The only UK show on Iron Maiden's world tour was also the biggest that the heavy metal group from London has played in this country. To have filled this 55,000-capacity stadium was a tremendous achievement, not only in terms of scale but also in the credibility it conferred. After 30 years of formation headbanging and dodging cartoon stage monsters, Iron Maiden are finally being taken seriously. Their music - not to mention their T-shirts - has retained a coolness among teenagers of an order that is a distant memory to most acts of such a vintage, and the audience at Twickenham spanned several generations. The genders, however, were not so evenly represented at a show that remained a defiantly Boy's Own journey into the realms of visual and sonic overkill.

Preceded by an archive recording of Winston Churchill's “We shall fight on the beaches” speech, the band arrived amid a flurry of pyrotechnic effects and explosions. The singer Bruce Dickinson booted a rugby ball into the audience, presumably a homage to the venue, as they piled into Aces High, a song about fighter pilots, played at a punishing pace and volume. The stage was decorated after the fashion of an Egyptian crypt, with mummified figures, a sphinx and a fire-breathing devil lurking among “stonework” covered in hieroglyphics. An evil-looking creature lurched towards the front, his skeletal face twisted into a hideous grin. Oh, hang on. That was one of the guitarists, dashing off a solo that was a typical blur of sudden acceleration and squealing handbrake turns.

Dickinson changed into a red tunic and stomped across the ramparts waving a Union Jack attached to a big pole as he sang The Trooper, while the guitarists pointed their instruments at the crowd like a line of infantrymen. The theatrical treatment was extended to Rime of the Ancient Mariner (words written “with help” from Samuel Taylor Coleridge), which turned into a grandiloquent, prog-rock epic as a ship's rigging creaked and thick mist rolled over the edge of an unusually becalmed stage.

Focused firmly on the group's greatest hits and executed with genuine zeal and commitment, the show offered an escape hatch into a universe where the “do or die” mentality of comic-book warfare met the fantasy world of ghouls and zombies. As the audience joined the band with anthemic chants of Heaven Can Wait, Run to the Hills and Fear of the Dark, it was enough to wake the dead.

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