At the helm of a heavy metal monolith, Bruce Dickinson has seen and done it all – and then some. Frontman for Iron Maiden, an airline pilot, a beer brewer, motivational speaker, actor and international fencer, Dickinson is the epitome of a modern polymath.
In his autobiography What Does This Button Do? he takes fans on a journey through the most colourful elements of his astonishing life.
The book started life as a handwritten document compiled while Iron Maiden were on tour in support of The Book Of Souls. How Dickinson found the time to sleep as he took on the monumental task of relaying his more than 30 years in the industry is baffling. “I get the occasional day off,” he chuckles, “which turns out not to be a day off at all.”
Seldom solitude is the Dickinson method for success. To the astonishment of his publishers, he submitted his manuscript completely handwritten. “One of the more amusing aspects of it, I had six or seven A4 pads, a hundred pages a piece and I said, ‘There you go, get someone to type it up.’”
A natural storyteller, Dickinson is a delight to speak with. His delightful humour even made it to the cover of his book in a standout warning that says, ‘May contain flying heavy metal’. Such a statement, of course, triggers questions about what metal debris are contained within and what precautions people should take on approach. Laughing, Dickinson says, “The book is not one of these kiss and tell stories about sex and drugs and all the rest of it.
“There are so many books like that and they’re kind of boring. They don’t have a great shelf life and I thought there’s enough going on in my life. Over the years I’ve been a professional airline pilot, I’ve gone into war zones and played shows in the middle of the war in Bosnia, I thought, well actually, there are probably some more interesting stories than just doing some, I-went-out-and-got-drunk-and-couldn’t-remember-where-I-was: chapter one. Chapter two, I went and did it again, chapter three: I woke up and I didn’t know who she was.’
“I thought there had to be something more in terms of content and to try and write it with some degree of wry amusement at the world in which I’ve ended up working in these past umpteen years. The world of rock‘n’roll is actually quite funny – I talk about singing and the voice and how it works for me, but also there’s lots of funny stories about how we don’t take ourselves too seriously, but we do take the music seriously.”
Wry amusement is the perfect way to describe Dickinson’s brand of showmanship. When Iron Maiden performed in Australia as part of their recent world tour, Dickinson’s onstage wit was incredibly unabashed and so very typical of him; even if a publisher had told Dickinson to write about sex, drugs and rock‘n’roll, he wouldn’t have been able to do it, it’s not who he is. “There’s far more sex, drugs and rock‘n’roll going on in the average rugby club on a Saturday night than on the entire Iron Maiden tour put together. There are other ways to have fun,” Dickinson says.
“We really enjoy what we do, which is play music, running around. I like to really squeeze life for all it’s worth. One chapter is about when I got diagnosed with throat cancer. It’s reasonably graphic I suppose.”
In bringing up the subject of his battle with cancer, suddenly the confident, vibrant man from a few minutes ago struggles to find words – Dickinson’s former illness is evidently a difficult subject to discuss. “People tiptoe around the whole topic of cancer – it’s one of those things that people are frightened of.
“I do go over it in some detail [in the book]. Again, I view my disease with some quite black humoured moments, and I think people need to know that it is possible, first of all, to survive, and secondly, to view the whole process as something that you’re going through.
“It’s not personal, it’s not the universe, it’s not karma, it’s not somebody’s revenge on you, it’s just shit that happens. And I think when you can accept that, that goes a long way towards helping you to take a positive attitude towards the treatment. When I wrote the book I had to make a decision on what my mental approach was towards this disease which, actually, is a part of me. I thought, I’m going to treat it like an uninvited guest that’s walked into my body and go, ‘Thank you very much, you had your chance. You had your twopence worth, now, please kindly leave the building. Bye. See you later.’”
There it is again, that wry wit and dry amusement. “I’m always a glass half full kind of guy,” he says. “I can nearly always figure out some way to put a positive on most things. There’s very little sense in taking a negative attitude on things, because where do you go after that? You have to do something. It’s living in the moment, which sounds easy to do but it’s actually very hard to do.”
Touring his one-man spoken show throughout Australia in October in support of What Does This Button Do?, Dickinson won’t be putting a cap on the difficult questions. Instead, he’ll be an open book. “This is like guided stand-up,” he says. “The first half is me chatting about the book – it’s pretty animated, otherwise everybody would be half asleep – then we put out cue cards to people and say, write down questions.
“Of course, I have no clue what the questions will be because that’s down to the audience. Then what I do is almost like improv, I riff on the questions as we go. It’s always surprised me, you get such fantastic questions.
“Hopefully it’s uplifting, hopefully it’s funny, hopefully people can learn something different about music, about the weird world I live in. Hopefully they learn something about themselves, and hopefully I learn something about me and about them. It’s a proper two-way street.”
