THE FEAR OF THE DARK

Of course we all want absolutely everything that Iron Maiden does to be 100% original, and I would guess most of their stuff are, even though another Iron Maiden did exist in the 60s (without much success, and a 90s release of old tracks) and the fact that most of their lyrics are inspired by poems, novels and history (but to be fair, that goes for a shit loads of bands).

But we do have one album fitting like a glove (of metal) into the concept of Uncoverseum. Namely: Fear of the Dark. This may come as a shock to some readers, so be warned! To others, no biggie. Have you ever scrolled through a case of vinyls you might quite likely have crossed this other piece. Of course we're talking about the album Fear of the Dark... By Gordon Giltrap.



Funny about Gordon Giltrap's album, which was released in 1978, is not just the title as you can see, but that he used the same font that we later in music history only would recognize as the "Iron Maiden"-font, and he did use it on his previous release in '77 as well. It was also used by other bands. An example of that is Hawkwind's album "Choose Your Masques" in '82.

Even though this is fun as hell, I have a hard time imagining that Iron Maiden was inspired by this release. Or was they? Please correct me if I'm wrong. The Gordon Giltrap album does have a quite funny looking cover. What does it mean? Iron Maiden's version is pretty obvious. If there's a monster emerging from a tree you might be afraid of the dark. But what does the other album cover tell us? To use glasses?? Or if you don't wear them, it all goes black? No, just fuzzy, black means blind. Maybe he should have used a blindfold instead of glasses for his cover. My guess is that this is a classic 70s cover where people just stopped communicating with each other, or the artist just didn't give a rats ass what the suits did to sell his record.

What ever happened here, I'm glad it did so that I years later could feel a bit excited when I pulled up Gordon Giltrap's slighly forgotten and ugly piece of work out of the dirt. But even though the cover stinks or just isn't much, theres some gold imprinted on the wax.