From Talk Is Jericho Baby, Talk Is Jericho, Talk Is Jericho Mama, Talk Is Baby! Welcome to Talk Is Jericho. It's the part of Thunder and Rock and Roll, and we're getting our rock on today with a true heavy metal legend. One of my biggest influences as a singer, talking about Bruce Dickinson from Iron Maiden Back on Talk Is Jericho. And this time he's talking about his new book, What Does This Button Do? An Autobiography.
The book is all about his time with Iron Maiden, of course, and the 10 years he spent as an airplane pilot while in Maiden, and also the 10 years he spent away from Iron Maiden. He's going to tell all those stories like the time he was almost shot down over Russia. He's telling some classic Maiden tales why he left the band, would eventually brought him back, how they used to crash weddings and parties whenever they were on tour, more specifically the Polish wedding.
Bruce's Tom of the charity show, He Didn't Sarajevo, and the craziness about being nearly stranded in a war torn country, playing gigs during a war. He talks about cutting off his hair, the initial fan reaction that they got after he did it. I know about that. He's got details on the classic Iron Maiden documentary, Iron Maiden Behind the Iron Curtain, sought back in 1985, still resonates in my mind. Lots of great stories from the legendary Air Raid Sire in himself.
Bruce Dickinson returns to talk as Jericho to push your buttons and he's here right now. Hello Bruce, how are you? I'm very well at last. I was at the Walden, I got a fun interview at the eight o'clock and then this guy called up and I said, oh no, I thought I was saying help. Yeah, it's completely my fault for being a goofball. Sorry about that. Well you're now an established illustrious author so I have to expect some of that prima Donna atmosphere.
You know what, I love about this book and first of all congratulations, it's a great read and I'll tell you the reason why. I've written a few books myself because you can tell that you wrote this book completely on your own. Well, I'm very glad you can tell which is great because I wanted the book to be my voice because you're authentic or authentic like sitting down having a beer with me, you know, type where he's basically.
And that's the thing too because a lot of times when you read autobiographies you can kind of someone uses a ghost writer, that sort of a thing but I noticed like you said, it is like sitting down and talking with you with your sense of humor and your little quirky little references and jokes and that sort of thing. It just makes it a lot more fun to read when you get that. Did you always have the idea of writing it by yourself? Yeah, I was never going to go with a ghost writer.
I mean, I do know there's one or two people who would probably have been quite sympathetic in everything but it's always going to be there, their words and their take on things. And whenever I read autobiographies which I don't do very often for that very reason, there's always a bit somewhere that reads like a press release or it reads like how somebody thinks I look at it or say something. And it's just like, you know, unless you've been there and done it, you don't know what it's like.
So you have to do it yourself. Yeah, I always say like I'm too egotistical to allow somebody else to transcribe my story because nobody can tell it the way that I can. Yeah, and actually that gives you, if you do it yourself, you can do it. You can nuance it so you get exactly what it was like to be in your head.
The way I put it is, it's a little bit like, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's just my, you know, as if I was just like being a, a movie projector and I'm projecting what's inside my head onto the wall and people can sit and watch it with me. Mm-hmm. It's interesting too though.
I find it like when you write a book and you do draft after draft and edit after edit, after a while and it was, it was at the same for you when you're reading a story, you're like, I don't even know if this is good or bad. I don't know if this joke is funny anymore. I just, you just start getting inside your own head where it's like, it shouldn't be the or should it be and it's got to be and. No, it's got to be the. I got a phone up here. I didn't dwell on stuff.
Mm-hmm. So I used to go and I would settle down every day and I'd write about 1200 to 1500 words and it would take me about two and a half hours and I would go straight through and I would just go in the zone, I have a little notebook of the stories I wanted to tell and then I'd get to the end of about 1200, 1500 words and I used to handwrite them as well so it's not tight. And then I'd just, it's like, that was it. Lojo's gone for the day and I drink my beer and go, oh, there you go.
And then I'd just move on to the next sequences and I'd sort of daydream my way through the book. So I'd be next. So for example, there were no chapters in the book. So it was just one, there's 700 pages of, you know, manuscript paper and there's very few big corrections, the biggest corrections and kind of little rewrites of the old line here and there and maybe half a paragraph or something. I wrote the book quite quickly, I mean I didn't start writing the book until the middle of February.
