Bruce Dickinson Talks Exclusively To KNAC.COM On Skunks, Picasso, Chemicals, Tattoos And Life In And Out Of Iron Maiden

With Bruce Dickinson best known as the frontman for Iron Maiden, even the most devoted fan can sometimes forget he has had a very success solo career. It began by what Dickinson calls “a very enjoyable accident” in that he was asked to contribute a track to the Nightmare On Elm Street 5: The Dream Child soundtrack in 1989. Although the track, “Bring Your Daughter To The Slaughter” never made it to the movie, it was released as a radio single – better check Ebay folks, I’m sure as hell not parting with my copy – and later re-recorded by Maiden for the No Prayer For The Dying album. It also landed Dickinson his first solo deal with Columbia. Tattooed Millionaire, which featured an old friend named Janick Gers on guitar, was released in 1990 and the vocalist toured as a solo act. Dickinson left Maiden shortly before the release of his second solo album Balls To Picasso (‘94). A string of albums followed – Alive In Studio A (‘95), Skunkworks (‘96), Accident At Birth (’97) and The Chemical Wedding (’98) – the latter two rekindling a relationship with then former Maiden guitarist Adrian Smith.

February 10th, 1999 was a bright day in the lives of Maiden fans around the world when it was announced Dickinson and Smith had rejoined the band. With three guitarists in tow, Maiden toured to support a best of/ video game package called Ed Hunter and Bruce temporarily capped off a chapter in his solo career with another live release Scream For Me Brazil. The sextet released and toured for Brave New World in 2000 and they reclaimed their place as one of the world’s most popular metal bands.

But what about Bruce’s solo career? According to the vocalist, it’s still alive and well. If you never heard some of his solo works, The Best Of Bruce Dickinson released through Sanctuary on September 25th is a nice place to start as it features a good sample of each release. For the already converted, it also includes two new tracks and a second disc of various rarities.

Note: This interview with Bruce took place in New York the night before the Twin Towers incident. Fortunately, he was not close to the area when it happened.

KNAC.COM: Why release a best of collection now?

BRUCE: Well, there’s nothing else much going on this year for Maiden. It’s also because this is a great time given the high profile of metal and to get a lot of people acquainted with this stuff who frankly have never heard it. It never has been marketed properly in this country. We never had descent distribution so this is a great chance to really expose it to a whole bunch of people, especially the recent solo stuff. The plan was to release an album called Catacombs in Europe, which was going to be largely about trying to give my existing fans something to listen to, rarities and other stuff like that. So, this is a combination of two things; CD one is the existing stuff and CD two is the rarities thing including a little interview explaining myself on all the bits and bobs. I thought it would be more interesting having that than a bunch of dry liner notes.

KNAC.COM: When I was listening to the album, I forgot how much I love some of those songs.

BRUCE: I kinda got that way when I was listening to it as well. The other thing that surprised me, particularly with CD 2, was how coherent it sounded considering none of it was ever intended to heard by anybody, really.

KNAC.COM: How did you choose the tracks for both discs?

BRUCE: CD one was not that tough actually because I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted in the first place. I wanted something that was going to, as one person put it better than I can say; give the jest of everything that I’ve done. Try to sum up each album with a selection of a few tracks as apposed to just going for a straight “oh yes, these were the commercial successful tracks” or something like that. One of the commercially successful tracks for example would have been “All The Young Dudes” or “Shoot All The Clowns”; they are not on the record. One of the reasons is that I feel there are other tracks that should go on there more. I agonized a little bit about “Book Of Thel” and “Dark Side Of Aquarius“ not because of the quality of the songs, but just because they were so long. I’ve could’ve squeezed a couple of the more commercial tracks instead of these, but I though hell, it’s my album and I’ll do what the fuck I want with it and argue about it later.

KNAC.COM: Where did the two new songs come from?

BRUCE: I wrote them with Roy Z. “Broken” was written specifically for this album, the other one, “Silver Wings” was kicking around. Roy Z played me this demo he had and he was a bit sheepish about it. He thought it sounded too much like Maiden and I was like yeah… why don’t we do it as a homage to Maiden 1985 style. So we did a demo of it and I took it back to London and played it to everybody and everyone loved it. So it worked really well. “Broken” is more in the Chemical Wedding style and that was the one we took seriously but “Silver Wings” just sort of came out. We thought it was like gonzo “Aces High” and we had a blast doing it.

