When I was a kid growing up and circa 14 years old in 1991., I was into Pet Shop Boys, Depeche Mode and above all, Queen. The songs of Freddie Mercury influenced me much, but that is another story.

It was Autumn in 1991.war in my country was getting even nastier and airstrike alarms were often, but fortunately for us, we are so far north that Serbs didn˙t bomb us, only flew over our heads. My family was alive and well back then, we just moved to our new house but I wanted to finish school, eight grade where I went for my whole elementary schooling, so I took a walk from our new house to my school circa 20 minutes every day. One day, I went with couple of my friends to now defunct department store in the center of the city, and we watched cassette tapes and I spotted one with cool cover and band called Iron Maiden. Ashamed to say, I nicked the tape from the shelf and took it home. Upon putting it into my tape recorder I was awed when first riffs of Tailgunner started and when the tape was over, I listened to it over and over again. I fell in love into heavy metal and more extreme form of music with that tape. In time, I knew all the songs by heart(still know every note today), suffered in love and questioned my teenage life with the title song, started to understand some political relationships with Mother Russia, imagined that i was a hitman with The Assassin and started to hate imposed christianity with Holy Smoke. There was no internet, so imagine my surprise when I discovered Maiden had many other albums and that this one was by no means the best or my favorite of their works. But, through this album, I found out metal, or it found me and it was this band and this album that presented to me the whole new sphere of metal and extreme music in my formative years.