Iron Maiden — Run For Your Lives at the Forum: Eddy Runs the Building

Three hours, a walking-tank Eddy, flames, and a crowd that knew every word to 'Hallowed Be Thy Name.' Heavy metal still has a king.

The Run For Your Lives tour is billed as a 50th-anniversary retrospective, and it plays like one — but a retrospective delivered at the volume of a jet engine, with a 12-foot Eddy stomping across the stage during 'The Trooper' and enough pyro to warm the back rows of the Forum. Bruce Dickinson sprinted the full width of the stage for the better part of three hours, hit every last one of his operatic highs, and fenced a soldier-Eddy with a prop sword. He is 67 years old.

The set leaned hard into the Paul Di'Anno and early Blaze Bayley eras — 'Murders in the Rue Morgue,' 'Phantom of the Opera,' 'The Clairvoyant' — which sent the lifers in the pit into orbit and tested the newer fans in the seats. But the heart of the show was the run from 'Hallowed Be Thy Name' through 'Fear of the Dark' through 'Iron Maiden,' which is still, after all these years, the single most overpowering stretch in heavy metal live. Nicko McBrain played the whole show one-handed after a stroke, and you would not have known if he hadn't said so. Long may they run.