Di’Anno: Iron Maiden’s Lost Singer – Review

A Raw, Honest Farewell to the Voice That Helped Create Heavy Metal

I’ll be honest, although I genuinely do love a bit of Iron Maiden, I went into this one knowing them mostly through Bruce Dickinson. The soaring vocals, the galloping bass, the album covers with Eddie doing something horrifying on the front. What I didn’t know much about was the man who was there first, the one who helped build the foundations before any of that stadium-filling stuff happened. Di’Anno: Iron Maiden’s Lost Singer put that right, and did it in a way I really wasn’t expecting.

Directed by Wes Orshoski, who also made Lemmy and The Damned: Don’t You Wish That We Were Dead, this isn’t a documentary about Iron Maiden. It’s not really a rock biopic either, not in the sense of celebrating the excesses of fame. What it actually is turns out to be far more intimate and, at times, genuinely heartbreaking: a portrait of the man whose voice launched one of heavy metal’s biggest bands, and an honest look at the personal struggles that meant he never got to share in what came after.

For anyone who came to this the way I did, it’s worth knowing the basics. When Steve Harris formed Iron Maiden in 1975, punk was in full swing and heavy metal was still working out what it wanted to be. Paul Di’Anno joined in 1978 and brought something Dickinson never quite would: aggression, streetwise attitude, a punk edge that suited Harris’ galloping bass lines and the band’s darker, more urban songwriting. Phantom of the Opera, Prowler, Running Free, Remember Tomorrow, Wrathchild, these are essential heavy metal tracks, and Di’Anno’s voice is all over them. The film never tries to argue he was better than Dickinson. That’s been debated for over four decades and it’s not a debate anyone’s going to settle here, although one fan’s explanation using Mustaine’s Megadeth and Metallica is one I’d most resonate with. What it does argue, convincingly, is that none of what came later happens without those first two records.

What I appreciated most, as someone with no real history with this story, is that Orshoski resists turning it into another Iron Maiden retrospective. If you’re after the recording of The Number of the Beast or the band’s rise to stadium status, you won’t find it here, and you don’t really need to, that story’s been told plenty of times elsewhere. Instead the film asks a much harder question: what happens to the person who gets left behind?

It follows Di’Anno over several years as he deals with severe health issues, declining mobility and the long consequences of decades of addiction. He’s wheelchair-bound for much of the film, and it follows him as he travels to Croatia for treatment organised by a couple of devoted fans, all while attempting one last return to the stage. Knowing he passed away in October 2024 gives every single scene an extra weight I wasn’t prepared for. It never once feels like it’s exploiting that. If anything, the film seems to become, almost by accident, a record of his final chapter. Although I knew of his fate, the film left me hoping I was wrong.

I went in expecting either a hagiography or a tragedy, and got neither. Di’Anno comes across exactly as people who knew him describe him: funny, generous, charismatic, deeply frustrating, fiercely loyal and often his own worst enemy. The film doesn’t shy away from any of that. He talks openly about the circumstances of his departure from Maiden in 1981, and about the touring, the substance abuse, the personality clashes that made his position in the band increasingly untenable. Nobody comes out of it as a hero or a villain, which is rarer in music documentaries than it should be.

Orshoski’s approach throughout is observational rather than dramatic; there are no reconstructions, no unnecessary celebrity padding for its own sake. Conversations, hospital visits, rehab sessions and live performances are left to tell the story on their own. Steve Harris, Blaze Bayley, James Hetfield, Gene Simmons and Gary Holt all turn up to speak to Di’Anno’s influence, and even coming to this fresh, it’s obvious how much those first two albums still mean to people more than forty years on.

The bit that stuck with me most, though, is what the film says about success not guaranteeing anyone a happy life. It would have been easy to frame Di’Anno’s story as one long regret while Iron Maiden went on to conquer the world without him. Instead the film keeps circling back to how much he loved performing. Even visibly in pain, he lights up the second he’s in front of an audience, and watching that, I understood a bit better why so many fans stayed loyal to him for so long. There’s also a genuinely moving thread here about the fans who organised fundraising and medical treatment for him in his later years, a reminder of how much affection there still is for him across the metal community.

I can’t speak to how this compares against other Iron Maiden documentaries, not being steeped in the band’s history myself, but I can say that as a way into Di’Anno’s story it worked completely on its own terms. A few of the medical sequences are genuinely difficult to sit through, and anyone hoping for a fuller account of his post-Maiden years and the actual split from the band might come away wanting more archive detail on that side of things. Neither of those really undermines what the film sets out to do.

By the end, this didn’t feel like a documentary about the original singer of Iron Maiden so much as a film about unrealised potential, resilience, pride and friendship, and about what it’s like to live in the shadow of one of the biggest success stories in rock history. Di’Anno’s place in that story was never really in doubt among people who know the band properly, and having now seen this, I get why. Dickinson arguably drove the Maiden Juggernaut (or plane) on the road to where it is today, but Di’Anno built the truck.

It’s uncomfortable in places, occasionally heartbreaking, and consistently compelling. If you already know Iron Maiden’s history, this is essential. If, like me, you didn’t, it’s one of the most honest music documentaries I’ve come across in a while, and a genuinely good place to start. If you come away dry eyed, I’ll be very surprised.