He ain't heavy he's your captain 2008

Champion fencer. Iron Maiden rocker. And fully fledged commercial pilot.  For those about to fly with Bruce Dickinson, we salute you

By Jon Wilde Last updated at 3:34 PM on 06th June 2008

There aren't that many rock stars you'd trust to fly you to France or Egypt in an airliner.
But Bruce Dickinson isn't your typical rock star.
He might be most renowned as the lead singer of Iron Maiden, a band who have sold over 70 million albums since their inception, but causing heavy-metal mayhem is far from the only string to Dickinson's bow.
'Fully qualified pilot' is just one of the many entries you'll find on the CV of this modern-day Renaissance man.

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From rocker to pilot: Bruce Dickinson flies in Cannes, France

The son of an Army mechanic, Dickinson was born in 1958 in Worksop, and brought up in Sheffield.
At 13, he enrolled at Oundle boarding school, from which he was later expelled.
Following a spell in the Territorial Army, he won a place at London's Queen Mary College, where he studied history.

After singing in numerous hard and heavy bands, he joined Iron Maiden in time for the band's third album, 1982's The Number Of The Beast. It went on to achieve huge sales worldwide, and established the band as metal superstars.

For the next ten years, Iron Maiden enjoyed an uninterrupted run of success with platinum-selling albums such as Powerslave and Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son, along with hit singles such as Bring Your Daughter… To The Slaughter.

During this time, Dickinson continued to indulge his passion for fencing, which he'd first taken up at 14.
He competed on the domestic circuit and in internationals, and in 1989 was ranked seventh-best fencer in the UK. At one point he was invited to join the UK Olympic team, but declined the offer because of touring commitments.

In 1993, he quit Iron Maiden to pursue a solo career, with mixed success. An aviation enthusiast from an early age, he then decided to take up flight training.

By the time he rejoined Iron Maiden in 1999, he'd attained a private pilot's licence and was able to fly the band around the world in a Cessna 421 twin-engined aircraft. Soon afterwards, he acquired a commercial pilot's licence, and he is now regularly employed as a captain for Astraeus Airlines, flying passengers to destinations in Europe and the Middle East on Boeing 757s.

Dickinson's CV is further expanded by a successful stint as a novelist. His debut work The Adventures Of Lord Iffy Boatrace was published in 1990.

He currently presents the Bruce Dickinson Rock Show every Friday night on 6 Music, and he also co-wrote the new movie Chemical Wedding. Dickinson continues to record and perform with Iron Maiden.
This summer, their enduring popularity is underlined with a tour of the world's stadiums, which includes a night at Twickenham in July.

This year alone, Iron Maiden will perform to more than 1.5 million people.

Bruce Dickinson on stage at Ozzfest with Iron Maiden

Life is an orange that's there to be squeezed.
That's pretty much my philosophy. My dad always told me, 'I don't care what you do. Just aim to be the best at it. Even if it's the world's best window cleaner.' From an early age I knew that my life wasn't a rehearsal, and that if I wanted something I had to get it while I could. Maybe that's why I've experienced so much. I have an insatiable curiosity about the world around us, and I think the best way to find out about something is to try to do it to the max. A lot of people take up a hobby or sport and then find an excuse not to carry on with it. Once I start something, I won't stop until I'm as good at it as I'll ever be.

I've been bonkers about aviation as far back as I can remember.My godfather was in the RAF and used to take me to all the local air shows. One of my first memories is of being at one show and I was so little that all I could see ahead were the hems of people's coats and a vast sea of knees. Then I looked up to see a Vulcan bomber in the sky. It was the most awesome thing I'd ever seen. That was it; I was off building my own Airfix models. Nobody could ever understand why I'd bought three of the same kit. But one wasn't enough for me. I had to have the whole squadron. I don't do things by halves.

If I'd become a pilot at 16 there would have been no Iron Maiden.
In my teenage years I was put off the idea of a career in flying, because I'd convinced myself that you had to be a boffin with degrees in maths and physics, which were my weakest subjects. I only came round to the idea after I left Iron Maiden in the Nineties and my solo career was faltering. Basically, I told myself that I needed to find a job, and I thought, 'I could always train to be a pilot.' Everyone thought I'd gone mad and there was no guarantee that it would work out. But as soon as I started flying, I wholly believed this was something I could do for the rest of my life. Now I get as much of a buzz from flying as I do performing in front of half a million people.

The biggest sacrifice I had to make when becoming a pilot was chopping off my long hair.
When I took the tests for my first licence in America, I still had hair down to my waist. The examiner gave me a seven-hour quizzing session before we went flying. Then I had a three-hour flight-check ride which started off at sunset and finished in the dark. It must have been the most gruelling test on record. It was obvious that he didn't like me because I had long hair. Then I'd look at photos of me with other pilots. They looked like the real deal, whereas I still looked like a rock star pretending to be a pilot. As soon as I got my hair cut, people were much friendlier towards me in general. In the past I'd go to the checkout in a supermarket and they looked as if they were about to call 999. Like, I've got long hair so I must be a shoplifter, right? As soon as I got my hair cut, they called me sir and smiled at me a lot.

The biggest downside to fame is being recognised, but being a pilot gives me the perfect disguise.
The first time I ever flew a 757 was fromBruce Dickinson on stage at Ozzfest with Iron MaidenHeathrow to Munich. I got off at the other end and was waiting for a bus to take me to the terminal. Out of the corner of my eye I see this Iron Maiden fan wandering around. He's got the T-shirt, the scarf, the works. Suddenly, he makes a beeline for me and I'm thinking, 'Right, here we go. Time to put my rock-star hat on.' All he wanted to ask was directions for the bus. He didn't recognise me from Adam. I realised that I could be completely anonymous in my pilot's uniform. Even today, surprisingly few people make the connection. When it's announced over the tannoy, 'Today your pilot has been Bruce Dickinson', hardly anyone stops to wonder if it's the same bloke who sings in Iron Maiden. Which is just as well. The last thing I want when I'm flying is someone pushing an album cover under the door and asking me for an autograph.

Bruce Dickinson with a vintage biplane at White Waltham airfield in Berkshire

'Iron Maiden attended the premiere of Spinal Tap and walked out in disgust, convinced we were the models for the film.'
It's a good story that's often told. But it's completely untrue. What made that movie so funny is that it centred on a rock band who took themselves completely seriously and had no idea how ridiculous they were. Iron Maiden were never like that. We've always had an acute awareness of our own absurdity and we've always been able to laugh at ourselves. Having said that, all the members of Iron Maiden have had their Spinal Tap moments. Like when our bassist Steve Harris got builders to make a replica of the Queen Vic pub in the garden of his mansion. I think it was his way of staying close to his East End roots.

Walk into my house and the first thing you'll see is a life-sized Dalek.
It's one that actually featured on Doctor Who in the early Seventies. I came across it in a second-hand magazine:'Genuine Dalek for sale.' I knew I had to have it, so I went out and bought it that same day. I remember driving home with it and all these people staring at the car and thinking, 'He's got a bloody Dalek in the back.' I've never told anyone how much it cost. If people knew, they'd think I was a very sad individual. But I love it. I'm too tall to be able to get inside it, but my kids used to be able to. My son would walk around in it saying, 'Exterminate all teachers.'

One big lesson I've learned is that you cross Sharon Osbourne at your peril.
I once made some disparaging remarks about reality-TV shows that she took personally. When we played Ozzfest in 2005, she organised a group of people near the stage who pelted us with bottle tops, lighters and eggs. Our revenge was to simply carry on regardless and play the best show of the day. So her plan badly misfired. I haven't changed my views about reality TV either. I think it's a complete disgrace – freak-show television, the lowest of the low.

One thing I'll never understand is why so many rock stars take up golf.
Every other musician I meet claims that golf saved their life. I'm of the Mark Twain school of thought that believes golf is a good walk spoiled. I'm actually thinking of getting an implant to prevent me from taking it up, in the same way that ex-smokers use nicotine patches.

Apart from death and taxes, the one thing that's certain in this life is that I'll never be a fashion icon.
My terrible taste in trousers is a thing of legend. The worst pair I ever wore was on stage in Spain. Someone had stolen my own pair from the dressing room, so we raced around town desperately trying to find something that would look OK on stage. We found a women's-clothing store that had some patent-looking PVC trousers, the kind of thing you'd wear to a cheesy Saturday-night disco. I barely squeezed into them, they were that tight. Then I managed to split them halfway through the gig, leaving my, ahem, equipment hanging out. It's only since I became a pilot that I've started wearing grown-up trousers.

I'm young enough for rock 'n' roll but I'm too old for fencing.
It's been one of my main passions since I was 14. At boarding school my metalwork teacher happened to be an amateur fencing coach, and he started teaching me. I soon realised that I had the determination to be pretty good at it. In competitions I used to be down 9–2 and end up winning 12–11. It was like tapping into a form of controlled road rage. I found it particularly useful when touring with Maiden. I'd set up targets in the dressing room before a show and fence to key myself up. Then I got into my thirties and I started getting injuries. I had to accept that, physically, I wasn't up to fencing competitively any more. It's something I really miss. If I had the time and the opportunity I would teach it. But I've got enough going on in my life. There's no room for anything new.

