Infinite Dreams

The longer you spend around music, the more you realise how much of it is about memory. The sounds that shaped you never really fade. For me, that story starts with Iron Maiden. Nearly every day, I pick up my Dave Murray Signature Stratocaster and fall into their riffs. It’s more than habit now; it’s muscle memory, meditation, and gratitude all at once. Those melodies are alive in my hands, as natural as breathing.

Iron Maiden were the first band I truly connected with back in the 1980s. I was introduced in two ways, through the older brother of a school friend around 1985 in the Powerslave era, and then properly by one of my parents staff who would bring his walkman that had integrated speakers and we would blast Live After Death on Saturday nights in the backroom of the shop. It wasn’t just music. It was energy, imagination, and discipline in motion. They embodied the idea that you could create your own world through sheer conviction and hard work. That philosophy ended up shaping far more of my life than I could have imagined. It led me into fencing, a sport that shares that same sense of precision, focus, and self-mastery. What started as inspiration from a band became a lifelong pursuit: competing, coaching, and dedicating huge portions of my life to helping others find that same spark of drive and identity.

So with that in mind, when Infinite Dreams arrived, it struck a deep chord. I expected a nice book, something collectible, maybe a visual history. What I got was something way cooler. This is not a book; it’s a monument. Hardback, immense, around 33cm high, 25cm wide, and weighing just over 2.6 kilograms, it radiates presence before you even open it. Inside, across 350 pages, it charts fifty years of one of the most creative and uncompromising bands ever to exist.

The scale and depth are extraordinary. Hundreds of photos, many never before seen, trace the band’s evolution from raw beginnings in smoky pubs to the grandest stages on earth. There are diary entries, old gig flyers, passport photos, studio shots, design sketches, stage plans, and candid glimpses that humanise the legend. The early material feels like time travel back to a world of ambition, grit, and possibility.

What shines most is the attention to detail, something Iron Maiden have always stood for. Every album cover, every prop, every lyric scribble reflects a world built entirely on their own terms. There’s even the gear: Steve’s basses, Dave and Adrian and Janick’s guitars, the tools that shaped a generation of sound. And of course, Eddie, ever-present, ever-evolving, the band’s mischievous alter ego and constant companion.

Both Steve Harris and Bruce Dickinson contribute reflections that feel like mirror images of their personalities. Steve admits he’s never cared much for anniversaries, saying they’ve always been about the next thing, not the last. Bruce ends with a “backward,” not a foreword, saying he prefers to keep his eyes fixed on what’s ahead. That mindset, forward facing and relentless, has always defined Iron Maiden.

Infinite Dreams captures all of that perfectly. It’s not nostalgia, it’s reverence for motion, for doing things. The pages remind you what endurance and creative integrity look like when lived without compromise.

For me, Iron Maiden were never just a band. They were a philosophy. They taught me about precision, intensity, and focus, lessons that carried from a bedroom full of riffs to a fencing piste, to coaching athletes, to the day-to-day rhythm of chasing mastery in any form. My mum even said once that they defined who I became, and it’s probably true.

That’s what makes Infinite Dreams so powerful. It’s not a retrospective, it’s a reflection of what’s possible when you live without half measures. The music, the art, the spirit, it all endures because it’s real.

Iron Maiden still feel like the future, even fifty years on. Every time I pick up the Strat or step into the fencing hall, I can feel the same pulse that started it all, the one that still drives everything forward.