KNAC.COM: Who is playing on them?

BRUCE: Me and Roy Z. I think when people hear that song they will realize how much Roy is on the other albums. For the next solo album that I do, it’s going to be just me and Roy. The drummer we used was Dickie Fliszar, who played on “Tears Of The Dragon” way back when, and also played with me and Janick so I think that will work really well.

KNAC.COM: Do you write a song, and then decide if it’s a solo song or Maiden song, or do you write for a project in mind?

BRUCE: I write for what ever is appropriate at the time. Whatever the next thing is that I’m going to write. If it’s a solo record, I go ahead and try to write for that. I don’t go round and say I’m going to save this track for Maiden, unless I write something that has got to be for Maiden. It’s rare, though. I have that kind of certainty. Sometimes I’ll have an idea and it sits around and doesn’t get completed and then I end up taking that to Maiden. I’ll work with one of the other guys or try to get it together.

KNAC.COM: In the album liner notes you mention that a lot of the solo material was written in days, is that normally how you work?

BRUCE: That’s how I like to work if I can. When I say I wrote it in days, I mean write the framework of the song. It sometimes takes me a couple of months to finish the words but I usually have a verse and a sort of template to work off of.

KNAC.COM: How did “Bring Your Daughter To The Slaughter” come up?

BRUCE: The publishing company asked my manager if I wanted to do a track for the Nightmare On Elm Street album. It was as simple as that really.

KNAC.COM: What part of the movie was that in?

BRUCE: It wasn’t. They asked me to do it and it turned out it didn’t go in the movie because it was too late.

KNAC.COM: Have you ever gotten flack for the lyrics to “Tattooed Millionaire”?

BRUCE: A lot of people thought it was about them. The guys in Motley Crue were all convinced it was about them. Axl Rose was convinced it was about him. And to all of them I just say the words to the Carly Simon song…. “You’re so vain, I bet you think this song is about you…”

KNAC.COM: In the album’s liner notes, you say you left Maiden because you felt you needed to get respect on your own…. Didn’t you think you had respect in Maiden?

BRUCE: Yes, but the respect I had in Maiden was because I was in Maiden. I think it is very different feeling when you’re earned respect for being your own man, for being your own person. Also, I wanted to take a few risks. Being in Maiden was not entirely a risky business. Not really. Not compared to what its like on the outside world. So that was a motivation for leaving. It’s like, if want to go climb Mount Everest, fine, but if you really want to climb Mount Everest, you do it without a safety net because then you really climbed it. It’s like on those TV shows where people do all these dangerous stunts, there’s always a safety wire.

KNAC.COM: That must have been a hard thing to do.

BRUCE: Yes, it was. It took lots and lots of soul searching and it was a purely internal thing. It wasn’t the kind of thing that other people could really get involved with because nobody else could understand. Going back to Maiden was great, but it was a different kind of great.

KNAC.COM: I know there was a lot of bad blood between you and the band when you left. Did you ever feel competitive with them?

BRUCE: Not in the long term because I think Maiden has this incredibly loyal fan base that frankly is going to follow them to the ends of the earth no matter what happens. I really had to build a fan base. I like the fact that I think that I’ve created people who are fans of what I do, but there’s no way I could create the cult of Eddie and things like that, even if I wanted to. My stuff has got an ornery cantankerous free spirited kind of quality to it, which sticks out, like the whole Tattooed Millionaire thing. I don’t like going with the big majority, I don’t like the big football crowds; That mentality may seem ironic because I stand in front of them all the time and sing, but on a personal level, I don’t like being in them. I like being an individual. More than a half dozen people and I start thinking it’s a cult.

KNAC.COM: How did you hook up again with Adrian?

BRUCE: He wasn’t doing much at the time and I needed an additional guitarist for the stuff I was doing and I thought well, let me ask Adrian if he wanted to play guitar on two or three tracks. He was really enthusiastic when he heard the stuff and I said, ‘no strings attached, see how you feel’ and he ended up doing the whole record. And then we decided to try to take it on the road. It was a real uplifting experience doing that tour. A lot of fun.

