In a new interview with The Quietus, Iron Maiden frontman, Bruce Dickinson, talks to author John Higgs about magical practice, the hallucinatory mandrake root, how to survive a rough childhood and why William Blake is an artist we should look to for inspiration. An excerpt from the feature follows...
At the heart of the alchemy that is Iron Maiden is the relationship between two very different men, Dickinson and band leader Steve Harris. Harris is a solid, steadfast, single-minded, no-nonsense bloke. He is the bass player who grounds the band. Dickinson, in contrast, is an airline pilot with a voice that soars above the guitar onslaught. They are earth and air. That vast distance between them is the territory that the rest of the band fill.
This difference between the two men is evident at the start of 1983’s Piece Of Mind album. It begins with Harris’s war film-inspired song, "Where Eagles Dare". This has straightforward, businesslike, descriptive lyrics, like “The confident men are waiting to drop from the sky”, and “The cable car’s the only way in, it’s really impossible to climb.” This song is then immediately followed by Dickinson’s "Revelations", which begins with a quotation from G.K. Chesterton’s ‘O God Of Earth And Altar‘ featured in The English Hymnal. Here are two men with, clearly, very different personalities, yet they are both equally ambitious, talented and unwilling to compromise. It is a volatile combination.
The two men clashed from the start. “I remember me and Steve had the most terrific argument when we finished shooting 'The Number Of The Beast’ video,” Bruce says. “We were going to go outside and sort each other out. I was like, ‘Roll up your sleeves, come on then, punch me.’ I remember Steve saying to our manager Rod, ‘He goes! He’s got to go!’ Rod just said, ‘He’s not bloody going!’ After that, we gradually settled into a bit of a truce.”
Yet Bruce and Steve need each other and in time they have come to accept this. Maiden has had other vocalists over the years, both before Bruce joined in 1981 and after he quit in 1993. These singers were often men more temperamentally similar to Harris. They have been good and sometimes great, but it is only with Dickinson that Maiden becomes more than the sum of its parts, and more than just another metal band. Their success requires the alchemy of both Harris and Dickinson for the band to truly become magic. For as Bruce’s hero William Blake wrote, “Opposition is true friendship. Without contraries is no progression.”
Blake is referenced many times in Dickinson’s solo work, not least on the album that may well be his masterpiece, 1998’s The Chemical Wedding. In the video for his most recent single, "Rain On The Graves", Bruce freely mixes the gothic melodrama of Hammer Horror with William Blake, at one point visually recreating Blake’s profound image ‘The Ancient of Days’. The video ends with Bruce prostrate on a replica of Blake’s grave. Dickinson is now the ambassador for the Blake Cottage Trust, who are attempting to raise money for urgently needed repairs to Blake’s cottage in Felpham. The replica grave marker will be auctioned as part of this.
“He’s an artist to whom you should aspire,” Dickinson says of Blake. “There’s a purity to what he does that is untrammelled by commerciality or anything like that. He was unpredictable, he was cranky, he was difficult to deal with. He’s uncompromising, he’s rude, he’s bellicose. But he’s incredibly powerful. He matters.”
Read the complete feature at TheQuietus.com.
