The Trooper
by Iron Maiden
- 161
- BPM
- E minor
- Key
- 9A
- Camelot
- 29
- Danceability
- 2
- Acousticness
Steve Harris, Iron Maiden's bassist and a founding member, wrote "The Trooper". He based it on the Charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava in 1854, during the Crimean War, and took inspiration from Lord Tennyson's poem of the same name. Released on June 20, 1983 as the second single from Piece of Mind, it reached number 12 in the UK, a better showing than the previous single, "Flight of Icarus", and number 28 on the US Mainstream Rock chart.
The B-side, a cover of Jethro Tull's "Cross-Eyed Mary", drew more American radio play than the song itself. The video, directed by Jim Yukich at Brixton Academy, used clips of a cavalry battle from the 1936 film The Charge of the Light Brigade. The BBC refused to play it unedited. Manager Rod Smallwood later said anyone would think the band had killed the horses themselves instead of using an old Errol Flynn movie.
Onstage, Bruce Dickinson has always waved a Union Flag during it. In 2016, for the band's first show in China, in Beijing, he left the flag at home at the request of the Chinese government. It was also left out in Shanghai two days later.
The Trooper runs at 161 BPM, the tempo of footwork, gabber and fast metal. In classical terms it sits in vivace territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.49 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 373 ms. It is in E minor, Camelot 9A, which shares its notes with G major and mixes cleanly with A minor and B minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.