As a tribute to their old guitar player Peter Wittke (who unfortunately died a couple years back) and in order to earn some money for the recordings of their next album "Dead Man Walking", Hamburg’s Heavy / Speed / Thrash act IRON ANGEL decided to release some classic stuff of their quite legendary past. "The Tapes" is a collection of 17 songs, 9 of them being live recordings, while the remaining tracks are comprised of the entire "Legions Of Evil" demo from 1984 and two previously unreleased 1985 demo tracks, which they didn’t even had titles for… The majority of the live stuff was recorded on their support tour for KING DIAMOND at the Zeche in Bochum (on May 25, 1986) and at the Warpke Open Air in 1985. The recordings were done with a regular tape recorder, that they simply added to the mixing board, but the result turned out highly impressive, especially considering the fact that this was never an official recording for a supposed live record, but only intended for private use. I personally haven’t heard such a good quality from band’s of the 80s in quite some time!! Unfortunately most of the live songs are from the band’s second album "Winds Of War", which I never really got into, mainly to to the changed vocal delivery of singer Dirk Schröder, who went for a more higher way of singing as opposed to the more rough sounding style of his early days, which fitted the band a lot better in my opinion. Dirk and drummer Mike are also the only two original members left at the moment, who try to keep the band going as soon as they have found like-minded new musicians. This CD is limited to 500 copies and sells for 12,- Euro (+ 3,- Euro postage & packaging) directly from the band’s official website www.iron-angel.de. They also have US versions (Old Metal Records) of their first two albums "Hellish Crossfire" and "Winds Of War" available (both with live and demo songs as bonus) and if you order all three together, you’ll get the whole package for 30,-Euro (ppd.).