If you really want to annoy me, ask me when I'm going to retire from rock 'n' roll.
I get asked that quite often. As though, because I'm turning 50 this year, I'm ready to stop performing and get the pipe and slippers ready. Why would I want to quit when Iron Maiden are more popular than ever? We're selling twice as many tickets for shows now than at any point in our career. The reason we can keep going is that we've never lost that youthful enthusiasm that kicked us off in the first place, and it's never felt like a job to us. We've all got families and grown-up responsibilities, but Maiden allows us the freedom to run around like lunatics and entertain people with our music. How lucky is that?

Iron Maiden play Twickenham Stadium on July 5. The film 'Chemical Wedding' and the album 'Somewhere Back In Time: The Best Of 1980–1989' are out now


SOURCE

Iron Maiden's secret to success 2008

Published: May 29, 2008 3:00 a.m.

Iron Maiden's secret to success

By BEN WENER

The Orange County Register

To keep the excitement level high, he says, "we just, you know, play a bit less."
Not as infrequently as you'd imagine, mind you - it was less than two years ago that Iron Maiden, one of the longest-running and still popular heavy metal bands in rock history, played Verizon Wireless Amphitheater in Irvine. And little more than a year before that they appeared at an ill-fated Ozzfest stop in Devore - that infamous show that still makes fans grumble, when Sharon Osbourne reportedly had eggs thrown at the band during its set and eventually shut off the sound off so she could instead yell, "Ozzy! Ozzy!"

Still, Maiden's touring schedule is never very full, typically sporting only a handful of stateside dates each time out, and often with a conceit attached, from The Early Days Tour, focusing strictly on material from the band's first four albums � to 2006's trek behind the hailed return-to-form "A Matter of Life and Death," when the group would play the album in its entirety � to this season's Somewhere Back in Time Tour, devoted to reviving the bulk of the band's 1984 World Slavery Tour, complete with a wilder pyrotechnic display than they set off at the Forum in February and the most gigantic Eddie (Maiden's skeletal mascot) ever assembled.
"When we looked back at the 'Live After Death' DVD," Dickinson recalls, "the big Eddie at the back that comes out � we said, 'Oh, well, let's just build it the same as we did before.' And then we found the measurements of it, and we went, 'Yeah, that's pretty small. We can't do that. We've got to at least double the size of it.' So now it is absolutely monstrous."


So big, in fact, that a special hydraulic cherry-picker has to be flown with the band in order to lift it.
Could be stunts like that that keep attracting fresh-faced fans. Or it could also be that while so many of Maiden's peers and progeny have faded out or lost their edge after an album or two, these British veterans - including founding members Steve Harris (bass) and Dave Murray (guitar), drummer Nicko McBrain and guitarists Adrian Smith and Janick Gers, all in their early 50s - have soldiered on, surviving a rocky '90s to re-emerge this decade as one of the enduring masters of the form.


I caught up with Dickinson, 49, by phone while Maiden was in final rehearsals after touching down in Texas, and I began by wondering the same thing I do of all global phenomena: Great though both highs must be, it must feel different to play for 30,000 Californians across two nights at Verizon in Irvine, as Maiden does this weekend, than it would to encounter 45,000 people all at once in Bogota, or 50,000-plus most anywhere across Europe.


ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER: But � how is it different, exactly?
BRUCE DICKINSON: Well, it doesn't so much go geographically, but it is different from place to place. Over the years, it's strange how places have taken on different characteristics.
When we first started coming to America 25 years ago, we always used to imagine that the West Coast was the laid-back one, and the East Coast was where it was really happening. But certainly for the last 10 years, we were doing shows in Los Angeles and going, "Man, what a great gig!" The audience reaction is just really in-your-face, and they're really attentive and listening and informed. It was just really spectacular. I would say, actually, that the West Coast is one of our favorite places to play in North America at the moment.


OCR: Well, you have some history here, of course. (Maiden's widely regarded 1985 live album "Live After Death" and its companion video, finally released on DVD in February, was captured across four nights at Long Beach Arena in 1984.) Do you have specific memories of those shows that stand out the most?
BD: Well, it was just a gorgeous summer. It was a time when metal and rock music were really at a peak, culturally speaking. After "Live After Death," to be honest with you, I think the sort of hair bands, and one or two of the more embarrassing episodes in metal history that happened around then, tended to take over a bit in the public perception. Which was a shame, 'cause of course we were still doing the same thing. And we're still here doing the same. So we must be doing something right.


OCR: How would you characterize metal now?
BD: It's kinda come full circle. Except, of course, that now more than ever the audience own the music, because of the Internet and downloads and things like that. Audiences have such a choice now. But because of that, it's really heartening when you see your ticket sales going through the roof. And with no radio advertising, no TV - we don't even have a record out. Well, we do now �


OCR: But it's a greatest-hits record ("Somewhere Back in Time: The Best of 1980-1989").
BD: Yeah, and it's designed - completelydesigned - to capitalize on people that are new to the band, who need some kind of reference to know what to dip into first. In effect, what we're looking at is a global phenomenon that is caused by word-of-mouth, and it's pretty unprecedented.

OCR: It does seem that way. When I saw you at the Forum, I noticed the crowd was astonishingly young. To see 15-, 16-, 17-year-old kids � other bands who have been around as long or longer than you don't draw like that. What accounts for it?
BD: The heartening thing is that it's happening in America now. This is what's been going on in Canada for ages, and it's what we expect in Europe and South America. When we go into a country and 45,000 people show up in Colombia, 30,000 in Costa Rica � we don't even have a record company in Costa Rica. These are not old, die-hard fans. These are people who are seeing us for the first time.
And a lot of them are very, very young, which is great, because with all respect to old rockers, they don't put out like 16-year-old kids. You know, they sit there and nod their heads sagely and ruminate - and they enjoy it for sure. But they don't really start leaping up and down and head-banging and taking their clothes off and sweating buckets. They'd end up in hospital.
But with kids and us � it's like feeding the hurricane. You need those warmer-temperature waters to keep the hurricane fed. We get our energy from the audience, and we fire it right back at them.

OCR: Some of why you're so popular with younger listeners must have something to do with older brothers and even parents handing down records. But I think a lot of it also has to do with metal now bearing so much of your influence.
BD: Yeah, I think a lot of the bands that are around now will all name-check us as being a major influence. Because, you know, we went out and we did things our own way. We went, "Screw the Establishment, we don't care about radio, we just want to rock the way we want to do it."

OCR: You continue to do that.
BD: Exactly. But the thing I'm really proud of is that the stuff we've been doing really stands up to scrutiny. So many of the bands now - the young bands coming up - are much heavier than we are. We don't have a problem with that - we're not gonna try to out-heavy them or anything else like that. We just do what we do.

OCR: Yeah, but you outsing the majority of them. I think there's good new metal, fine, but there's also just a lot of growling and screaming now.
BD: Look, I'm not gonna diss people's choices. People choose to sing that way, and audiences choose to buy it. They enjoy it. My son is in a band, and he's a singer, and his vocals � they're screaming-growling stuff � and he's got a pretty reasonable voice. Yet he practices really hard to get the screaming-growling thing without losing that voice every five minutes. So I'm, like, "Hats off to you." And then I go along to see him at gigs, and I'm like, "OK, I get this." It's not how I would sing it. But I get it, within the terms of reference.
At the same time, all the kids in his band are really into Maiden. They love it because of what it represents and its heritage, but also because of what we do right now. So many of these kids who are into the band now have gotten into us during the last five years. Effectively, that means that they've been listening not only to our heritage albums - if even that - but to the new stuff we've been putting out.

OCR: Perhaps, but they must be hoping to recapture some part of your past, too.
BD: Oh, one of the main reasons this tour has seized young people's attentions in particular is that they have no idea what it was like when Maiden played "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" back then - but they would have given their eyeteeth to have been there.
And now we're offering them that opportunity. Not by doing kind of a pastiche or facsimile of the World Slavery Tour. But we are bringing those songs back to life with more experience than we did in 1984. Everything in 1984 sounded like we were really in a hurry to get to the end, 'cause we were just excited, and still pretty young. We'd come on stage and play everything at twice the speed.
Now, as we've gone down the slippery slope of doing this for umpteen years, we have the confidence to give our songs the power they really deserve. A lot of bands along the way lose the excitement level, 'cause they've been doing it for years. So they get really good at delivering music that kids are gonna look upon and go, "Yeah, but they look kinda bored." (Laughs.)

OCR: You look anything but bored.
BD: We figured this out a while back. How do we stop this happening to us? 'Cause all of us would be really disappointed with ourselves if that happened. And we thought, well, don't play too much. Treat this as a huge privilege. Treat it like when kids get together and they're in a band, and they've got their first three or four gigs - each gig is just like the first time you do a world tour, 'cause it's so exciting.
So to keep that excitement, we just, you know, play a bit less. And we leave gaps in between. That gives us time to recover physically, but more importantly, mentally. It keeps that excitement level there.


OCR: That also helps keep a mystique going.
BD: Of course, once you go out, like when we did the initial part of the tour and we played in L.A. and we played in New York � I mean, you could tell the sort of seismic ripples that went through on the Internet after we played L.A. That went all the way through North America. Kids were e-mailing going, "God, you should have seen it, it was awesome, they were fantastic." The business on this tour � we've never done business like this for years and years and years in North America. It's really, really cool.

