IRON MAIDEN's headline concert at Paris's La Défense Arena on Monday, June 22 was thrown into chaos when a city-wide power outage plunged Europe's largest indoor venue into total darkness mid-performance.
The blackout struck during "2 Minutes To Midnight," abruptly cutting the song short and killing the stage lighting entirely. Emergency service lights flickered back on after about ten minutes, but the band was unable to resume right away — fans inside the 40,000-capacity arena ended up waiting roughly an hour before the show could continue.
The timing could hardly have been worse. The Paris date was being professionally filmed for IRON MAIDEN's upcoming "Run For Your Lives" tour documentary, and had been deliberately staged as a phone-free event so the cameras could capture an undistracted crowd. With a hard 11:30 p.m. curfew imposed by the venue, the lost hour proved fatal to the running order. Once power was restored, there simply wasn't enough time left to play the full set.
Bruce Dickinson was forced to tell the audience that the concert would have to end early. As a result, the planned three-song encore — "Aces High," "Fear Of The Dark" and "Wasted Years" — was scrapped entirely, and the show closed well short of its intended finale.
The disruption was completely outside the band's control, the result of an external grid failure rather than any onstage technical fault. The "Run For Your Lives" tour marks IRON MAIDEN's 50th anniversary, with a celebratory setlist drawn exclusively from the group's first nine studio albums — the run of records that built the band's legend between 1980 and 1988. Filming the Paris show was meant to be one of the centerpieces of the accompanying concert film; whether the night's footage will still be usable, or whether another date will be tapped for the documentary, remains to be seen.
For the thousands who packed La Défense Arena, it was a frustrating end to what should have been a landmark evening — though the band, true to form, kept spirits up until the lights finally forced them off.