It is not hard to spot Iron Maiden guitarist Adrian Smith making his way down Windsor’s Thames Street: he is head to toe in fishing clobber. The 63-year-old’s first book, Monsters of River and Rock, is a beautifully written account of his experiences in the 100m-selling hard rock band and a seemingly very different life as “Iron Maiden’s compulsive angler”. “There’s a lot of downtime in the band,” Smith considers over a coffee before our visit to a favoured fishing spot on the Thames, a metalhead barnet creeping from underneath his fisherman’s hood. Let’s go fishing.’”After hearing Deep Purple’s Highway Star in his mid teens, hard rock took precedence and angling did not seem appropriate for a would-be rock god. The lifestyle wears you down.”Big fish … Smith onstage with Iron Maiden in Sweden in 2018.

Source: The Guardian September 03, 2020 13:28 UTC