Welcome back to Broken Records, where Steve and Remfry search for the least good of all the albums in the history of music. Today we’re once again joined by Tom Dare, host of the Hell Bent For Metal podcast, as we’re in bad heavy metal territory once again. Yup, the time has come for us to tackle the Blaze Bayley era of Iron Maiden with their 11th studio album Virtual XI from 1998.

The 90’s weren’t great for Maiden, and unlike a lot of bands they can’t really blame grunge. The faults of that decade were pretty much entirely all their own fault. After a patchy couple of final albums from Bruce Dickinson’s first run in the band, the iconic frontman stepped away from Maiden to make solo material that sounded… well, basically like Iron Maiden. Maiden themselves were charged with replacing their beloved vocalist and decided on Bayley, of Wolfsbane fame, to fill Dickinson’s mighty shoes. 1995’s The X Factor wasn’t particularly well received, but there were mitigating factors to make the case that it was just a blip. But then came Virtual XI, an album that was self produced, was marketed by the band making a fake football team and promoting a video game that wasn’t even out yet, despite neither of those things having anything to do with the album, and was given a lead single called The Angel and The Gambler which is nearly ten minutes long and is… look it’s not good. The record flopped and Maiden seemed destined for the knackers yard. Until they went back to Bruce and, you know, the rest is history. It’s worked out fine for them in the long run, but we still need to know; is Virtual XI really as bad as all that?

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