OCR: I think part of why you endure is that your music has added resonance, especially now. I think your last album reflected our times very heavily.
BD: I think "A Matter of Life and Death" is one of the best albums Maiden has ever made. It stands up to all of our best from the '80s. I'm immensely proud of that album, and funnily enough, it was critically quite well-received. But even if it hadn't been, what mattered is not so much what the critics say. What matters is what happens when people listen to it and go, "Wow, this is anything but an old and tired band."

Contact the writer: 714-796-2248 or bwener@ocregister.com

SOURCE

Phone interview with Bruce Dickinson January 2008

I interviewed Bruce Dickinson by phone on the 26th of January, 2008. It was 3:00 am (25th of Jan.) in the UK and he had just finished a day of rehearsing for the "Somewhere Back In Time" world tour at the Pig Iron Studios. The interview lasted around 30 minutes, during which he namechecked this blog a record-breaking 68 times (see bold type) - Well done, Bruce!


BD: Hello.

CBL: Hello. Can I speak to Bruce Dickinson?

BD: Ah, yes, speaking.

CBL: Oh hi, this is Colin Liddell phoning from Japan.

BD: Oh, hi there. How are you?

CBL: Yeh, hi, I’m fine. I was supposed to speak to you yesterday, I think, and that didn’t work out, so I’ve got a few questions about your coming trip to Japan. Is that OK?

BD: Absolutely. Go ahead.

CBL: Right. So, first of all, you’re in the studio right now. What are you doing in there?

BD: Well, I mean at the moment, all we’re doing at the moment is rehearsing for the tour, and, in fact, we’ve been going all week, and we’ve pretty much just knocked off for the weekend, having a couple of days break, and then we just do one rehearsal Monday, and then that’s us all ready to go, y'know, we’re um… It’s all sounding pretty good actually, so we’re very pleased. Some of the songs we haven’t played for 23 years.

CBL: Yeh. So you’re having to relearn a lot of things?

BD: Well, we were, well, we were really surprised, um, the first day back into rehearsals, uh, we went through.. Well, actually, we went through… We managed to get through all the songs.

CBL: Yeh?

BD: So, I think everybody is so excited about this tour. We’ve… I think everybody’s been putting in a bit of work on the side. Eh, so everybody came pretty well prepared for stuff really. There was only the odd moment where we went ‘Oh hang on, how does that bit go?’ y’know, but it was really, really great, and it was very exciting. I mean some of the songs we hadn’t played together for a long time and, uh, y’know we’d really… y’know just… It’s one thing to think about it, um, uh, from a distance but actually to go and play those songs is so exciting.

CBL: How hard is it to kind of dredge up the old memories of the songs, the lyrics and everything and how they go?

BD: Ummm, well, I mean I, I got a couple of… I got a couple of CDs made up of the set that we were going do, and I just carried it around with me and played it, and sort of played it in the bath, played it in the shower, and then when everybody was out of the house, uh, I used to walk round the kitchen island and sing the set to myself. And just, y’know, remind myself of what the words were, because we don’t do any stuff like, er, these guys who use auto-cues or anything else like that, y’know. We actually remember the words – huh huh.

CBL: Yeh. So, your way of kind of bringing back the songs into your memory, it’s very similar to the way a lot of the fans would behave. I mean that’s the sort of thing they’d do. They’d listen to it in the bath. They’d sing it in the kitchen, whatever, as they’re going around their daily life.

BD: Well, yeh, and that’s exactly what you have to do, I mean, y’know, when you look down at the audience and everybody’s singing the words, erm, y’know you better make sure that you’re on the same page.

CBL: Hu hu, yeh. That would look back, yeh. Now I want to ask you why have you… Why has the band decided to, eh, focus on the 80s material again?

BD: Well, eh, one reason… About two or three years ago, uhm, we said we would, um… We had a very successful tour last year in which we played exclusively new material, start to finish, on one set. We played the whole of the new album, um, and, uh… What always worries us, certainly, is being lumped in with some of these other kind of nostalgia acts that go out there.

CBL: Yeh.

BD: And that’s, y’know, that would be absolute death for us. Em, y’know, we go out and we do these tours as, y’know, celebrations of stuff we’ve done, um, but in between times we do full-on album tours in which we play, by and large, almost exclusively new material, um, and what we find by doing that, by sandwiching the tours in that way, we actually increase our fan base and increase the excitement value of what we do.

CBL: Uhu.

BD: Constantly. We’re in a stage now where, ah… We have, well, in actual fact, we have never played to as many people as we have done, as we will be doing on this tour, um, in as few shows. And it’s just extraordinary what’s going on. I mean in terms of like, y’know, South America, we’re playing to 50,000-seats sold out stadiums. In Scandinavia we’ve got, we’ve sold quarter of a million tickets across six shows.

CBL: Yeh.

BD: Yeh. It’s amazing. We were never ever this big at any point in our careers at all.

CBL: Yeh, and so this, this vast new audience that you’re accessing with this tour, they’re going to be getting all the 80s stuff, like, full frontal, so they might get the impression that Maiden are quintessentially an 80s band.

BD: Uh, well, no. Eheh, quite the opposite, because, in actual fact, none of these kids were born in the 80s.

CBL: Mhuh.

BD: Um, most of these kids have become Maiden fans, um, with “Brave New World” and “Dance of Death,” and the last two or there studio albums that we’ve done, so they’ve grown up with the material, but they’ve also bought the back catalogue but they’ve never ever heard the band perform it.

CBL: Uhuh.

BD: So for them this is legendary.

CBL: Yeh.

BD: Yeh. They haven’t… Y’know, they weren’t even born in the 80s most of these kids that are buying the tickets to see the band, so, for them to have the opportunity to come out and see us playing this stuff, for them is absolutely extraordinary. Um, and they know that this is probably a one time opportunity for that to occur, I mean, because we won’t be going out and playing a lot of these songs again ever.

CBL: Yeh. It is a one off thing? That’s for sure, yeh?

BD: Well, no. This is… Bringing back the Powerslave tour to all these various territories, yeh, this is a one off thing. We won’t go back to a lot of these places again with this show. I mean one or two places we are gonna have to go back. We’re already making plans to go back to South America because there have been riots in several countries because we’re not playing there.

CBL: [sniggers]

BD: Um, in Venezuela they found out… The audience discovered the address of the local promoter and police, the riot police had to be called because they besieged his house…

CBL: What were they actually demanding? Demanding more shows or…?

BD: We didn’t do a show. We’re not doing a show in Venezuela.

CBL: Aha, alright. That’s why.

BD: They’re demanding to know why, why he doesn’t book a show in Venezuela.

CBL: Aha, so they have to go across the border or…

BD: I don’t know why he didn’t book a show in Venezuela but I’ve got a feeling we’re going to have to do one.

CBL: Uhm.

BD: In Mexico City we’ve booked a stadium, a 20,000-seat stadium, um, and, uh, two weeks ago they had to move it to a 48,000-seat stadium.

CBL: Uhum.

BD: We’ve sold that out now.

CBL: Yeh, it’s certainl,eh… This tour’s taking on gigantic proportions and the other thing…

BD: Yeh, this is not, y’know, this is not, y’know, like old men coming out of the woodwork to go and see the band.These are young kids, um, who have been brought up with the band, who’s experience of the band, y’know, is either anecdotal or it’s new material, by and large, and, um, this stuff is just taken hold. I mean, we we’ve hardly advertised this tour. I mean…

CBL: It’s sort of just … It’s done it by itself virally, or…

BD: Yeh. This is word of mouth. This is a million and a half people… This is like an uprising of a million and a half people round the World going to go and see Iron Maiden.

CBL: Yeh.

BD: A band that you can’t see on MTV or VH1 or TV Network or the X-Factor or hear on the radio or anything else like that.

CBL: Can I also ask you about… You’re taking your own airplane this time as well.

BD: Yeh.

CBL: Um, it’s kind of interesting because you you’re actually flying it, right? But…

BD: Yeh, I’m flying some of it. When I’m not working with the band, I work for the airline, who we’re leasing the aircraft off. I work for the airline as an airline captain, yeh.

CBL: Uhuh. Yeh, I heard you took Rangers down to Israel for a football match. What was… Why did you, why did you… I heard you volunteered for that.

BD: No, I didn’t actually. I mean, I, it just happened to appear on my roster.

CBL: Uha.

BD: I didn’t know it was Rangers. It was just… It was a three-day trip to Israel, so I thought ‘that sounds like fun.’

CBL: You’re not a fan of Rangers or anything like that, are you?

BD: Sorry?

CBL: You’re not a fan of Rangers, are you?

BD: I’m not a fan of any football team. I’m a rugby fan.

CBL: The other, the other lads in the band are West Ham fans, aren’t they?

