Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson recently spoke about his solo album ‘Tyranny of Souls’ in collaboration with Roy Z. He explained his initial plan for the album and admitted that it didn’t work.
Dickinson released ‘Tyranny of Souls’ in 2005 as a solo production separated from Iron Maiden. Since 2005, he hasn’t released more material, which makes ‘Tyranny of Souls’ his most up-to-date solo album. Roy Z also helped with the album’s production and contributed to music, lyrics, and instruments.
However, in a recent interview, Dickinson spoke about how his plan was something else for the album. He stated that he wanted Ronnie James Dio and Rob Halford to make the album as a collaboration, but he was unsuccessful in getting Dio and went for Geoff Tate instead. However, the trio never united for the album.
He and Roy Z tried to get started and wrote a tune to be sung by three metal singers. Unfortunately, they couldn’t get further than one song, which negatively impacted their plan. That song written for three metal singers to sing together was the title song ‘Tyranny Of Souls.’
Here is the story as told by Dickinson:
“We were going to do this thing with three metal singers — myself, Ronnie James Dio, and Rob Halford. However, for reasons that didn’t make much sense — managerial bullshit or whatever — there was some opposition, not from me, to having Ronnie there, which I thought was crazy.
So the suggestion was that we would have Geoff Tate instead. So Roy and I wrote a tune. We thought we’d have a go at writing an album that would be sung by three singers. We only got as far as one song, and that song was ‘Tyranny Of Souls’. And the idea was that had we done the project, the chorus would have been all three singers, but the beginning of it would have been kind of one like me, one line Geoff, one line Rob, and so on, through the song. And each line would have been written so it would suit the delivery, it would suit the vocal characteristic of whoever was singing it.
So it was quite a tall order. It would have been quite difficult to do. I thought, ‘Shit, it’s gonna be pretty difficult to do a whole album of this stuff.’ And, of course, we never did. But ‘Tyranny Of Souls’, the demo of it was designed to illustrate how that would have worked.”
Watch his explanation below.
