What Does This Button Do?: An Autobiography

by Bruce Dickinson

The newspaper was always used to make the fire and I usually saw the news two days late, shortly before it was consigned to the inferno. When Yuri Gagarin became the first man to go into space I remember staring at the picture and thinking, How can we burn that? I folded it up and kept it.

I have his medals and a copy of his service Bible, annotated accordingly with verses to give support at a time when things must have been unimaginably grim.

What I got was not a beating, or a telling-off, but quiet disapproval and a lecture on the morality of fisticuffs and the rules of the game, which were basically don’t bully people, stick up for yourself and never strike a woman.

I have never smoked tobacco, except in the odd joint when I was aged 19 to 21, which we’ll address a bit later on. I say this because, in fact, I probably smoked a pack a day just by being around my parents. My God, could they puff away. Aged 16, they tried to enlist me in the filthy weed society, but it was my greatest act of rebellion to evade their yellow-stained clutches.

Ice Station Zebra was the movie that introduced me to my first rock ’n’ roll band. Yes, with a truck, electric guitars and gigs. The band were called the Casuals.

Bullying happens because weak people need to prop up their ego by beating up or humiliating others.

‘Sing up, lad,’ he said.

Well, I like a challenge, so I yelled at the top of my lungs, and once I started I didn’t stop. The embarrassment left me and I carried on to the end of whatever verse it was in whatever hymn. I confess that it felt wonderful – not that I would admit it at the time.

‘You have a very fine voice, boy,’ he said. And then he strode off down the aisle and I never saw him again.

On it was written: ‘Dickinson – Sidney House, NON-SINGER’.

Mike, our bass player admitted defeat: ‘I think you are our vocalist, dear boy.’

Our future in the music business thus secured, we broke for tea, margarine, jam and toast. It was 6 p.m., after all.

But we needed a name. Names are vexatious things. They can unwittingly define and doom a band to perdition, or, even worse, to be damned by faint praise. A name creates the tightrope that every band walks. Rock music walks that tightrope for eternity: too pomp, too punk, too serious, too laughable, too out of tune, too technical – none of it matters as long as you stay on the tightrope. In fact, it’s exciting to watch as you wobble. But it’s hell if you fall off.

Traditionally, it is the third album that determines whether it is the end of the beginning, or the beginning of the end for a band or artist.

Martin’s Range Rover was hit by a minibus full of nuns, and the repair bill was £666.66.

Actually, ‘Dune’ wasn’t ‘Dune’ at all. The author Frank Herbert didn’t like heavy metal and caused us no end of problems, so the name was changed to ‘To Tame a Land’.

It brought home to me how such a small thing as clapping can be twisted and subverted by the grim realities of a war zone.

This was one coherent band, although the amount of ganja being smoked probably stretched the credibility of the word ‘coherent’. All the musicians were several

years younger than me, so I left them to it. They had more brain cells to lose than me.

In many respects Accident of Birth was the album Iron Maiden never made.

‘Do you smoke?’ he asked. ‘No. Why? How much difference does that make?’ ‘I’m 20 per cent more likely to get rid of it, and it’s 20 per cent less likely to come back.’

After a few months the memory still remained, but the desire to eat sugar had virtually vanished. An unintended consequence was an acute awareness of how awful many of the ‘foods’ (or rather, products) were that I had chomped my way through in years past.