by Eduardo Rivadavia

After recording four fine studio albums in three years, Saxon had catapulted to the top of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal heap alongside Iron Maiden and Def Leppard, who were themselves already going strong, but had yet to release their American breakthroughs, The Number of the Beast and Pyromania, respectively. Therefore, the release of Saxon's first live album -- named The Eagle Has Landed after the iconic giant eagle lighting truss which illuminated the band on-stage -- should have been a crowning achievement for the hard-working quintet. Instead, it signaled the end of their golden era: delivering an imperfect greatest-hits set marred by a few iffy performances ("Heavy Metal Thunder" distinctly lacked the, err, "thunder" of its studio version) and ill-chosen inclusions from the band's then-recent Denim and Leather album ("Never Surrender," "Fire in the Sky," but no sign of the anthemic title track?); opening the door for lukewarm reviews from jaded English writers, always eager to tear down what they'd only recently built up. Saxon's signature first hit, "Stallions of the Highway," was also conspicuously absent, leaving even die-hard fans a little miffed -- although these had absolutely no cause for complaint when it came to positively crackling performances of such all-time classics as "Motorcycle Man," "747 (Strangers in the Night)," "Princess of the Night," and the epic "Wheels of Steel," in arguably its definitive, audience-participating version. In the end, all the above made The Eagle Has Landed a solid offering, but certainly not the caliber of live album which children of the '70s had grown accustomed to receiving. EMI's 2006 expanded reissue of The Eagle Has Landed retains the original's mixed qualities: adding a generous six tracks supposedly culled from the same, 1981-1982, time period, but failing to remix them so that they sound like it; all the while paying little mind to addressing missing essentials left off the first time around. Still, aging Saxon fans will likely all agree that the hour's grown too late for quibbling over such details, when faced with heartwarmingly resurrected nuggets like "And the Bands Played On," "Frozen Rainbow," "Midnight Rider," and "Dallas 1PM."