Iron maiden live in Argentina 2009.
Somewhere Back in Time World Tour was a concert tour by Iron Maiden in 2008 and 2009 to promote the DVD release of their 1985 concert video Live After Death, a second installment in a series of DVD re-releases of concerts, supported by tours, titled "The History of Iron Maiden". To tie in with the tour, a new greatest hits compilation - Somewhere Back In Time - The Best Of: 1980-1989 - was also released. These combined with Iron Maiden's Bruce Airways service (where singer Bruce Dickinson flies fans to concerts) and their most expansive merchandise campaign - including an individual tour shirt for each concert among other things - mean this tour was heralded as the band's most important in many years. Many of the band's songs had not been played in a long time, as much as 21 years in one case, and two of them ("Moonchild" and "Rime of the Ancient Mariner") never played by the current line-up. A subsequent tour documentary titled Flight 666 was released in April 2009 with an accompanying DVD and soundtrack, with a limited release of the documentary into cinemas. The World Slavery Tour's stage had been the biggest and most complicated the band ever designed, but a number of modifications were made for this tour.
The tour used an updated version of the band's 1984-5 World Slavery Tour stage set, which carried an Ancient Egyptian theme, and the band played a set focussing on the 1980s - specifically the years when albums Powerslave (1984), Somewhere in Time (1986) and Seventh Son of a Seventh Son (1988) were released. The only song the band played that was not from the 1980s was the title track from 1992's Fear of the Dark album, because it is one of the band's best known songs. During the whole tour Iron Maiden played to more than 2 million people worldwide.