KNAC.COM: What did you like most about that tour?

BRUCE: Meeting people. Not meeting crowds of people. Meeting small numbers of people who you could sit and talk to.

KNAC.COM: What do you hate most about the music business?

BRUCE: The business part. I hate the fact that music is packaged and controlled and digitized and analyzed and sold like soap powder and toothpaste. It’s just treated like any other product rather that as a piece of art. It’s like a cancer that has spread throughout music now. Bands think in terms of business now. Bands think like businessmen, they don’t think like artists.

KNAC.COM: Do you see that more now than in previous years?

BRUCE: No. Funny enough it was [around the time] punk started. A lot of bands were starting their own record labels and stuff, which was very admirable. But the music business has also been full of crooks, that’s no surprise or secret. The whole entertainment industry has always been full of crooks. The artists ended up being poor, but they were still artists. Now, artists are still poor, but they are not artists anymore. That’s my take on it. That’s not universally true, but it does seem to me that an awfully lot more artists are wondering around wearing businessmen’s hats.

KNAC.COM: It also seems that major labels are giving artists their own label to sign bands.

BRUCE: Yeah, some of it’s an ego thing. You know, “bless his heart, let him have his own little label,” [but that’s] on the basis that it’s cheaper for him to make mistakes then it is for them to make mistakes and you never know, they might even get lucky. What happens if you give the guy 100,000 dollars and say, “go sign the best four bands you know and go make a couple of EPs.” The guy thinks that’s a lot of money, but no record company in their right mind could sign four bands with 100,000 dollars. You could spend 100,000 dollars on one band and they will probably still suck. This guy has gone out and done all the work of all the A&R; men combined for a fraction of the cost, and at the end of the day, when he has made the demos, the record company just sits there and throws the four bands at the wall and once of them sticks. They exercise their option, and take that band. And if they are a big success, they give him another 100,000 dollars.

KNAC.COM: I guess you aren’t interested in doing that.

BRUCE: I will quite happily act as a go-between if I thought there was a band out there. I’ll start pointing them out to people and everything else, but that’s about it. I don’t want to get involved in the shenanigans. I’ve been involved in two or three things with bands that I really liked and thought would do really well. I’ve tried to get them hooked up with managers and things like that. Sometimes it’s been successful, and sometimes it hasn’t. I’ve just sat and watched it fall apart because of politics or egos and I’m like, you live and learn, but goodness me, it’s amazing how people can throw away a good thing when they want to.

KNAC.COM: I figured you have done just about everything else, why not work behind the scenes?

BRUCE: With big reservations, I don’t like it when it infringes on the creative side of things. Anything that would conflict with that. In fact, I had half-share in a record label, which my own stuff was on, and I’ve very happily sold my half share back to Sanctuary because now at least there’s no conflict between myself. I am the artist, they are the label. Even though they are chums of mine and I’ve known them for a long time, they are still the label. There is still that separation.

KNAC.COM: Getting back to your album, was Skunkworks an attempt to form a new band?

BRUCE: It was, like a Tin Machine-type vibe. It never worked out because you never realized it was supposed to be a band. People didn’t realize it. It wasn’t presented in the right way, but it was my fault. Maybe it was the record company’s fault, whatever, it was never presented as that. One of the big marketing assets that people had was that I was the ex-lead signer of Iron Maiden and here I was trying to form a band and say that [my past] doesn’t matter. And that was very undesirable for some of the record labels; here was the artist trying to deny that it mattered that he was the lead singer of Iron Maiden. And actually, it doesn’t matter. It’s utterly irrelevant, to making records, selling records or listening to records, but unfortunately in the real world, people think that way. The audience thinks that way and there’s no way around it. It’s like Christopher Lee comes on and everyone goes, “Oh shit, it’s Dracula.” And that’s just the way it is. You can change it to a certain extent, but it’s very hard to change people’s connections completely.

KNAC.COM: Why was it a low point? Did you really want to give up music?

