The World Slavery Tour was a concert tour by the heavy metal band Iron Maiden in support of their fifth album, Powerslave, beginning in Warsaw, Poland on 9 August 1984 and ending in Irvine, California on 5 July 1985.
2. 2 Minutes to Midnight
Kill for gain or shoot to maim
But we don't need a reason
The Golden Goose is on the loose
And never out of season
Blackened pride still burns inside
This shell of bloody treason
Here's my gun for a barrel of fun
For the love of living death
The killer's breed or the demon's seed
The glamour, the fortune, the pain
Go to war again, blood is freedom's stain
Don't you pray for my soul anymore
Two minutes to midnight
The hands that threaten doom
Two minutes to midnight
To kill the unborn in the womb
The blind men shout "let the creatures out
We'll show the unbelievers"
The napalm screams of human flames
Of a prime time Belsen feast, yeah!
As the reasons for the carnage cut their meat and lick the gravy
We oil the jaws of the war machine and feed it with our babies
The killer's breed or the demon's seed
The glamour, the fortune, the pain
Go to war again, blood is freedom's stain
Don't you pray for my soul anymore
Two minutes to midnight
The hands that threaten doom
Two minutes to midnight
To kill the unborn in the womb
The body bags and little rags of children torn in two
And the jellied brains of those who remain to put the finger right on you
As the madmen play on words and make us all dance to their song
To the tune of starving millions to make a better kind of gun
The killer's breed or the demon's seed
The glamour, the fortune, the pain
Go to war again, blood is freedom's stain
don't you pray for my soul anymore
Two minutes to midnight
The hands that threaten doom
Two minutes to midnight
To kill the unborn in the womb
Midnight
Midnight
Midnight
It's all night
Midnight
Midnight
Midnight
It's all night
Midnight, all night
Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: Adrian Frederick Smith / Bruce Dickinson
2 Minutes to Midnight (Live Long Beach Arena) lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group
The tour was notorious for being the band's most arduous to date- although it was very successful, the band were left exhausted by its end in 1985 and demanded a break for the rest of the year before starting work on Somewhere In Time in 1986. The band's lead vocalist, Bruce Dickinson, has since explained that "I never thought it was going to end ... I began to feel like I was a piece of machinery, like I was part of the lighting rig." Overall, the tour lasted 331 days, during which the band performed 189 gigs. The tour also saw the band play to the largest crowd of their career, approximately 300,000 people at the first edition of the Brazilian rock festival, Rock in Rio in 1985.
The tour was extremely notable for its use of props, such as the sarcophagi, 30-foot mummified Eddie and extensive pyrotechnics. Steve Harris referred to it as "probably the best stage show we ever did," and Dickinson commented that, "You could set it up in small theatres or big arenas and it would always look fantastic." The band's 2008–2009 tour, Somewhere Back in Time World Tour, featured a stage set which largely emulated the World Slavery Tour.
Iron Maiden's first full-length live album Live After Death was recorded during the band's four shows at London's Hammersmith Odeon in October 1984 and four shows at Long Beach Arena in Long Beach, California in March 1985. A video entitled Behind the Iron Curtain documented the band's first shows in Poland, Hungary, and Yugoslavia in August 1984, as they were regarded as the first rock act to take a full stage show into the Eastern Bloc.
An 18-year-old Iron Maiden fan, Daniel Pitre, fell 100 ft to his death from a catwalk in the press area of the Colisée de Québec during the Quebec City show. The band learned about the death only after the show.
