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Holy Smoke" is Iron Maiden's 21st single and the first to feature guitarist Janick Gers, who joined the band in mid-1990. It was released just weeks before the album, No Prayer for the Dying, and climbed to number three on the UK Singles Chart. The song deals with the many Televangelist scandals that took place in the United States in the late 1980s, including mentions of "Jimmy the Reptile" (a reference to Jimmy Swaggart), "The TV Queen" (a possible reference to Tammy Faye Bakker), Noah, and "plenty of bad preachers for the Devil to stoke." Contrary to what some believe, however, this song is not aimed at the Christian religion itself, but rather the people that abuse it to make gains for themselves. This is one of the very few Iron Maiden songs with profanity in the lyrics (for example, "I've lived in filth/I've lived in sin/and I still smell cleaner than the shit you're in"), which is replaced by gunshot sounds in censored versions.
The song is atypical for the band standards, being short and straight. It features a common pop-rock song structure with intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, solo, verse and ending with another chorus. The guitar solos are very fiery making use of artificial harmonics, sweep picking, tapping and wild bends. The first solo is played by Janick and second one is played by Dave Murray.
The band took a humorous approach for the video of the song, as the band members are filmed on Steve Harris's farm (who directed the video), playing football and driving a tractor, while everything happens in bright daylight. Bruce Dickinson is bouncing in a turnip field and wearing a pink T-shirt. The band's producer, Martin Birch, can also be seen on the video, wearing a kind of sadomasochist costume. The video was directed by Harris himself. Harris's daughter Lauren, who was around five years old at the time, also appeared towards the end of the video.
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