BRUCE: I had a project which I invested a couple of years of my life in, something that I really believed in which had gotten a vote of no confidence from the business end of things. It was a massive period of confusion around that whole album. In Europe people didn’t understand it. We were put out to tour with Helloween, which is totally the wrong band to tour with for that kind of album. Had it been Accident Of Birth, of course it would have been perfect. Some of the reviews could be described as cautious admiration from some of the music press who saw it as a brave step. They gave it two thumbs up for the music, fingers crossed for the concept. The audience was frankly baffled and there was no backup. No backup of any marketing or promo to make this transition work so I just felt stranded. Chocolate starfish time. I was really depressed, and at the end of the whole thing the band was starting to fall apart. It was a worthwhile interesting experiment that had not worked, so I canned it. I was feeling kinda gloomy and I really thought my next record could be the last one I ever make. While I was thinking that, Roy Z called and suggested I do Accident Of Birth.

KNAC.COM: There’s a song on the album called “Wicker Man” – which came first?

BRUCE: This track came first, but it’s totally unrelated to the Maiden track, except for the line, “The shadow of the wicker man is rising up again.” The Iron Maiden “Wicker Man” song was originally going to be called “Your Time Will Come,” and Steve didn’t like that title, well none of us really did, and he said, ‘why don’t we call it “The Wicker Man.” So I let out a big groan, shades of “Bring Your Daughter To The Slaughter”…But it was the right thing to do because it gave us an album, it gave us a video, it gave us a great poster, a stage setting, it gave us everything just from those three words… the wicker man.

KNAC.COM: What is the story behind “Dracula”?

BRUCE: “Dracula” is actually a demo from 1977. It’s the first song I ever recorded when I was 19 years old. I got it off a 25 year old cassette.

KNAC.COM: And “I’m In A Band With An Italian Drummer”?

BRUCE: That was just a piece of bullshit fooling around. That was written by the bass player of Skunkworks, Chris Dales, and the lyrics were written about Alexander who was our Italian drummer. Most of it’s true. He’s cock’s too long to fit in this song…it’s true, it was!

KNAC.COM: So he got all the girls.

BRUCE: He did actually. It was scary. He was hung like a donkey, and he carried a picture of his erect member in his top pocket. He would just say “I got a really big dick and I’d like to show it to you.” And the girls would laugh; “go on, show us what you got!’ He would just pull out this picture and they would look at it… And I’ll tell you what, nine times out of ten they would end up in bed with him! It was disgraceful.

KNAC.COM: Where was the live material recorded?

BRUCE: In Brazil. It is a fantastic place to tour. People are very passionate, they are just really wild. It’s a bit like Beatlemania down there; people really do beseech hotels and things like that. The really nice thing about the audiences down there is that they really listen intensely to all the music, you don’t get some jerk in the back throwing bottles and going “hey rock dude” during a quiet passage.

KNAC.COM: Are you into any new music?

BRUCE: I highly recommend Ritchie Blackmore’s new album Fires At Midnight. I think it’s excellent stuff.

KNAC.COM: He’s getting a lot of flack for playing stuff like that.

BRUCE: Yeah, I know. It’s just ignorant people who don’t understand. He’s playing better guitar now than he’s done for the last 15 years. He’s so happy and having such a great time playing great guitar, soulful, emotional but people what to hear “Smoke On The Water”… Fuck ‘em.

KNAC.COM: Anything else?

BRUCE: Tool, very good album, Linkin Park… That’s about it.

KNAC.COM: Tell me a bit about the movie “Chemical Wedding” which you’ve involved with.

BRUCE: There is a production company which is part owned by Terry Jones who was a member of Monty Python. They have picked up the option on a screenplay, which I wrote ten years ago, which five years ago was optioned by Walter Yetnikoff. That option lapsed two years ago and was picked up by Messiah Pictures. And that is where the movie is at. It’s is not a comedy, and has nothing to do with Monty Python. [It’s about the] resurrection of Alistair Crowley. And that’s as much you are getting.

KNAC.COM: What’s going on with Maiden?

BRUCE: New album next year to be released in 2003 with a tour to follow.

KNAC.COM: So, in addition to your success in music, you have learned to fly a plane, written two novels, a screenplay, have worked as a DJ and fence. Is there anything else you want to do?

BRUCE: Well, I can’t knit. I am really useless at knitting and I would like to be able to iron my own shirts.