BD: Not all of them. Steve’s a big West Ham fan, um, but, uh, yeh, I don’t think anybody else is particularly. He just has his his, his thing, em, because he used to be a junior for West Ham, so it’s kind of… West Ham is kind of his religion, but I was never, I was never particularly into football when I was a kid, so I’m, eh, pretty neutral. I’m fairly immune to football. I thought the Rangers guys were great. They were, y’know, fun guys to have on board the aircraft, and we went to see the match and I discovered that I was wearing the wrong coloured hat [line interference] Hapoel Tel Aviv, yeh, Hapoel Tel Aviv, we were seated in their stands [line interference] with this bright blue hat on. [line interference] It was kind of amusing because all these people sat there in their red hats turning around sort of going ‘Are you a Rangers supporter?’ I went ‘Uhhh, no, not really, I’m just a supporter of humanity in general’

CBL: Yeh, football fans are really…yeh…

BD: [line interference] they couldn’t quite figure out that somebody at a football match that was just, uh, curiosity, but hey there you are, y’know.

CBL: I think it’s interesting you, em, you’re into different sports from Steve because, y’know, people often think there’s a bit of a tension there, or you have different philosophies about the music. I mean, one thing I saw on the DVD with “A Matter of Life and Death,” you’re talking about, eh, different approaches about writing the music. I mean, you’re obviously, because you’re a lyricist, you think the words should come first, and you were also talking about Steve’s view that the music is the most important thing because, y’know, a lot of the fans haven’t actually… A lot of the fans around the World don’t actually understand English well enough to get all the nuances.

BD: Yeh, I mean, and, and that’s just stuff you have to work through really. [line interference] I think you come to a series of compromises to make the stuff sound great, y’know, um, but if you’re writing songs in English, y’know, and things like that, it’s like, y’know, if you’re a playwright, you don’t worry about the fact that people who don’t understand English might not get what you’re writing about. You just go ahead and write and do what you do, um, so, yeh, I mean I think… Basically I think all the ingredients and all the various personalities that comprise Maiden over the years have come up with some very successful stuff, so, y’know, I just think like y’know, yeh, we all have differences, but all the differences combine to make us successful.

CBL: Yeh. I’m interested in, y’know, em, where you’re coming from as a songwriter, because you, you do start with the words and um… Words do suggest certain emotions and emotions lead into music and so that’s one way to write music. I think it’s a more organic and honest way to write music in a way, coz if you just start with an abstract piece of music…

BD: Well, I wouldn’t necessarily go that way. I think it just depends, y’know… Some of it depends to an extent how you, y’know, how your brain’s wired up as well, and different people have different strengths and different weaknesses, y’know, um, and I think the good thing to do is always to respect other people’s strengths and to know your own weaknesses.

CBL: Yeh. So it’s a case of you and Steve kind of complementing each other in a way by having different strengths.

BD: He’s good at a whole bunch of things that I really have no interest in.

CBL: Yeh.

BD: Yeh, um eh, I’m interested in the end result and I’m interested in, y’know, the emotional input and things like that, y’know, and Steve is absolutely fascinated by twiddling knobs and, y’know, the minutiae of everything. Y’know, I see that as being ‘Well, hey, y’know, OK, fine, I guess somebody has to do that job.’ I get really very bored with all that. He absolutely adores it, and so, y’know, between the two or three or four of us, y’know, whoever’s writing all the songs it all gets done, and that’s great, um, y’know. It is, it, it is complementary. We do work together as a team. We’ve been together now for God knows how many years. We all know our little foibles and, y’know, we all know when to, y’know, when to push and when to back off, y’know, in terms of getting our ideas across.

CBL: Umh. Yeh I’d like to ask you about the kind of inspirations behind your lyrics because just like, y’know, heavy metal lyrics, eh, of its very nature, it tends to go for the extremes and the kind of hyperbolic thing, the big impressive sounding imagery. It’s like a constant attempt to invoke the spirit of the sublime, y’know, in the original sense that Edmund Burke used it. Em, so you, you, y’know tend to write about the great themes and metaphysical things, rather than kind of mundane day-to-day kind of kitchen sink stuff. How does your sort of song-writing inspiration eh fit within that context?

BD: Um, yeh, I mean, I…ehhh… I mean, metal’s a pretty, y’know… Metal’s fairly melodramatic kind of stuff. Um, y’know, Metal is in many respects, if you were to take it and compare it to, uh, other forms of, y’know, other forms of performing, it would be at the very least musical theatre and it could be like really absurd opera, y’know. And all of those things tend to take a fairly broad brush approach to things. They want to make a bit impression.

CBL: Yeh.

BD: And metal is a bit like that, y’know. Um, although, y’know, and there are shades within it as well, y’know. Add all the Hollywood bands. And I don’t think they do necessarily do go and deal in, uh, timeless classic themes. They do deal in the minutiae. The trouble is it tends to be the minutiae of used condoms, um, so it’s a bit raggedy and y’know, it’s all about the sleazy sordid side of life in graphic detail. Maiden have never gone for that, y’know. We’ve figured that people want to go and explore that kind of stuff they can just… There’s plenty of places you can just go and do it on a Saturday night down the pub, y’know. We’ve always decided that we wanna tell stories…

CBL: Yeh.

BD: And they don’t necessa…y’know. And stories may just be kind of open ended. They might just be, uh, fairly non-judgmental retellings of adventure stories that you can set to music, or sometimes, y’know, yeh, they might a little… They might be something we’re trying to put across in the song, but by and large we tend to tell stories. They are, they are stories. They’re either stories and we either pinch them from legends or we pinch them from history, or we glue two bits of legends together, or we plunder a bit of Shakespeare and we turn it into something else. So, that’s what we do.

CBL: Is that very different from what you do as a solo songwriter with your solo albums, coz I, I believe they’re a lot more introspective, aren’t they?

BD: Yeh, they are, um, I, yeh. I suppose I, I still indulge in, y’know, the desire to go and tell stories, but I don’t necessarily have to tell stories with a plot.

CBL: mm-hu.

BD: Y’know. You can tell stories of a journey.

CBL: It’s more stream of consciousness sort of thing?

BD: Yes. But you can tell the story of a soul’s journey, or something else like that, I mean, there, there’s… The album that I’m the most proud of, I suppose, is the one I did that was based on, partially based on, but mainly inspired by, um, the works of the poet William Blake.

CBL: Yeh.

BD: And that was called “The Chemical Wedding,” which was also an illusion to alchemy and the way the soul changes through the years, uh, and of course because Blake was himself was certainly an alchemist, was almost certainly an occultist, who would have had esoteric knowledge and it’s infused in his poetry, and, so, it was an attempt to just try and tap into bits of that imagery and bits… I mean I’m not claiming in any way, shape, or form that it’s fit to wipe Blake’s arse, most of it. It’s just my attempt at some kind of homage to Blake, because he’s an inspirational poet who I think embodies the soul of much of what is termed rock and roll now.

CBL: Yeh. Um, so it sounds like you got a lot more, kind of, artistic freedom when you’re working solo. And when you’re with Maiden, there’s other expectations that come into the equation. Is that how you see it? Is it a bit more of a tighter place artistically?

BD: But having the ability to just do what you want all the time with nobody else, with no checks and balances, isn’t always a way to make the most, um, y'know, successful pieces.

CBL: Yeh, it’s good to have something to push against sometimes.

BD: Yeh, absolutely. Y’know, some of the best things… I mean, I’m always reminded of, y’know, probably the most memorable bit that the composer Rossini ever wrote was the William Tell Overture. Um, but by the time he wrote that, he’d pissed up all the money, that he’d been paid. He’d been commissioned to write several pieces. He was an alcoholic and he spent it all on drink, so, em, his sponsor finally sent the heavy mob round, kidnapped him and locked him in a room and said you’re not getting out until you write something that’s any good, and miraculously the following morning, out popped the William Tell Overture.

CBL: Yeh, yeh, it’s just the pressure of… A lot of good things are written in prison, as they say.

BD: Yeh, absolutely. I always say, y’know, if you gave somebody… If you said, ‘Oh folks, listen, here’s, um, a limitless amount of money and we’re going to pay you loads and loads of money and all you have to do is just sit down and come up with something really, really brilliant, but we’ll just keep paying you money until you do. It’ll never happen.

CBL: Yeh.

BD: But if you say ‘Here’s a prize and the person who comes up with the most brilliant thing gets the prize,’ I’m sorry there’d be geniuses coming out of the woodwork.

CBL: Yeh, this kind of leads into an obvious line of questioning. Like, you’ve obviously with, sololy and with Maiden, you’ve already achieved a lot. You’ve got enough money, all your needs are taken care of. What keeps driving you, driving you back, to, y’know, keep on going, to keep producing stuff?

BD: I get bored.

CBL: So, it’s boredom mainly, yeh. That figures because you’re a bit of a Renaissance man. You seem to be going in a great many directions with, y’know, the various things like writing novels, sword fencing, em presenting the, eh, show on the BBC, etcetra.

BD: Yeh, I mean, life is, y’know, to me… I can’t understand why we’re put on the planet unless it’s to push against boundaries. Y’know. Otherwise what’s the point of being here?

CBL: Yeh, so it’s like…

BD: And, y’know, um, um, um, money and all the rest of it, y’know… As long as, y’know, as long as you’re not, y’know, panic-stricken about starvation or shelter and things like that, y’know. And I have a sort of pleasant enough life in the ‘burbs, y’know, em and, y’know, I can… It’s not like I spend vast amounts of money on stupid crap, y’know, but I do, y’know… I’ve got plenty of money to be comfortable, but money doesn’t make me comfortable. What makes me comfortable is ideas and having things to do, and creating things. That’s what makes me feel comfortable and fulfilled, um, and, y’know, that’s what excites me. When I get a new project or, y’know, a set of ideas or something to create, that’s what excites me.

