The Iron Maiden will return to Portugal on July 6, 2025, for a concert at Meo Arena in Lisbon, as part of the “Run for your lives” tour, celebrating the 50 years of the British band, announced the promoter this Thursday.
The worldwide tour will kick off on May 27 next year in Budapest, Hungary, followed by 27 more concerts in stadiums, festivals, and arenas across Europe, marking 50 years “since [bassist] Steve Harris founded the band in late 1975,” adds the promoter Prime Artists.
For this tour, Iron Maiden is preparing “a very special setlist, covering the first nine studio albums, from ‘Iron Maiden’ to ‘Fear Of The Dark'”. As guests, they are bringing the Swedish band Avatar, known for their “metal’n’roll fusion,” which has been “breaking down the boundaries between what is typically seen as a band and a theater troupe for over two decades,” writes Prime Artists.
Iron Maiden’s vocalist, Bruce Dickinson, assures that “next year will be very special” for the British band and promises “a once-in-a-lifetime live experience”: “If you’ve never seen us before […] this is your chance to discover what you’ve been missing.”
“We will play classics and fan favorites from the first nine albums […], many of which we haven’t played in years and will most likely 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 translate to over “100 million albums sold and nearly 2,500 shows in 64 countries.”
The “Run for your lives” tour, which follows the ongoing “The Future Past” tour, has announced concerts in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Scotland, England, Ireland, France, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Austria, and France, ending on August 2 in Warsaw, Poland.
Iron Maiden returns to Lisbon three years after performing at the National Stadium during the “Legacy of the Beast” tour, announced in 2019, which had concerts postponed successively 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 had a bar in Faro for over 20 years, and the band even headlined the 2011 edition of the Motorcycle Concentration in the Algarve’s capital.
The first Iron Maiden album with Bruce Dickinson on vocals, “The Number of the Beast” (1982), definitively propelled them to the forefront of the musical genre, being the creators 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, which was critically acclaimed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Closer to the “stand-up” model than a concert, the show featured music, stories, and audience questions and was inspired by the presentation sessions of the autobiographical book “What Does This Button Do?”, which Dickinson published in 2017.
Tickets for the concert at Meo Arena in July 2025 will be on pre-sale on the next 24th at Fnac stores for 24 hours and will go on general sale two days later, on September 26, starting at 10:00 AM.