Iron Maiden performed their headline set at their two-day festival at Knebworth Park last night, that fans and critics alike are calling one of the highlights of the band’s 50th anniversary year. The event, named Eddfest after the band’s zombie mascot Eddie, ran across July 10th and 11th and drew an estimated 50,000 people to the historic Hertfordshire site for a two day event on Friday and Saturday.
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The weekend was built around more than just music, the live shows explored the Infinite Dreams Museum, a walk-through display of props and memorabilia spanning the band’s history, as well as a themed area called Maidenville complete with a funfair, bars, and a merchandise emporium.
Saturday’s main stage lineup featured The Almighty and Airbourne opening with pub rock energy, followed by Mongolian folk metal band The Hu, who reportedly impressed the crowd. The Darkness played next, before Iron Maiden took the stage just after 8pm, spotlighting the main event.
Bruce Dickinson opened the set by joking with the crowd about England’s World Cup quarter final against Norway, which was taking place at the same time. The band leaned heavily into their earlier catalogue, opening with a run of songs from the Paul Di’Anno era including ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’, before moving into ‘Number of the Beast’.
One of the night’s standout moments came when the band brought back ‘Infinite Dreams’ from ‘Seventh Son of a Seventh Son’ album, a song Dickinson noted hadn’t been played in 38 years. According to a review from MOJO, the track replaced ‘The Clairvoyant’, which had been part of the setlist during last year’s London Stadium show. The final setlist included ‘Phantom of the Opera’, ‘Seventh Son of a Seventh Son’, ‘Fear of the Dark’, ‘The Trooper’, and ‘Wasted Years’.
The show doubled as a filming session for an upcoming concert movie, following a technical setback the band faced weeks earlier back in Paris. Iron Maiden had originally planned to film a performance in Paris in June, but a power cut roughly fifty minutes into the set brought the show to a halt before it eventually resumed.
Friday night had its own celebration on the festival’s second stage, with former Iron Maiden singer Blaze Bayley headlining a set drawn from his years fronting the band in the 1990s, backed by Steve Harris’s first band, Gypsy’s Kiss.
With Eddfest set to perform as Iron Maiden’s only UK show until at least 2028, the festival gave fans a rare chance to mark half a century of the band’s history in the place where so much of British rock history has been made!