CBL: So, it’s not the love of the crowd, like a lot of people suspect with performers?

[warning bleep that my phonecard’s credit is about to expire]

BD: No, it’s actually… No. It’s not, um, it’s not the love of attention from lots and lots of people. But it is a love of attention. It’s a love of attention from your peers, and it’s a love of attention from people who respect your ideas.

CBL: Right. I’ve got just one last question. Eh. Do you remember RIFF RAFF magazine from the 80s?

BD: Oh God, yeh, a long long time ago.

CBL: [laughs] What’s your memory of it then?

BD: I can’t remember much about it except that it existed. Go on…

CBL: [laughs] I used to write a bit for it. Just thought it might have been a vague memory in there. I was right, OK. Well, thanks a lot Bruce.

BD: I remember that Riff Raff existed but I can’t remember anything particularly specific about it.

CBL: You must have met Mark Crampton… No? You don’t remember him. OK, well, it’s been nice talking to you and good luck with the tour and I hope to see you when you get here.

Phonebank: Thank you.

SOURCE

Iron Maiden: Britain's biggest heavy metal export 2009

From The Times

April 11, 2009

Iron Maiden: Britain's biggest heavy metal export

Long a byword for uncool, Iron Maiden are now our biggest musical earners abroad after the Police and ahead of Coldplay. With a Brit in the bag and a new film opening, 2009 could be their best year yet

Your average middle-aged Brit, with a bit of time to spare during a trip to Brazil, might think, “Ooh, I'll have a nice cocktail and a stroll along the beach.” Bruce Dickinson, the 50-year-old lead singer of the heavy metal band Iron Maiden, thinks, “Ooh, I've already piloted that jet from Rio de Janeiro to São Paulo this afternoon, and I'm not due on stage to sing my lungs out to 80,000 people just yet, so I'll nip across the road to the go-karting course where Ayrton Senna learnt his trade, do a quick race against a pro, then hurl myself around a stage for two hours, stay up late boozing, go to bed, get up, baffle the international press with talk of combustion engines and Monty Python for two hours, jump in a helicopter to the Grand Prix circuit where Lewis Hamilton won the world championship last year, drive a Formula One car around it at 150mph, fit in another go-karting race after that and then head to a sports centre to get kitted up and compete against a dozen Latin-American fencing champions.”

So this is exactly what he does - all in the space of 24 hours. I know this because I did it with him, and despite being half his age and not doing any of the actual singing, steering or spiky stick action myself, I still felt ready to die somewhere after that first stomach-churning bend at Interlagos. (Dickinson was just grinning and saying something about being “ready for a beer”.) So if I was in the anti-ageing industry I would be investing everything in trying to bottle Bruce Juice.

In fact all of Iron Maiden seem to live in Shangri-La. The group was born in the 1970s but is now finding bigger audiences than ever before for the driving guitars, thunderous drums and fantastical lyrics about Coleridge and Cathars and the number of the Beast. Their solo show in São Paulo is their largest yet - it attracts about half the crowd of an entire Glastonbury Festival.

“Five years ago,” says Steve Harris, guitarist and creative heart of the band, “we said we'd start easing back a bit. Just because we thought that by this age we'd be needing to. But we don't need to, or want to - and the demand is there, so we can't really. Our success is bigger than it was in the Eighties! So what can you do? You keep on going.”

Iron Maiden are a uniquely British band - around the world their show opens with Churchill's “We will fight them on the beaches” speech and ends with Monty Python's Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.
They are such a wildly successful British export it's a wonder that Peter Mandelson hasn't invited them aboard any yachts. But then, that's the irony about Britain's biggest band - people in Britain don't think of them as big. Media attention seems skewed towards old bands making comebacks when Iron Maiden have never actually stopped, though the line-up has varied a bit and Dickinson went solo for some years. Cool kids in Shoreditch wearing Iron Maiden T-shirts may well be doing so ironically but, in times of crisis, metal sells well.
When AC/DC's new album went to No 1 at the end of last year it was surely a sign of hard times. The band's other peaks were the economically grim years of 1980 and 1990. Just this week, PRS for Music, which collects royalties for songwriters, revealed that British stars' foreign earnings had hit record levels, with the Police earning the most, followed by Iron Maiden, then Coldplay and the Spice Girls and Elton John. Def Leppard, another hard rock band, were also in the Top Ten.

Iron Maiden have just won a Brit Award for Best Live Act, from an awards body that has tended to ignore them, and last year sold out the 55,000-capacity Twickenham Stadium, their first UK stadium show. Not that the band care particularly. Their rock-solid manager, Rod Smallwood (who has the cash to keep year-round staff at his holiday home in Barbados), declares: “The band don't give a s***. We've got our own little world and the Brit Awards don't really come into it. But that award was voted for by the public and Coldplay fans aren't very proactive, are they?” Apparently an army of Maiden fans around the world orchestrated a mass vote.

And what about those ironic T-shirt wearers? “It's weird,” says Steve Harris, “when David Beckham wore a bloody Maiden shirt - he's probably not even a fan, he just wore it as a fashion thing or something. Or maybe he is a fan ... I don't know.

“But we've never been cool. Emphatically, we never want to be cool or fashionable. We despise fashion. What is fashion? It's a transient thing, here today, gone tomorrow. We have seen bands come and go, all of whom have been touted heavily. We have got a style - it just doesn't happen to be very fashionable. Who cares?”

So what is the enduring appeal of heavy metal? It's noisy and relentless but, Iron Maiden insist, its message is positive. They sound almost Californian as they insist how inspiring their message is. The band formed in 1975, in Leytonstone, East London, and their hits over the decades include Run to the Hills, Can I Play With Madness, Aces High, Bring Your Daughter ... to the Slaughter, The Evil That Men Do and The Number of the Beast.

Research exists claiming to show that heavy metal and classical music fans have the highest IQs among all listeners. One fan, Felipe Martynetz, a 24-year-old from Curitiba in Brazil, has a letter to give to the band, in which he has written that “the philosophical background in Maiden's song lyrics made me discover philosophy as something that had always been near to me, but whose presence I'd never suspected. Then I read Huxley's Brave New World, Golding's Lord of the Flies, and Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
What dawns on you, while watching Iron Maiden's live show, with its bombast and pyramids and 20ft robots, is how curiously lacking in aggression it is. Passion, yes, but it's not a fight. (A roadie tells me that he's been working for Maiden for 30 years and has never seen a punch-up.) Dickinson agrees. “Oh no, it's not fighting. It's not a big f***-you at all. That's a pointless waste of energy. There is the potential on the one hand for rage and chaos, or passion and exultation on the other - and that's my choice: to try to levitate all these people who have come along. And I don't do it - they do it themselves - but you have to sort of provide the framework.”

He says that he began performing in small clubs, and learnt from one of his childhood heroes, Ian Gillan, the Deep Purple singer, how to bring your audience in. “I said to him one night, ‘What's your secret?' And he said, ‘Always look 'em in the eyes.' I thought, OK, I'll try it - but how far can I actually see? And I discovered it was entirely possible to look right the way to the back of a show and see somebody. I thought, well, if you grab that person, then everybody around them suddenly goes ‘Wow'and you energise that whole area suddenly. I started working that - in the end you can do it in stadiums.”

A new film, Flight 666, shows these Maiden devotees in all their international hues - but all wearing variations on that same black T-shirt. The film, which has also just won an award - Best Music Documentary at the South By Southwest music festival in Texas, was made by two Canadian film-makers, Scot McFadyen and Sam Dunn, lifelong metal fans who were allowed access to the band as they toured the world on their private jet. Yes, Iron Maiden have their own plane, and Dickinson, who works as a commercial pilot in his time off, is the captain. He grabbed headlines last year for piloting one of two aircraft that rescued stranded holidaymakers after their package tour company went bust.

Ed Force One, a customised Boeing 757 (decorated with their zombie mascot, Eddie, clinging to the tail fin), transports all the band, their families, crew and equipment directly to where they want to play. It means fans in “Second World” countries never visited by Western rock bands now can be. Marvel at the Costa Rican in the film who never dreamt that he would see stars up close “because I live in the ass of the world!” The band tell me that Oasis have made inquiries about using it. But when you say the words “private jet”? “Oh yeah, it's a red rag to a bull,” agrees Dickinson, “but there is so much woolly thinking about everything to do with the environment. It's like energy-saving lightbulbs - all very well and good, but there are lots of health risks associated with them and in addition they're a bit of a nightmare to get rid of and they cost a huge amount to manufacture in the first place with all sorts of weird chemicals in them - so, yeah, it's sort of the answer, but it's not 100 per cent the answer.” And so Dickinson's theories about the environment continue.
He debunks “myths” about electric cars and biofuels; he argues that shipping is far more polluting than flying, that algae technology is the way forward (“and it scrubs CO2 out of the atmosphere”) but that we will also have to get used to nuclear power, like the French. He has invested in a cargo airship that will lift 1,000 tonnes across the Atlantic and likes the idea of the band eventually doing an eco-friendly tour in one.
Dickinson could talk like this for hours. In fact, he does - until the chat drifts on to how his mother was 16 and his dad 17 when he was born in the upstairs bedroom of his coalminer grandfather's council house in Nottingham. And how he was 35 when his mum told him that she had tried to abort him, with some kind of month-after pill. “And I was, like,” he chuckles with bafflement, “‘Am I supposed to have some kind of crisis about this? Because this is harder for you than it is for me'.” He shrugs.

