World Slavery Tour
| Tour by Iron Maiden | |
Official tour advertisement for the band's performance at Gothenburg, 3 November 1984
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| Associated album | Powerslave |
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| Start date | 9 August 1984 |
| End date | 5 July 1985 |
| No. of shows | 187 in total |
| Iron Maiden concert chronology | |
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. 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 187 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.
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