It's interesting to you like for me when you're writing a book and obviously it's the same for you as well. The stuff that happened over the last 20, you know, 25 years is a lot easier to remember than the stuff that happened. You know, you start out when you're a kid and then go into high school and go into when you were, you know, going to college and all that sort of stuff and starting the bands. Was it harder to remember those early years?
Like I had to sit there for a long time and really dig deep, almost like a psychiatrist and try and get into remembering those old memories. I have a pretty strong, I mean I have a terrible night. I have a, I have a shocking memory for names. I would have had. But I've got a really good memory for descriptive things as in like literally like pointing a movie camera at a scene and seeing what I did.
So I mean there are some hotels back on the number of the beach tour that I could tell you the color of the carpet and the path on it. And that's just a very strange thing to be able to do I guess. It's the way my, my, my recall memory works. It's very visual. So for that reason once I got inside what stories I wanted to tell and sometimes I've forgotten some of the stories and I went, oh, that was a good one. So wow, I remember that. And sometimes I would sit and talk to people about the book.
I was talking, I would recall things as I was going through it. I would go, oh, I better write that one down. That's a good one to go with, you know. So the book ended up being actually a little bit over, I wrote a little bit over 160,000 words. And we took out about 35,000 words. Maybe more actually. I think we maybe took out 50,000 words. So maybe I wrote more than 160,000 words. But so we took us three and a half days to get 50,000 words out of the book.
Otherwise it would have been 600 pages long and not 400. But that's the hardest thing though, trying to decide. I don't have to be an entertaining book. So you don't want it to be a doorstep that somebody's going to look at and go, oh my God, this is like war and peace, you know, it's got to be an entertaining read above all, you know. And it's hard to because I basically, my first book was the same. I wrote 165, I had to get down to 130.
And I found instead of having to edit out stories, you could just edit down like, okay, this story should not be three pages. I can tell the same thing in one page. Was it the same for you? Did you have to edit out chunks of the book? We just took chunks, I just took chunks out. I mean, so for example, there would be, there was like three or four anecdotes about time in Samson, right? And each of them was very funny.
But one after the other after the other after the other, suddenly, you know, it's not quite so funny because you've already done the loss and you need to move on to the next part of the narratives. And my editor, Jack, the fantastically named Jack Fog. He said, look, I want to edit this as if it was a novel. So we've got to keep the story moving. And the irony of it was that some of the early stories I'd written, some of the early episodes, if you like, are at a very early stage in the book.
He said, I need to get these types, something typed up so I can show it to some of the other publishers to show what kind of a book it is and show them you could write and so on and so forth. So I typed up three stories and each one, you know, five, six pages each. And they go, and they're like, these are great. This is really funny. This is going to be a hilarious book. This is going to be terrific. Bob, Bob, Bob, none of those stories ended up in the book.
In the end, we had more stories than we needed and we just said, sorry, this one here, we're just going to have to lose this. And I'm like, well, I see where you're going with it. So the good thing about that is that I've got 35, 40,000 words of episodic stories from all kinds of different eras. Some of which can easily be repurposed into doing something else, but that's something else wouldn't be for at least two and a half years. It's hard, isn't it? Right?
When you write a book, it's very mentally taxing when you're finished. You're like, oh my God, thank God I'm finished with that. Well, it was, I wasn't, when I got done with it. I mean, I already had the last line of the book as soon as I wrote the title. So, I thought, well, that's a great way to finish the book because it really is like press the reset button for the rest of your life after getting through the whole trope cancer and starting to go on tour of line 7, 47.
So that's a good place to stop. It still wasn't quite over, you know, because they said, okay, you got a little story we can do just at the beginning of the book. So like a little chaser, like the first five minutes of a Hollywood movie, just to something just to set the scene that it's just not your average rock and roll book. I went, oh, okay, let me think about that.
Yeah. So, I think we ended up with the story about me nearly getting shot down over Russia with a couple of members of the British government on board. Yeah, somehow you're flying some kind of a private roll, you said fishing trip or whatever it may be over the airspace of Russia, they don't want you there.
Yeah, well, the fishing trip, I think the fish they were talking about may very well have been new to submarines, but you know, seeing as they had FBI and personal equipment of the FBI on board armed to the teeth and there were just these guys flying out to the headquarters of the Soviet northern fleet in Mermansk. And I mean, I was just working as a first officer with the airline I worked for. I think as I worked full time for 10 years as an airline pilot.