He went to Oundle when his parents started doing well in building and property. He felt an outsider there and says that he didn't make friends easily, which is a surprise because he comes across as such an affable chap now. The band come from modest backgrounds. Dickinson calls heavy metal “the working man's opera”.
Dickinson may be manic in his passions but his demeanour is unflappable, with the steady voice of the BBC radio presenter that he also is. When captaining the aircraft his reassuring tones comes from the cockpit announcing “light drizzle” and apologising for “a few small lumps and bumps back there”. But later he tells me about flying in to São Paulo, sighing. “Oh God, it's a palaver. Sometimes they get a bit enthusiastic in Brazil and you have to say, ‘Hang on, this is quite a serious business we're engaged in up here!' But the call sign is always 666, so they know it's us. The guy yesterday goes, ‘Is that Ed Force One?' ‘Yes it is.' ‘Is he on board?' I said - guessing he meant me - ‘He is flying the aeroplane'. ‘Say something for me Broooce! Scream for me!'”

Are the band a threat to morals? Nicko McBrain, the drummer with the long peroxide locks, the chatty Essex charmer of the band, now lives in Florida, where he goes to church regularly. “We used to play Southern states like South Carolina and there would be protesters outside the gig with banners, saying our lyrics were satanic. But you've got to read the words. In fact my reverend back in Florida, I gave him The Best of the Beast book - it's got all the lyrics, pictures, tour dates and everything. And he read it and he came out and said, ‘There's some serious stuff going on in this.' People question my faith and I say, ‘Well, the greatest trick the Devil ever played was making people think he didn't exist'.”

Perhaps the greatest trick Iron Maiden ever pulled was convincing the English that they no longer exist - their lack of fame at home works out quite well. “Frankly, I like it that way,” Dickinson says. “I've lived in Chiswick for 20 years and I pay the council tax and the congestion charge and when I'm away I get texts from my sad old 50-year-old mate who runs the Feltham Recycling Centre saying they're missing me down the pub, ha ha. I go home, get my bike out, mooch around the shops and enjoy living in - how shall I put it? - a cool country. Because then we go out on tour and we can set fire to everything.”

Flight 666 will be showing in cinemas nationwide on April 21. Tickets can be bought online at www.ironmaiden.com

SOURCE

Iron Maiden: doing it their own way

By Thomas H Green
Published: 5:19PM BST 28 Jul 2010

Iron Maiden on stage

Most gig-goers consider it overkill to wear a band’s tee-shirt to their concert. Iron Maiden fans, as in much else, are the exception to the rule. The entire 15,000 capacity crowd at the preposterously named Jiffy Lube Live amphitheatre in Bristow, Virginia, seem to be wearing Iron Maiden tee-shirts, most portraying the band’s zombie-like mascot Eddie The Head. They also sing along as one, a vocal army, even drowning out the band during the 1992 song 'Fear Of The Dark’. Iron Maiden lap it up, all six of them responding with a frenetic agility that belies their fifty-something ages.

It’s not a dauntingly large crowd for Maiden. They regularly play to upwards of 50,000 and in South America they’re superstars, mobbed in the streets. Make no mistake, Iron Maiden are huge. Thinking of them in terms of a patch on a sleeveless denim jacket, hastily sewn between Saxon and Twisted Sister, is outdated. The reality is that Iron Maiden have sold more than 80 million albums and often play the same stages as U2 or The Eagles. In 2009 they even won the Brit Award for Best Live Act over Coldplay, The Verve and others.

On this last of 25 US dates trailing their new album, 'The Final Frontier’, their backstage area is swarming, a semi-military operation. Before the show their compact, stockily muscular singer Bruce Dickinson sits chatting in a hospitality room. He’s a unique, atypical rocker. A world class fencer, he also holds a commercial pilots’ license, and has written two novels and a screenplay. Clad in combat shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, he eats a crisp and tomato ketchup sandwich, and ponders the disparity between Maiden’s popularity and their low public profile. Could this be because the band have veered away from being photographed, preferring that Eddie represent them on the covers of their fifteen studio albums?

“I don’t see why anyone would want to photograph us,” he muses, “It’s not like we’re budding George Clooneys. We don’t want to be recognised really, except for what we do. The celebrity thing, I mean, Lindsay Lohan – what’s she for? I look at that and throw my hands up in despair. Maybe we’re some kind of antidote to that.”

Dickinson has short hair nowadays but his bandmates have proper metal manes. Foremost among them is bassist, founder and the band’s driving force, Steve Harris, who writes most of the songs. The other members are gregarious boxer-nosed drummer Nicko McBrain, and virtuoso guitarists Dave Murray, Adrian Smith and Janick Gers. Their sound onstage is dynamic, all topped with Dickinson’s screeching vocals. It’s also a musical gumbo. Rather than the bludgeoning blues riffing of ACDC and other heavy rockers, Maiden major in prog rock’s portentous storytelling, all tinted with folky mysticism, literary references, from Samuel Coleridge to Raymond Briggs, and a hefty dollop of death (“Always a theme with metal because it’s the great mystery,” says Dickinson). Yet, what makes it exciting is their relentless galloping rhythms, triple-headed guitar attack and a sonic aggressiveness redolent of punk.

Harris is having none of it. “Punk was only important in that we hated it and didn’t want anything to do with it,” he says backstage in his affable London geezer accent, “Punk came out at the time we were doing pub gigs and it was very difficult for us to get work because we didn’t look right. We were around before punk, from ’75, and then when punk began to really happen in ’77 people started making those comparisons which really annoyed us because we didn’t want them.”

Whether he wanted them or not, in the wake of punk, Harris’s fast, energized vision for metal found an increased audience. In 1980 Iron Maiden started to have hits and, when they replaced singer Paul Di’Anno with Bruce Dickinson in 1982 'The Number Of The Beast’ album put them in rock’s major league. It was accompanied by much controversy over supposed Satanic influences but dark occultism simply doesn’t fit Maiden, they’re more Terry Pratchett than Alistair Crowley. When a giant animated Eddie arrives onstage, Dave Murray, whose genial ruddy features are creased with an ever-present grin, prods the animatronic creature with his guitar. Far from scary, it’s very British, good-natured entertainment.

The true drama for Maiden was the 1990s when metal went out of vogue in the wake of grunge. There was worse to come. Dickinson left in 1993 to pursue a solo career becoming, in his own words, “a respectable global cottage industry.”
“I was a bit down when Bruce left,” recalls Harris, “going through a divorce, probably at my lowest ebb ever, and for a couple of hours I thought about it [finishing Iron Maiden]. Then I thought, 'What are you doing? Just get out there and bloody do it’.”

He hired another singer, Blaze Bayley of the band Wolfsbane, now best known for his appearances in hair restoration adverts. Iron Maiden’s popularity went down but was far from out and when Dickinson re-entered the fold in 1999 the band’s ensuing career made them bigger than ever. A couple of years ago they toured from India to Costa Rica and beyond, entirely on their own customised Boeing 757, Ed Force One, filled with tons of equipment alongside the band and crew. Eddie, naturally, was painted on the tailfin and Dickinson was pilot.

Unlike many of their contemporaries, Maiden are not a nostalgia act. The current tour concentrates mainly on their last three albums, while concerts in 2006 consisted of them playing the whole of their new album from beginning to end. This would be suicidal for many bands but Iron Maiden fans are a breed apart, constantly welcoming new young blood.

“We seem to have more regenerations than 'Dr Who’,” says Dickinson, “What’s good is that when each new generation discovers the band it’s usually on the cusp of a new album, then they work their way though the older albums.”

Their latest album has a raw quality akin to their most popular early '80s material, and the Virginian crowd respond enthusiastically to the sole new track, the rampaging 'El Dorado’. Iron Maiden close their set, however, with their 1980 debut single 'Running Free’ then rush through the backstage area to a convoy of vans and limos that screech off into the night accompanied by a police escort. This sight certainly doesn’t hinder their A-list credentials yet the key to their appeal is not glamour and excess. Bruce Dickinson may have hit on something earlier when he said, “There’s a bit of old-fashioned stagecraft to this and we’re very proud of that fact. All our backdrops are painted. People have tried to sell us the latest wingding video walls and we went, 'I’m afraid it looks crap, it looks like you’re standing in front of some garish fruit machine in Vegas – awful.’ Our backdrops are 2D on canvas but they have a more 3D effect than anything that’s quote-unquote modern.”

Anyone who’s seen the spectacle of, say, a Chemical Brothers show, would agree this perspective is dubious and yet it nails the appeal of Iron Maiden. They do things their own way and are willing to graft for it, offering old-fashioned entertainment to a ballistic rock template. Iron Maiden are not the “garish fruit machine” Dickinson refers to; they are instead closer to pinball, occasionally given a graphic makeover and eventually unexpectedly classic.

