Asked to name the lead singer of Iron Maiden, most metalheads would immediately spout out “Bruce Dickinson.”
But for the band’s first two, groundbreaking album releases, Iron Maiden (1980) and Killers (1981), it was Paul Di’Anno at the mic. And even he was technically the band’s fourth lead vocalist.
Tracks like “Running Free,” “Phantom of the Opera,” “Wrathchild,” “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and the two title tracks helped set the blueprint for the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM). And several are still in the band’s regular setlist, some 45 years later.
To this day, even the participants can’t agree if he was fired, quit, or parted with the band by mutual agreement. But Di’Anno’s leaving seemed inevitable. That’s given his drug and alcohol use, sometimes unreliability on stage, head butting with band leader Steve Harris and Manager Rod Smallwood, and preference for straight-ahead punk metal to the more ambitious musical and lyrical directions that Harris wanted to go in.
The fascinating ups and downs of the singer’s life, music, and intense health struggles in recent years are the focus of the documentary Di’Anno: Iron Maiden’s Lost Singer (97 mins., $24.95, Cleopatra Entertainment).
It was written, directed, and edited by Wes Orshoski. He’s in familiar territory, being behind rock docs Lemmy, the well-received doc on the late Motörhead singer/bassist/leader, as well as one on the punk group the Damned.
After Iron Maiden, Di’Anno would struggle with several bands (Di’Anno, Battlezone, Killers) and pursuing a solo career over the ensuing decades, but never really gaining traction again. Partially his fault for substance and legal troubles and partly changing tastes in music.
Meanwhile, he watched as the Dickinson-fronted Iron Maiden became a worldwide phenomenon. They are scheduled for induction into this year’s class of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and Di’Anno is among the names being enshrined.
But the narrative heart of this documentary isn’t just musical, it’s equally (if not more so) medical.
Beginning in the ‘90s, Di’Anno began to have trouble walking. Then his legs began to swell and discolor. By the 2010’s he was bound to a wheelchair suffering from lymphedema (a chronic swelling of the limbs), compounded by complications from a near-fatal 2015 battle with sepsis. Various surgeries were planned, shelved, or unable to be performed due to his condition, which only worsened during the COVID pandemic.
With care in his native UK out of his price range, Di’Anno made a last-ditch effort to travel to Croatia for a much more affordable care. His expenses were bankrolled by admirers with the help of a Croatian superfan, a UK pub owner, and eventually Iron Maiden themselves. So off Di’Anno went abroad in 2022. Though only by transport van and boat—his condition made him unable to make any trip possible by airplane.
To detail even slightly the ups and downs (and ups and downs and ups and downs) of the last almost three years of his life would be a disservice to the pacing and surprises that Orshoski gives the viewers both in Croatia (which produces a subplot of…romance??) and near-immediate Brazilian tour.
Di’Anno’s fate has as many shifts as his own moods and emotions of depression, anxiety, and hopefulness. And he’s in terrible shape and in pain most of the time.
“It’s a slow death. Otherwise, I just might as well fucking get out of it and be done,” he tells Orshoski in 2017.
The doc features talking heads not just from members of bands Metallica (James Hetfield in fanboy mode), Megadeth, Exodus, and Overkill, but former bandmates, fans, producers and even medical personnel. They all discuss Di’Anno both as a musician and a patient.
Though phrases like “He is his own worst enemy” and “He lives for today and not tomorrow” are peppered in there. A text scroll mentions that, after he settles for a lump sum for all royalties on Iron Maiden songs he wrote, he blows the whole thing quickly.
A backstage meeting between a wheelchair-bound Di’Anno and towering, in-full-Demon-getup Gene Simmons at a KISS concert is a bit awkward, with Simmons of course playing to the camera and not his guest.
A similar reunion with Steve Harris after 40 years when Iron Maiden opens a tour in Zagreb, Croatia is short and a bit stiff. Though the viewer wonders without all those people standing around recording on their phones if the pair could have had a deeper and far more meaningful final encounter.
There’s early video footage of Iron Maiden with Di’Anno at the front. His bare-chested, leather-clad, youthful assurance and cockiness at odds with the bloated, bearded, heavily tattooed and immobile Di’Anno of most of the film. But then again, that’s the point.
Di’Anno will of course appeal to fans of Iron Maiden and heavy metal music. But it’s also got legs and a compelling story for the person who couldn’t recognize or know the name of band mascot Eddie. In this, Wes Orshoski has straddled two words of storytelling in film and music. And his creative grasp holds very well onto both.
