Speaking with Charlie Bahama, IRON MAIDEN bassist and founder Steve Harris explained how BRITISH LION came to exist at all — and why the way he has been running it for years is about to change.
The project, which pairs Harris with singer Richard Taylor, guitarists David Hawkins and Grahame Leslie and drummer Simon Dawson, only became possible once MAIDEN's schedule loosened. "Back in the day I couldn't have done it because we were so busy with MAIDEN," Harris said. "But then we started touring a little bit less frequently and the tours were a little less longer, so we had a bit of few gaps in between. So I thought I'm just gonna get together with the guys that I knew from way back anyway. I helped write some stuff with them. I was managing them and doing all kinds of stuff back in the '90s with them. And some of the stuff that we wrote together I thought, 'You know what? It's gotta see the light of day.' And I thought the only way to really grab it by the scruff of the neck and do something with it is actually being in a band myself. So that's what I did. And it's been great."
Fourteen years in, the output is two albums, and the reason is obvious. "The problem is I'm still really busy with MAIDEN, touring and recording with MAIDEN, so I just have to fit it in when I can," he said.
Running two sets of material at once turns out to be less complicated than it sounds. "When you're doing a tour with one band or the other, you just rehearse those songs, and then you're kind of in that mode, and you don't really think about the other thing," Harris explained.
What is changing is the habit of slotting BRITISH LION club dates into MAIDEN's off days. "We had a lot of days off on the MAIDEN tours, and so I ended up doing BRITISH LION shows in between. 'Cause I get bored on days off," he said. "But now that Simon, the BRITISH LION drummer, has joined MAIDEN, then we're not really gonna do that now because I don't want anyone having the excuse to say, 'Oh, he's tired,' or whatever. So we probably won't do that again. But whenever MAIDEN gets any time off, then I'm usually playing with BRITISH LION."
Told he does not rest, Harris pushed back mildly: "Well, I do. I do rest, but, yeah, there's a time and place for resting. But I love playing — I just love playing live."
The appeal of the smaller band is the rooms. Asked what BRITISH LION scratches that MAIDEN cannot, he pointed to clubs and proximity — venues he had never played in four decades with MAIDEN, including Amsterdam's Melkweg. "I'm not trying to conquer the world with this band," he told Bass Player in 2020. "There's not enough years left in me to do that anyway."
BRITISH LION's second album, "The Burning," arrived in January 2020 via Explorer1 Music, recorded, engineered and mixed at Barnyard Studios by Tony Newton and produced by Harris.