An entry in the Treasure Ark series, which selects quality live recordings. This one captures a performance from the era when Blaze Bayley was the singer. Recorded on March 2, 1996 at The Rave in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, during "The X Factour," the tour that ran from 1995 to 1996. After guitarist Adrian Smith left the band and Janick Gers, who had played guitar on vocalist Bruce Dickinson's solo album, joined, the band released two albums in the 1990s, "No Prayer for the Dying" and "Fear of the Dark." These held up reasonably well in sales even amid the dominance of alternative rock genres such as grunge, and seemed to be pulling the band through hard times, but Dickinson then left after a rift grew between him and the other members. Blaze Bayley, the singer of Wolfsbane, a band that had once served as a support act for Maiden, joined as his replacement. However, "The X Factour," the band's first album in three and a half years, was a major commercial failure in the United States. This is a recording from the new singer's debut tour, held under these difficult circumstances. The tour started at the end of September 1995 with the band's first-ever shows in Israel, and went on to perform in countries it had never played before, including South Africa and, in Eastern Europe, Bulgaria and Romania, before moving through Scandinavia, the UK, and continental Europe, then beginning a North American tour in February 1996. After that, the tour went through a run of shows in Japan before the band headlined "Monsters of Rock" in Brazil toward the end of the tour. This recording captures a show from about a month into the North American leg. The setlist centers on songs from the new album, with a relatively high proportion of newer material performed. Bayley sounds as if he is singing in a style closer to Dickinson's, and although his own style was originally different, his individuality had not yet fully come through at this stage. A document of Maiden's dark years.