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Interview: Iron Maiden rocker goes galactic

By DARRYL STERDAN, QMI Agency Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson isn't that keen to boldly go where no man has gone before.

Despite the space-odyssey lyrics and themes of the veteran metal brigade's 15th studio album The Final Frontier, their frontman -- who is both a licensed commercial pilot and an old-school Trek fan -- isn't racing to book passage on a suborbital airline such as Virgin Galactic.

"I think I'd want to take a long hard look at those little suborbital things before I got on one. As a famous airline designer once said, 'The airplane -- they've not yet perfected it,'" the 52-year-old singer says, laughing. "And for the amount of money it costs, well, I could think of a lot of things you could do that would be a lot more fun, and last a lot longer."

Presumably, that would include spending most of the past 30 years circling the globe with his bandmates: Bassist and chief songwriter Steve Harris, drummer Nick McBrain and guitarists Dave Murray, Janick Gers and Adrian Smith. As the sextet counted down the final shows of this year's Final Frontier tour, Dickinson called up from an Italian villa to discuss getting high with fans, wearing Capt. Kirk's corset and the chances of him being the new Simon Cowell.

What does it mean to put out a 15th album? It can't give you the same thrill as the first one.
Well, it's not really a numbers game. Not for us, anyway. Every album you put out is important because it could be the last one -- especially when you get up to 15. I'd like to think this album would be a great starting point for our next album, or an equally great finishing point if we decide never to make another one. Not that we think of it as our last album. But never say never at this point.

This record has some of your longest and most complex songs. Is that about challenging yourselves? You, in particular, seem like a man who not only likes challenges, but needs them.
Yeah. Without them, I'd get bored very quickly. But I think you have to find what challenges are appropriate. It's like the Clint Eastwood thing: A man's got to know his limitations. Once you know your limitations, then you can exceed them.

Speaking of bringing people in, you literally fly planeloads of fans to and from shows as part of a VIP package. What happens on those flights?
We try and make it special. The flights are all Fight 666 -- that's on the boarding passes and everything. And we make up goodie bags -- you get a hat and Bruce Air sunglasses and flags and all kinds of good things. And the only way you can get this stuff is if you're on the flight. You can't go and buy it on a website. And I dish out signed photographs as well, and I chat to everybody. I come back and take pictures, I hang out with the cabin crew and sign stuff.

Since you called the album The Final Frontier, I have to ask who the biggest Star Trek fan is in the band.
That's probably me. But I'm an old Star Trek fan. Not that I'd like to dis' the new series, because I think it's great. Jean-Luc Picard is terrific, and all the spinoffs have some great stories. But I love the cheesy naiveté of the original.

So, if Maiden were Trek, you'd be Kirk?
Oh please, no. I'd rather ... well, you know what? Unfortunately, I probably would be Kirk. Maybe I'm cheesy enough. But please don't put me in that corset he wore.

American Idol needs a new acerbic Brit judge. Interested?
Absolutely not. You couldn't pay me enough to go on that show. I find it a bit sad that people enjoy it. There's another show called Britain's Got Talent which is clearly just an exercise in laughing at people's inability. It's sad. Reality TV leaves me completely cold. I couldn't tell you who won any of those shows. I've never watched them for longer than 30 seconds, which is sufficient to go, 'I can't believe people sit and watch this s---.'
darryl.sterdan@sunmedia.ca

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Interview with Bruce Dickinson 25 Aug 2010

By SEAN HAMILTON, Deputy Showbiz Editor

Published: 25 Aug 2010

AFTER 35 years of hard riffing - and boasting an average age of 53 - Iron Maiden are enjoying the biggest success of their lives.

Their new album The Final Frontier, their 15th studio album, has rocketed to No1 in the UK and 12 other countries around the world.

Lead singer Bruce Dickinson, 52 - also a full-time airline pilot, successful writer and a keen fencer who represented Great Britain - believes their success is down to their uncompromising normality, good tunes and an amazing live show.

He said: "I loathe all the celebrity crap - all the minders, the backstage glamour and the glitzy bollocks. We hate it all.
 
"We are all about the music. If we could beam ourselves back home after a show, we'd go to the shops as if nothing had happened.

"The rest is just fluff. It's nice but it's bollocks in the grand scheme of things.

"We got rid of most of our rider. We just have three loaves of white bread, some butter, a tin of tuna fish and some beers.

"People come backstage looking for the spread of food and we say, 'Go make yourself a sandwich'.

"And we don't want vases of flowers. Do we look like the sort of blokes who have flowers in our dressing room?

"We are simple and straightforward and give our fans what they want.

"We have always ploughed our own furrow. We have always looked after our fans and insisted on remaining current.

Rock on ... veterans show no sign of slowing down - even after 35 years

"We've had a string of successes over the previous few years and it has been consistently building. But this year seems to have focused everybody's attention. 

"It seems like a spontaneous phenomenon to the outside but it's been bubbling away for a few years. We seem to have reached a tipping point this year."

Iron Maiden, formed in east London more than three decades ago, have had plenty of time to fine-tune their act.

Long-standing members Steve Harris (bass), 54, Dave Murray (guitar), 53, Adrian Smith (guitar), 53, and Nicko McBrain (drums), 58, have shifted more than 100million albums and amassed personal fortunes estimated at £10million plus.

The current line-up also includes guitarist Janick Gers, 53, who joined in 1990.

One thing's for certain - they have not done it on their looks.

Their latest album sleeve features a backlit picture of the band, presumably so as not to scare the kids.
But their loyal fans all over the world cannot get enough of The Mighty Hammers, as they call them, because of their epic live sets, their hard rocking sound, their famous T-shirts and their iconic monster Eddie.

Reach for the skies ... singer Bruce in his day job

Bruce - who picked up a Brit Award for Best British Live Act last year - said: "We're pretty straightforward. We just go out and give it large every night. 

"For every little sensitive beginning to each song, there's a bone-crushing finale.

"Inevitably, with Maiden, there's always Eddie at the end and there's always a riotous sing-along.
"And that is what people want. We take people on a journey. It's pure escapism."

While the rest of the world - especially the music industry - has changed around them, Maiden have stuck to their course like an old-fashioned piece of solid British engineering.

Bruce added: "We've been a relatively constant fixture in the music industry and a lot has changed. But it's only the method of delivery. Digital has come along and replaced CDs and vinyl.

"Some things have not changed - and that's how good you have to be to make it.

"You have to be very determined. You must have something special that nobody else can do - a sound or songs or performance. That's just the same when we're in the digital age as when it was all vinyl and records.
"And now, more than ever, you've got to be good live. We still exist as a force within music because we're still making different-sounding records on our own terms.

"They are records that engage our fans and we still go out and tour them."

The mighty Maiden insist their latest No1 is thanks to new teenage fans rather than ageing headbangers who enjoyed their chart-topping Eighties albums The Number Of The Beast and Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son.
Bruce said: "Being on stage gives you one big advantage - you get to see who's coming down to the front.


"And we've noticed for several years that they are getting younger. It's the one thing that makes it fresh every time we go out on tour. It's not the same old faces.

Reaching new audiences ... many of Maiden's fans are youngsters

"Over the past ten years we've been putting out albums and the kids coming to the shows have grown up with those albums, not the older stuff. 

"We occasionally see families coming and it's great if you see a dad bringing his son to his first show as a rite of passage.

"But, generally, it's the other way round - the kid bringing the dad. A huge part of our new fanbase all over the world are 14-year-olds who are excited we have a new album out."
The band have just completed a major world tour, which climaxed in the UK with a performance at metal festival Sonisphere.

Bruce said: "We would never do a TV show like X Factor and we would never play Glastonbury. I cannot stand X Factor.

"I've been offered all sorts of reality TV. One guy offered me a programme which involved me having my poo examined. I thought it was a wind-up. I told him where to go in no uncertain terms.

No1 album ... The Final Frontier tops the charts in 13 countries

"Glastonbury is a bit too cream cakes and afternoon tea for us. It's all yurts and people being far too polite." It's incredible that the band have remained on good terms after so many years - although there have been some comings and goings. Bruce quit the band in 1993 to pursue a solo career, returning towards the end of the decade.

He said: "The Nineties was an unusual period. It was a dark time for Maiden. I wasn't in the band for five years of it - because I'd quit to do solo stuff.

"It was generally a difficult time. But you're bound to have periods of limbo. If you can surmount those obstacles you come out of it with greater awareness of why you still exist as a band."

He says the secret of remaining pals with his bandmates is knowing when to give one another space. Living on opposite sides of the world helps, too.

Bruce said: "We're all from different backgrounds. We all have different ways of looking at the world but we've all come to understand each other and live with each other. We all love each other.

"When you've been that close to people and lived on a bus with them, you know when to give people space. At the end of a tour we all disappear off to the four winds.

"Steve lives in the Bahamas, Nicko lives in Florida, Dave lives in Hawaii and Janick has moved back to Sunderland. I still live in London."

Bruce is remarkable. He has published two novels - including The Adventures Of Lord Iffy Boatrace - and still holds down a regular job as a captain for airline Astraeus when he is not on tour.

When he IS on tour, he flies the band around in their private Ed Force One Boeing 757. But with Iron Maiden more popular than ever, Bruce now accepts that he will be rocking until he dies.

He said: "At the start of every tour we think this will be the last one. By the end we're disappointed and think, 'Is this it?'

