Steve Harris formed Iron Maiden back in 1975 and besides being the band’s bassist he always had been their main songwriter. So most of the songs released by the group over the decades were written by Harris but sometimes he had the help of other bandmates.
In an interview with Scars and Guitars podcast (Transcribed by Ultimate Guitar), Harris was asked which would be the “ideal” Iron Maiden song. So he decided to choose a track that was written with other bandmates and not only by him.
Steve Harris picks the “ideal” Iron Maiden song
“That’s an odd one because there’s so many songs I’ve written. I don’t know how many I’ve written, but it’s got to be more than 150 songs at least over the years. It’s a really tough one to say. I don’t know. I think it’s probably something you would probably ask the fans. I think when you ask people, we’d never really do that, but if you did ask people, I think you’d probably get 10 or 12 people saying 10 to 12 different songs. It’s just such a personalized thing, so it’s very difficult.”
The interviewer then suggested “Flight of Icarus” as an ideal song and Harris disagreed.
“Not really, because I think it would be better to choose a song that’s written by, say, three of us, or whatever because that song was written by Adrian and Bruce. It doesn’t really have the elements of my writing in there. I would probably pick something like ‘The Evil That Men Do,’ which is written by all three of us. We’re the main songwriters. David does write, too, but he’s not very prolific. Nicko doesn’t write, Janick joined a lot later, but he’s become quite a prolific writer. I still probably say ‘The Evil That Men Do,'” Steve Harris said.
“The Evil That Men Do” was released by Iron Maiden on their 1988 album “Seventh Son of a Seventh Son”. Besides this song and the title-track, that album also had other famous songs like “Can I Play With Madness” and “The Clairvoyant”.