The first B-side is a cover of Nektar's "King of Twilight", from their 1972 album A Tab in the Ocean. Their cover is actually a medley of the songs "Crying in the Dark" and "King of Twilight", the last two songs on the album. The Japanese 12" was mixed with the B-side covers from "The Trooper" and "2 Minutes to Midnight" singles.[2][3]
Song information
The song's lyrics are written from the viewpoint of a BritishRAFpilot fighting during the Battle of Britain (1940), the first military engagement to be fought entirely with aircraft.[4] The artwork depicts the band's mascot, Eddie the Head, in the cockpit of a Supermarine Spitfire, one of the principal aircraft to participate in that battle.
"Aces High" is one of Iron Maiden's most popular songs, and has been covered numerous times.[5][6] It is featured in the video game Madden NFL 10, the MTV show Nitro Circus, and Steve Peat's segment in the mountain bike film New World Disorder III. Colin McKay used the song on his part of the skate video Plan B Questionable. It can also be found in the soundtrack of the game Carmageddon II: Carpocalypse Now.
The music video, filmed in Poland in September of 1984 during the World Slavery Tour and directed by Jim Yukich, was accompanied with footages of The Battle of Britain as seen on newsreels. The footages were later re-used as the startup for every Iron Maiden concert in the stage screens to accompany the background music (mixing both Churchill's speech and the snippet of the original song.)
Live performances
"Aces High" is frequently used as the opening song for Iron Maiden concerts. As seen in concert videos such as Live After Death and Iron Maiden: Flight 666, it is usually preceded by Winston Churchill's "We shall fight on the beaches" speech with the sound of planes in the background. Churchill's speech was also included at the beginning of the song's music video.[7]
In a 2014 interview with Q magazine, Gerard Way said that "the live version of 'Aces High' off the Live After Death album was the song that first made [him] interested in performing live."[8]
A version recorded in the summer of 1996 by Arch Enemy was – as guitarist Michael Amott observed in the liner notes to Wages of Sin (on which the cut reappears) – "released on the Japanese Iron Maiden tribute albumMade in Tribute. This one turned out really intense, and was easily one of the better songs on a really terrible collection of Iron Maiden cover versions."
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