"So we'll carry on as long as we're having fun. You may as well go down doing something you love.
"We will be back to tour this album and after that we should be looking at a big resumé tour - an unashamed tour with all the greatest hits."

s.hamilton@the-sun.co.uk

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Interview with The Aquarian Weekly

Interview with Iron Maiden: Conquered Earth; Next, The Final Frontier
 

—by Patrick Slevin, July 8, 2010

The worldwide success of Iron Maiden is staggering. Never the darlings of MTV, rarely the beneficiaries of heavy radio airplay and infrequently the focus of the mainstream print press, the flag-bearers of the NWOBHM have nonetheless conquered the consciousness of heavy metal fans everywhere.

Well, almost everywhere. But that’s just because they haven’t flown there yet. In their own plane.
And we’re not talking about some little corporate jet here. Flight 666, the band’s last tour and its accompanying DVD, saw the band buy and brand a Boeing 757 (the Ed Force One) which singer Bruce Dickinson flew from tour date to tour date. Not bad for a sextet of blue-collar metal dudes.


(And yes, Bruce Dickinson is a licensed commercial pilot.)

Still, there are a few places the continent-hoppers haven’t been, something which the band hopes to rectify soon, maybe in support of their August release, The Final Frontier. So far, on their American leg, they’ve only premiered the forthcoming record’s single, “El Dorado,” a thinly-veiled critique of the mentality behind the financial meltdowns on both sides of the pond. Fans can draw any number of conclusions based on the sci-fi artwork and tracklisting, but according to founding bassist and songwriter Steve Harris, there is not an overriding theme.

There is a grand stage show to accompany the new album, including the new Giger-esque Eddie. Harris spoke before going onstage in Saskatoon (in western Canada) about the upcoming record, songwriting, and their devoted fans.

Saskatoon sounds like nowhere to me. Is there anywhere that Iron Maiden hasn’t played?
Yeah, there are quite a few places we still haven’t played in the world, believe it or not. We haven’t played China yet; we’d like to play there. South Korea, places like that. Malayasia, Hong Kong. All kinds of places, really. But we’ve traveled the globe many times, and we thoroughly enjoy it. It’s good to go back somewhere as well as going new places.

How has the tour been?
It’s been really good so far, really good. The first couple of weeks is always the toughest, physically, mentally. But certainly now, it’s getting better (laughs).

I’m assuming that you’re doing more recent material?
Yeah, the last two tours we did a lot of the older stuff, so we’re doing a lot of stuff now off the last three or four albums. There will be a couple of oldies, but we like to mix it up. It keeps it fresh for us and for the audience, I think. Sometimes you get people that moan that they didn’t hear ‘The Trooper’ or whatever, but they could have heard that on pretty much every other tour. It’s just one of those things.

Is ‘El Dorado’ the only new song that you’re going to be performing?
Yeah, because the new album doesn’t come out until Aug. 17. So we’ve basically given that away as a free download, and we’re playing that, and then next year, we’ll be playing a lot more new material. But it’s a new show. The new show I think is worth seeing just for the show alone. Watching video from people up front, it looks pretty bloody good, I gotta say.

Yeah, Eddie looks great.
Oh, you’ve seen it?

I saw some video of it online. Have you ever personally been inside of Eddie?
No, not at all. Why would I want to do that? (laughs)

‘El Dorado,’ lyrically, seems to echo some of the financial malfeasance that’s been in the news.
Yeah. It’s about greed and drawing people in basically. Imploring them to sort of do whatever and giving them the once over afterwards. It’s about that, loosely.

Does the album follow any general theme as Matter Of Life And Death did?
A lot of people that have heard the album, press and people who have heard it, think that there’s some sort of concept or something, but there isn’t really. There are only two or three songs kind of around that sort of subject. It’s actually quite a diverse album. There’s not really one song—‘El Dorado’ or any other song. You can use any song as a lead, a taste. That’s what we do, we put out a taste, but it doesn’t really represent the rest of the album at all. There’s not really any other song that’s like that on the album.
I think it’s a very interesting album, it’s quite diverse, and there’s a lot going on. It’s a long album, hour and a quarter, so it’s a lot of music. And hopefully people will like it. I think it’s a pretty rich darn album, it’s pretty different I think. But we don’t really analyze it until we start speaking to journalists, to be honest.

You look at the cover art, and it’s space-themed, and you think of Somewhere In Time. Did you feature any unusual instrumentation on it?
There are some unusual things going on on the album, yeah. I think the opening song—I won’t say it’s going to shock people—but it’s quite different. We’ll see. You can get 10 people in a pub discussing Iron Maiden songs and they’ll have ten different ideas about this and that anyway. You can’t really worry about it, really; we just do what we do. And hopefully people like it.

What was the balance of songwriting on this record? You have so many contributors, I can only imagine it’s difficult to make everybody happy.
Not really. It doesn’t really work like that. It’s not about keeping people happy; it’s just about getting really good songs, and whatever combination of writers does that. We don’t write 20 songs and use 10; if we’ve got enough, we stop. There are always lots of bits and pieces flying around, but basically we just use whatever we think is strong at the time.

There’s no plan, no fixed plan of who’s writing with who or anything like that. It just worked out this time as well as the last album that I wrote more stuff with Adrian [Smith] this time, purely because we were the first ones to get together really, and it just sort of stemmed from there. It doesn’t always work like that, and it probably won’t necessarily work like that in the future.

You do have short songwriting sessions, just a little over a month.
Yeah, we don’t allow ourselves too long, because if you allow yourself six months to write, you’ll take six months. So we tend to put ourselves under a bit of pressure. And it is a bit of pressure; I certainly feel it anyway. A little black cloud goes away when you know you’ve got enough songs and you’ve got good material.

That never makes you feel rushed?
Not rushed, it just makes you feel a bit anxious because you know you’ve got to come up with good stuff. But that’s always been a good thing; it’s always been a positive thing. It’s almost like going through a weird stage when you’re doing it, because you do feel sort of an anxiety. I, in particular, I can’t really sleep properly when I’m writing. Too many ideas flying about all over the place, so I don’t really sleep very well. But once the writing’s done, you feel this massive pressure cloud go away.

So you don’t do any kind of intensive writing beyond those sessions.
No. Once we’ve got enough songs, we stop. We’ve always done that, because there’s no point in really working on stuff that you can’t record. We don’t really give ourselves enough time to do that, and we don’t want to do that. We just want to record an album and go on tour with it.

I was under the impression that Matter Of Life And Death was not mastered. Is that the same kind of style that you’re taking with this one too?
It was [mastered], but it was pretty flat. It’s the same with this one too. It’s just that, these days, I think mastering, dare I say it, is kind of—I’m not saying you don’t need it because sometimes you do to get the levels the same and stuff like that—when you work in digital format and you’ve got your mixes sounding just how you want, then you don’t really need a great deal of tweaking. Well, we don’t. Some artists might, but we don’t.
And that’s what we’ve found more and more lately, really, that we don’t need any tweaking at all, and when things are tweaked, they affect everything across the board, and it tends to mess with the mixes. I’m not going to say in the future that we’re not going to [master] but the last couple of albums have been fairly flat. Because they’re dynamic enough anyway in the mixes, so we don’t really want anything messing with it. We did try different things, different frequencies and this and that. But it didn’t sound better really. Sounded different, but it wasn’t better (laughs).

Also, the live sound of Iron Maiden is really what you want to capture in the studio.
Yeah, that’s the thing. You spend a long time capturing all that and getting it just how you want it, and if someone else comes and puts a frequency across it and it affects the whole mix—sometimes it sounds good, and you let people try these things, because you want to be open minded about it—but if it doesn’t make it sound better, then what’s the point?

It might be a tough year for concerts this summer, but it seems that Iron Maiden has been blessed with an extremely devoted fanbase. Do you have anything you attribute that to?
Not really. We’ve been asked this many times, and no. I don’t think you can really put a finger on it. What are we doing any different than anything else? Bruce does say on stage, and it’s true what he says, that there’s music fans, there’s metal fans, and then there’s Iron Maiden fans, and they really are a different breed altogether. It’s the truth. Why we deserve that kind of devotion, I’m not really quite sure. Yeah I think we make good albums and everything else. But I don’t know. Once an Iron Maiden fan, always an Iron Maiden fan, it seems to me.

The fanbase all over the world is unbelievable. I think people didn’t realize until the movie Flight 666 and that really brings it home how global it is. You can’t really explain it. It’s just unbelievable.

That was an interesting experiment, buying a plane…
Well, we played most of these places before anyway, it’s just these days now, trying to freight things around the world, with security and everything, it’s just an absolute nightmare. Some of the places before were just becoming more and more difficult to get to, and now we can fairly well go where we want.

I know you haven’t announced dates for past Europe, but do you plan to go to some of these places you mentioned, like Hong Kong or South Korea?
Well, we’d definitely like to go in the future, whether it’s the near future, we don’t know. Some of these places are not the easiest places to go to. I’d love to go to China, but there are certain things you have to go through. It took us a long time years ago to end up playing Russia, but we ended up getting there in the end. I’m sure with China, we’ll get there too. It takes a lot of people working out getting rid of all the bullshit, I suppose, to actually get in there.

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