And whilst I was in I made and nothing to do with Air Force one, I mean, I was just a regular out of job. And part of my job was flying people off sometimes to do some pretty weird and funky places as well as doing what you might call normal passenger flying, but we were usually chartered in by other carriers.
So if I was in the USA, for example, and I was working for an equivalent carrier, they say, oh, American Airlines are short of an airplane for six months, you're going to be backed up with American and you're going to be flying people to Cancun every day because they're short of airplanes. And so they're going to rent you guys. So that's the jobs that we did. Which, that's what I love about your book too is once again, the title says it all, what does this button do?
And at first I was like, what does that mean? But I understand it's like throughout your life, you've had all these different opportunities and you're taking a chance to like, oh, what happens if I press this button and what happens if I press that button? It's a great kind of tag line. Well, it's not what kids do. I mean kids do that. I mean, every child sees the world in a new way every single day. And the world is ever seen the world the way that any child sees the world.
That's what's amazing about being a kid, you know. I mean, you give babies, probably young wives think to do, give them a knife and fork. But I guarantee you that you'll be amazed at the number of different things they figure out to do with a knife and fork, anything except eat. Right. Because they see it in a new way, play with it. It's like there's no restriction. And ask for buttons and things like that. You know, you get a baby or a child or a baby. I mean, I give them a load of buttons.
And especially the button says do not press this button. I guarantee you that's the first button they don't put in. Right. And that's kind of a metaphor for what you did throughout your life. It is absolutely a metaphor for what I did throughout my life. And I read probably not like every single second of every single day, but at some point in your life. And everybody has had a, what does this button do moment that has just made them feel wow, how cool is that? Look at that.
You know, I don't know what it is. Whether it's kicking a soccer ball, whether it's, you know, throwing a past the completion, whether it's doing something physical, whether it's writing, whether it's music, whatever it is, there's something somewhere that everybody can do that is going to really fire up the passion in them. And those are the things. That's what the book is a celebration of, I suppose.
It's not about trying to, you know, settle scores with people that nobody else has ever heard of or cares about, or about, you know, all the bad sex you ever had in your life, you know, all that kind of nonsense. I mean, I said to somebody else, interviewer, they went, oh, there's not much, you know, sort of like sex and drugs and rock and roll. I said, no, I said, really? I said, do you want to know why? I said, first of all, because there wasn't that much. And secondly, it's kind of boring.
You want to see like stuff that's funny. Go watch Spinal Tap and then go watch the hangover. And that's all you need to know about sex drugs and rock and roll. Yeah, that's all you need to know more. That's all you need to know about touring in the 80s.
But as it gets, you know, it's the point, you know, it's a little part better, I think, to read about things that are, you know, positive and exciting and different and things that celebrate life, not things that, you know, celebrate just basically just, you know, messing with people. There is a great story in there that you just had a sentence of it that you went and had a couple drinks and you ended up putting your weiner in the ear of the singer of Quiet Riot. That's a good one.
Yeah, that's right. Yes, I mean, again, you know, if that's as bad as it gets, you know, then that's okay. And there's a few bits of bad behavior in there, you know, just to demonstrate that we're not entirely choir boys, you know. But by and large, that pretty harmless. And it's all, it's good fun, even though it's, you know, pretty stupid. There's a few we edited out, actually, that were, you know, a bit more deborched. And I was quite keen on one or two of them. I was like, yeah, really?
Can we get that one in there, you know, at the top of this, they involved other people and other celebrities. And of course, you know, that, that opened up a can of worms. And all of a sudden the book all becomes about that story. Well, yeah. Because everybody's going to pick on that one story because it involves some other celebrity.
So you go, actually, you know what, it probably is good to take a step back here because you want to establish the book for what it is and get beyond that, you know, that sort of celebrity reality nonsense. Well, that'll be the clickbait for the book too, right? If you go into the websites and such. Bruce Dickinson said this about this person and that about that person. And that's not what you really, or the point of what the book is.
What, and I know of a sudden people think, oh, well, I'm not going to bother with this book or maybe the, oh, they get the book and they think, oh, it's not like that. It's all, you know, so straight away. I went, no, this is going to be an uplifting book. There was a English actor a long time ago, a long, long, past away now. I got called David Niven. Yeah, sure, of course. And, yeah, very famous Hollywood actor. And he came out with a biography, autobiography called The Loons of Balloon.
