Enjoying the excess
Iron Maiden drummer Nicko McBrain on heavy metal, health scares and being assaulted by Keith Moon – oh, and snooker. James Belfield finds out more.
A6-metre zombie called Eddie, stage sets of Mayan ruins, their own customised Boeing 747 and 18-minute epic songs about doomed airships – yes, rock and roll doesn’t get much more excessive than Iron Maiden.
But after 16 albums, a few lineup changes and more than 40 years on the road, the ultimate metal band has drawn a line in the sand… over snooker.
Maiden’s drummer Nicko McBrain – a 63-year-old who’s let the cash and trappings of music stardom take him to South Florida, but whose motormouth London accent makes him sound more like a turbo-charged teen straight out of Eastenders – is, somewhat strangely, a mad-keen fan of the green baize.
And as well as installing a fullsize, tournament table at his US home he was all for having something to practise on when travelling in the band’s gigantic private plane – after all, lead singer Bruce Dickinson is already busy piloting what Iron Maiden have dubbed Ed Force One (after their zombie-mascot Eddie) so it would be a good distraction, right?
‘‘It’s a little bit excessive having you own 747 when there’s only like 70 people on the bloody thing,’’ McBrain says, punctuating himself with a few rounds of machine-gun laughter. ‘‘And yes, all that excess I still enjoy. And we laughed about putting a snooker table on the plane but there’s 1.3 tonnes of weight on a bloody snooker table and you could only play it on the ground cause you’ve got to have a dead flat table otherwise you’d be accused of cheating.
‘‘And that’s the problem – you could cheat, couldn’t you? You’d just get on the intercom to Bruce and say, ‘C’mon Bruce, just turn a bit left’ and you’d have the f ***** g ball in the f ***** g pocket… Or you’d just knuckle it … So, no, the snooker table wasn’t going to work.’’
Which is as bit of a shame really, because McBrain’s pretty ‘‘shellshocked’’ having completed the South and North American legs of their latest Book of Souls world tour – 72 dates in five and a half months is a big ask for a six-piece band whose ages range from 57 to 63 and whose stage show is renowned for being dramatic and pacey.
‘‘I just feel I’ve done 10 seconds with Tyson – actually I feel like I’ve done a round and half to be honest, and I’m not winning,’’ McBrain says.
‘‘In the early days I was a bit f ***** g younger, mate. I could run and jump and do all those sorts of things – all the good stuff – 48 hours in a row. As Steve [guitarist and founder Steve Harris] said when I was talking about how knackered I was feeling, he said ‘I think we’re all feeling it’.
‘‘But we love to get on stage together and go out and in front of new and old fans and just play and that’s the most important thing about what we’re doing.’’
The fact they’re playing and touring at all is, in fact, a bit of a wonder considering Dickinson (whose vocals sound like an opera singer being shredded through a jet engine and who has the stage presence of a demonic Energizer bunny) last year underwent chemotherapy to treat cancer on his tongue – something he’d been battling throughout the recording of Book of Souls in 2014. ‘‘When Bruce comes on that stage every night and starts singing [the opening line to If Eternity
Should Fail] ‘Here is the soul of a man’ I’m right underneath him because he comes on right above where I am before I get on my drum set,’’ McBrain says.
‘‘And every night I get a tingle down my back and think ‘That’s my brother up there’ – I’m thankful first that he’s breathing and then for his voice.
‘‘I think as a band that, if it’s possible to be any closer than we already were, then it’s has taken us somewhere new. First of all, you question your own mortality whether you’re younger or older – and in my case I’m younger [cue another burst of machine-gun laughter] – but it has brought us together where I’m so happy we’ve got the best album we’ve had since [2000’s] Brave New World and possibly even [1982’s] The Number
of the Beast and we’re all excited to be playing songs off that.
‘‘They’re all stunning songs to play live and we have got our leader – because Bruce is our frontman and he’s the leader of the band without any doubt – up there on stage belting it out. He’s running round like he’s 20 years old – not that he hasn’t always – but I think he feels that way too.’’
Although nowhere in the league
of Dickinson’s cancer battle, McBrain has also had to work though health issues before feeling right for the gruelling tour.
