Loudest stamps ever
Analogue heritage: Iron Maiden for postal services
Those: picture alliance/dpa/PA Media
The British Post loves to honor national saints with their own stamps. After the Beatles and Margaret Thatcher, it’s now Iron Maiden’s turn. The fact that the Royal Mail has never been right with its motifs has to do with the medium and the music.
Dhe so-called Rock’n’Roll, that is, true rock music for older men, is as analogue as a sufficiently franked postcard. The Royal Mail charges one British pound and 85 pence for a standard international letter. As a fitting theme, the Royal Mail is now also offering 12 commemorative stamps to honor a band as British as musicians can be when they grew up as miners’ kids in northern England and used to play football for Westham United: Iron Maiden.
There were already postage stamps from the Beatles. Margaret Thatcher postage stamps already existed. So it was high time for Iron Maiden. They were there before punks borrowed their leather jackets; they already bore their enemy image, the iron maiden as prime minister, in their name; and they wrote the history of the Empire in their songs about the Viking invasion (“Invaders”) and the German bombs (“Aces High”), the Falklands War (“Como estais amigos”) and the Bosnian War (“Blood on the World’s Hands “).
Philatelists will be delighted with the stamps – eight depicting concert scenes and four featuring the band’s mascot Eddie – because stamp collectors have a lot in common with heavy metal fans. Arch-conservative at heart and odd in nature. Either fossils are named after metal musicians like the bristleworm Kalloprion kilmisteri, which has been extinct for millions of years, after Lemmy Kilmister from Motörhead – the other all-British rock legend besides Iron Maiden. Or they are printed on Royal Mail stamps for scrapbooks and handwritten mail.
That’s how Iron Maiden are themselves: their singer flies their plane around the world himself, the Boeing carries the number 666, which some consider a bad omen, others a good joke. The tour they are currently on is titled “Future Past”. They live in the future past, as eternally yesterday. The stamp makes her “speechless and very proud,” says her website. Whoever may have written that for you there.
Iron Maiden and her mascot Eddie around 1980
Quelle: picture alliance / Avalon.red