The Iron Maiden will be coming to Portugal on July 6th of next year as part of the Run for Your Lives tour, which marks the 50th anniversary of the British band, the promoter announced this Thursday. Tickets for the concert at the Meo Arena in Lisbon will be available for pre-sale starting on the 24th, at Fnac stores, for 24 hours, and will go on general sale two days later, on September 26th, from 10 AM.
This world tour kicks off on May 27th of the next year in Budapest, Hungary, followed by another 27 concerts in stadiums, festivals, and arenas across Europe. For this series of concerts, Iron Maiden is preparing “a very special setlist, covering the first nine studio albums, from Iron Maiden to Fear Of The Dark,” adds the promoter Prime Artists. As guests, they will be bringing the Swedish band Avatar, known for their metal’n’roll fusion, which has been “breaking the boundaries between what is typically seen as a band and a theater troupe” for more than two decades, writes Prime Artists.
Quoted in the promoter’s statement, Iron Maiden’s lead singer, Bruce Dickinson, assures that “next year will be very special” for the British band, promising “a once-in-a-lifetime live experience”: “If you have never seen us before […] this is your chance to discover what you have been missing,” he says. “We will perform classics and fan favorites from the first nine albums […], many of which we haven’t played in years and which we probably will never play again in the future.”
The band’s manager, Rod Smallwood, also quoted in the statement, adds that the 50 years of Iron Maiden have translated into over “100 million albums sold and nearly 2,500 shows in 64 countries.”
The Run for Your Lives tour, which follows the still ongoing The Future Past – tour, has concerts announced for the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Scotland, England, Ireland, France, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Austria, and France, concluding on August 2nd in Warsaw, Poland.
Iron Maiden returns to Lisbon three years after performing at the National Stadium, as part of the Legacy of the Beast tour, announced in 2019, which had concerts successively postponed to 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, the band released their latest album, Senjutsu.
Founded in 1975, the British Iron Maiden has been a regular presence in Portugal. Bassist Steve Harris even had a bar in Faro for over 20 years, and the band headlined the 2011 edition of the Motorcycle Concentration in the Algarve capital.
The first album by Iron Maiden with Bruce Dickinson on vocals, The Number of the Beast (1982), propelled them definitively to the forefront of the musical genre, being the authors of multiple classics within metal such as Somewhere in Time and Fear of the Dark.
In December 2019, Bruce Dickinson brought the solo show One-Man Speaking Show to Aula Magna in Lisbon, a critical acclaim at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Closer to a stand-up model than a concert, the show included music, stories, and audience questions, and was inspired by his autobiography presentation sessions for What is this Button for?, published in 2017.