What Does This Button Do?: An Autobiography

by Bruce Dickinson

took me a long while for the penny to drop.

Lol!

Note to self: when things go wrong on stage either ignore and move on, or make a meal out of it and create its own narrative within the performance. Oh, well.

Eddie is Iron Maiden’s mascot, monster, alter ego – call it what you will. Part supernatural, part primal, part aggressive adolescent, Eddie is a super anti-hero with no backstory. Eddie doesn’t give a fuck. He just is.

As we travelled through Poland it was like reliving the past 40 years of history, from the horrors of Auschwitz to the grim and obvious failure of communism, and the slow but growing sense of a new future, somewhere groping in the distance.

As the Icelanders say, ‘What do you do in summer?’ ‘We like to fish and we like to fuck.’ ‘What do you do in winter?’ ‘In winter, fishing’s not so good.’

Rock in Rio, the first one ever, was a 10 – on any scale of 1 to 10.

And so it went on. First-class travel, a massive fee, merchandising equivalent to a week of sold-out US shows, personal spending money, luxury hotels, guaranteed air freight for 30 tons of equipment – the answer was always, ‘Yes. Anything else?’

The album Somewhere in Time took a great deal of inspiration from the movie Blade Runner.

Ever the master of pragmatism, the US conveniently published all of the questions on their database for the written examination. Ever the model of free enterprise, books were available with the answers to all thousand-or-so questions, along with worked examples of weight and balances, navigational, technical, aerodynamic and regulatory problems.

It was, in fact, not much larger than an FM college radio station, but the big bosses had delusions of grandeur with taxpayers’ money and built lavish studios costing millions.

BBC.

I needed a free-thinking rock audience, not a conservative metal ghetto.

‘Can we use the rear galley space for stores?’ ‘No.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Fire hazard.’ ‘What about storing water?’ ‘No.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Fire hazard.’ There are some things that are just not worth arguing about.

Socialism.

‘Let’s just rent a cinema in Cannes, fly down in the Iron Maiden plane with a bunch of journalists and cameras, and pretend that we have been invited.’ Which is exactly what happened. A day trip to Cannes, watch a movie, do a load of press, have our interviews on the promenade like movie stars, then fly home to bed. No hotels, no permission, and it all worked out cheaper than flying commercial.

I was beginning to feel quite important, but in among the bravado was the temptation to despair. For three days or so, all I noticed were hospitals, churches and graveyards. By God, London was infested with the bloody things.