He stopped drinking, dropped a lot of weight and devoted two months, twice a day, to practising the new songs. ‘‘I didn’t want to let anyone down – especially Bruce after what he’d been through.’’
He’s also reconfigured his drum kit to compensate for the arthritis he suffers down the left of his body, and has worked with a chiropractor to counter a displaced pelvis. (He reckons his posture is a ‘‘lost cause’’ but has been promised the new configuration should keep the back issues at bay during the tour.)
Despite the health scares, fitness regimes and predilection for cue sports, don’t be fooled into thinking Iron Maiden’s live show is just a way to top up their superfunds and entertain a few old-time fans.
Their crowds are more than likely to be packed with young metal-heads as well as those stretching out faded Seventh Son
of a Seventh Son T-shirts, and they’re still intent on taking their music to new audiences.
They’ve already rocked new venues in Brazil and Argentina and, before landing in New Zealand for shows in Christchurch and Auckland, will play two ground-breaking shows in China.
In 1984 Iron Maiden toured behind the Iron Curtain in Poland, Yugoslavia and Hungary, and 10 years later played a show in Sarajevo at the height of the Bosnian War – and it’s clear from McBrain’s excitement that seeing the world is still a major part of the enjoyment of being with the band.
‘‘The only thing I’m sad about is that we don’t have any real time off in China before we’re off down to New Zealand,’’ he says. ‘‘And I always wanted to go to China with the band – you know I kind of thought about taking my wife on a holiday there but I thought ‘no, I want to go with my other family… It’s like [Charlie Brown character] Linus with his security blanket, when I go to a new place I want to be with my boys – you know, taking what I do and what I love and my passion and introducing that to new people, it’s astounding for me to still to be able to do that at this part of our career.’’
And what a career. Pre-Iron Maiden (he joined as the band’s third drummer in time for the fourth album Piece of Mind in 1983), McBrain was influenced by the likes of The Who’s Keith Moon, whom he counted as a ‘‘good friend’’ despite their first encounter being fractious.
‘‘We were on the same bill and there was a party in the manager’s suite at the Charlton Athletic Ground in London and I insulted [Who frontman, Roger] Daltry,’’ McBrain says through another volley of machine-gun laughter. ‘‘Mooney literally threw me out of the dressing room.
‘‘He grabbed me by the neck at the back of my shirt and dragged me out and said ‘You don’t talk to our Rog like that, get the f**k out.’’
Fortunately, later meetings at London’s famed musos’ drinking haunt, La Chasse, and Moon’s liking for fibreglass drums made by McBrain’s Staccato Drum Company allowed the relationship to flourish.
‘‘He was an excellent bloke, you know what I mean. We all know about ‘Moon the loon’ and all that but when it comes to aspiring me, he influenced my playing to a massive extent. His drumming was totally unique: above anyone I can think of, no one’s drumming sounds remotely like him. And I used to take leaves from his books of drum skills with gratitude – and I still do today.’’
So is there any chance of Keith Moon-style excess when Iron Maiden visit New Zealand? Only if the snooker schedule allows.
McBrain is usually a regular at the World Snooker Championships held annually at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre in northern England – his boxer’s nose and long greying-blond rocker’s hair a sure standout among the clean-cut, hushed audience – but this year’s event is on right now and he’s having to keep tabs on his favourite player Ken Docherty via his computer.
‘‘I’ve been to The Crucible the past two years and you know I love it – but I’ve got an app on the computer where I can watch it live-streamed so I’ll kind of be there,’’ he says. ‘‘I even spoke to the guys at World Snooker and said ‘Why don’t you put a cutout of me sitting in the press box’.’’
And then that machine-gun laughter rattles off again.
‘Every night I get a tingle down my back and think ‘That’s my brother up there’ – I’m thankful first that he’s breathing and then for his voice.’ Nicko McBrain on Bruce Dickinson (left).
❚ Iron Maiden play Christchurch’s Horncastle Arena on April 29 (tickets via www.ticketek.co.nz) and Auckland’s Vector Arena in Auckland on May 1. Tickets can be purchased via ticketmaster.co.nz