What Does This Button Do?: An Autobiography

by Bruce Dickinson

Back in 1988 the Seventh Son tour was all-conquering, but equally interesting for me was meeting video director, editor and auteur in general Julian Doyle, who was initially called in to direct ‘Can I Play with Madness’. Julian and I went on to direct and storyboard several more ideas and, of course, the Oscar-defying feature film Chemical Wedding, starring Simon Callow as the reincarnated Aleister Crowley. Before Aleister Crowley, though, came Monty Python. Julian was Python’s film guru. He reassembled the film Brazil from the cutting-room floor, having finished large chunks of it himself because Terry Gilliam was ill. As an editor his credits extended to virtually all the Python films, and he taught at film schools and was his own lighting director and cameraman. After directing Donald Sutherland and Kate Bush in ‘Cloudbusting’, Julian was asked to come up with ideas for ‘Can I Play with Madness’. He managed to engage Graham Chapman to perform in the video.

It was a meeting of all worlds: poetic, mechanical, logical, daring, experimental, creative, internal and external. In one moment I realised that this confection of aluminium and rivets was keeping me alive. Moreover, in the air I was an interloper and had to respect the ways of the wind, the temperature, the density of the medium in which I hung, suspended only by a difference in pressure, which, although real, might just as well have been an act of faith.

Many people were under the impression that Tattooed Millionaire had been a serious attempt at a solo record, when in fact it was just a bit of fun, well executed and with a lot of record company enthusiasm behind it.

I spent my days in a strange mixture of euphoria and uncertainty. One morning the LA Times lay strewn around the floor, most of it disposable advertising supplements, and I managed to locate the bits pertaining to actual news and opinion. ‘Thought for the Day’ was a feature I seldom noticed, but on this day I read it. It was a quote from the writer Henry Miller: ‘All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without the benefit of experience.’

Not exactly a flying start to a solo career, but then again people who left Iron Maiden had traditionally fallen quietly into obscurity or been reduced to karaoke-style nostalgia. What happened now was entirely up to me.

will have to go our separate ways,’ I said. People who don’t understand Iron Maiden won’t comprehend the impact it has had on so many people’s lives. Maiden has represented a personal affirmation of self-worth for millions of people down the years. Above and beyond pop music, fashion and the detritus and useless decadence of ‘reality’ celebrity, Maiden was hard work and tangible, substantive and complex, but also visceral and aggressive.