Me, a British institution? I may end up in one

Iron Maiden’s rock renaissance man Bruce Dickinson tells GARRY BUSHELL why cancer and hip ops can’t stop him

BRUCE DICKINSON has lived an incredible life. He’s a pilot, a novelist, a competitive fencer, a businessman, a brewer and a cancer survivor. There is also a good chance you will know him better as the energetic singer with Iron Maiden, one of Britain’s biggest exports.

The Worksop-born star tells the story of his rise from “mischievous spotty urchin” to self-mocking rock god, in his new spoken-word tour.

Bruce, 62, will reminisce about his years as a boarding school rebel and “explain how I ended up singing instead of drumming or joining the Army, and the story of my ridiculous trousers”.

“But,” he says, “the last third of the show is entirely adlibbed. The audience are given cards for questions and comments. I see them in the interval, shuffle them around and create an improvised script. You have to think fast and laterally but it can be very funny.”

Bruce came slightly late to the Maiden party, replacing original singer Paul Di’Anno in 1981, in time to lend his operatic vocal range to the East End band’s third album, the multi-platinum Number Of The Beast, and first top 10 single, Run To The Hills.

Not everyone was impressed. One fan griped that Bruce’s singing was ‘like listening to my favourite songs through an air raid siren’. Maiden responded by dubbing Dickinson “the Human Air Raid Siren”.

Since then, the band has sold more than 100 million albums worldwide. Have you turned into a British institution, Bruce? “I might end up in one,” he snorts. “Our relationship is not with the media, but with our fans. They’re like plywood, every year we add a layer…”

Despite Bruce’s protests, heavy metal is in his heart, his soul, and even his left leg, thanks to recent surgery.

“I had five and a half inches of titanium hammered into my thigh and was up walking the same day,” he declares proudly.

Decades of jumping around on stage had eroded the cartilage in his hip joint. “The fencing played a part too,” he says. “I fence left-handed so my left leg takes the brunt of it. I was hobbling around last October and the surgeon said, ‘Your cartilage has worn out’. I said, ‘Can we just change it now?’ A week later, the crutches were gone and I’d started physio. I’ve been cycling,

I’m doing weights. It’s incredible.”

The irrepressible Bruce is the only child of a shotgun marriage between an aspiring ballet dancer and an ex-soldier. He was brought up by his formidable grandmother in Sheffield while his parents toured with a performing dog act. When they got regular jobs – estate agent and car salesman – he was dispatched to Oundle boarding school at 13. Bruce’s school horror stories take up a chunk of his first half. He famously had two tons of horse manure delivered to his housemaster’s front door and was expelled for “defrosting” the headmaster’s runner beans in an unorthodox way. Bruce has rival careers as an airline pilot and beer brewer “because I love them,” he says. “Life’s too short to do things you don’t love.”

Fate dealt him a bum hand in 2014 when he was diagnosed with cancer of the head and neck. Postponing a tour for treatment, Bruce advised Maiden’s manager to “tell them the reasons are too tumorous to mention”.

He describes this as “a bit of dark humour to allay a lot of the fear that goes with it.”

He talks about flying jumbo jets, the band’s own Ed Force One plane (named after Maiden’s monstrous stage mascot, Eddie), and bringing troops home from Afghanistan.

One of nature’s cavaliers, Toryvoting Bruce finds himself at odds with lockdown measures. “I’m not an anti-vax conspiracy theorist but there’s such a lack of joined-up thinking, it’s quite frustrating. I had to go to France because my girlfriend had an eye operation. We’re both double vaccinated, and when we came back we had four nasal swabs, we took the tests and were all clear, yet we’ve still had to quarantine. Are we all mad?”

Iron Maiden have got a sold-out European tour to play “as soon as the Government work out how to get us visas,” he says. “I’ve been writing stuff for Iron Maiden which I can’t tell you about but I will be able to talk about it at the one-man show. What we’ve done will really rock your world…”

I had five and a half inches of titanium hammered into my thigh and was up walking the same day...