And I read it when I was a kid, one of a few autobiographies I have actually read. And absolutely riveted by it. Because there was not a single nasty weird thing in it. But his life was just his huge adventure. From whether it was going out and, you know, going out and wrestling with Avril Flynn, or, you know, whether it was going and being in the army in the Second World War and being on special forces doing reconnaissance. But then he'd find, you know, a blown up wine cellar.
And they'd just sort of go, well, let's just go and get drunk in the middle of battle and just sort of did, you know. And this all these great stories. And I was like, you know what? This guy is telling a life that really has been lived. And he was loving life. I thought, that's a book to aspire to, you know. Because life is really, you know, life is all we've got. The alternative is, you know, inevitable but not so great. Well, and it's interesting to, I like what you said earlier.
And it's something that I learned from my books. It's that you don't want to go and settle a vendetta or start a vendetta with somebody because it's not necessary. If you look at the story of your life, no matter who was opposed to you or whoever pissed you off, it's like in the end you won. You got to do all these great things. So I always found that negative slant. You don't need it. Yeah, no, exactly.
And also the sort of probably enough, whilst I was writing the book, I had people emailing me saying, I hope I'm going to be well represented in the book. I hope. And I didn't have the heart. I didn't have the heart to email them back to say, I'm really sorry, but you're not important enough to be in it. So it was strange, those sorts of comments coming from people.
And in truth, there's lots of things that get blown up, how the proportion in the press on occasions, anything, it's not really important to part of my life. So why bother with it in a book? It's just gossip. So yeah, let's just leave it. There are way, way more important things, way more important stories to talk about and things to tell. You know, for sure.
And then when you mentioned the adventure of David Niv, and one of the stories that to me was one of the center pieces of the book was your trip to Sarajevo when you were doing the skunkworks, I believe, in 95. And talk about this adventure that you had as the singer of a rock and roll band, but you are in the middle of a war zone, and almost like a, I don't know, an underground mercenary at this point in time. What an adventure that was.
Yeah, that was a little strange, probably slightly unhinged thing to do, looking back on it. But that was a truly, what does this band do moment? I don't have phone call, fun enough from the magazine Corang in the UK. You know, I was out of maiden, and I was sitting around at home when they found out. And they said, we've had a request for somebody to do a charity show in Sarajevo. And this is in 1994 in winter. And there's a proper shooting war going on.
And it was the longest siege since Stalin grad. In fact, it was longer the siege of Stalin grad in the Second World War. So there was no question that this was like a pretty serious situation. So I said, what are they out of their mind? And they went, no, no, no, apparently it's all going to be sort of sponsored by the UN. And you'll have all this protection and flag jackets and helmets. And you'll be helicoptered in and you'll do the gig. And they'll take you straight out again.
And it's all organized. And I went, OK, yeah, all right. Why not? What does this button do? And none of it was true. So we did get there on a military flight into Split, which was like 8, 10 hours drive away. And then it all started to unravel. Because the guy came up, one of the British Army guys who was working for the UN. He said, look, it goes, the UN are scared.
But if you go and play a show in Sarajevo that you'll upset the Serbs who don't like the Bosnians and they don't like anything that makes them happy. So there's your tickets to go home. And I said, well, you know, I'm not really about this quitting business. You sure there's no other way of getting in there. And we found a local cameraman who said, yeah, we can get you into this secret tunnel, which I thought sounds like I had dangerous.
I said to the guys, they said, well, why don't we stick around for a week? Because the next flight wasn't for another week to get us out. And I said, look, we've got some gear. We could do a couple of pubgics here in split. It's a nice enough place. I'm sure the beer's cheap. We could find the floor to sleep on. Come on, let's not just quit. Straight away. So we told them, OK, guys, we're staying. And at which point, everything changed. The guy made a couple of phone calls.
And he came back and said, OK, so now you're nothing to do with the UN. We went, well, yeah, I guess not. They said, well, in that case, you must be something to do with British Army. You must be our guest. I went, OK, this is sounding good. Yeah. What's next? He said, well, come on down for a cup of tea and we'll store your equipment. And we'll see if we can get you into Sarajevo.
And so at midnight, that night, along comes this soft-topped, ex-military flatbed truck painted bright yellow with Felix the cat, Rose Runner, and after it's a goal, on it. And they said, there you go. There's your truck sleeping bags in the back, equipment in the back, two crates of beer. And off we went for eight hours through the mountains and the fog. And we got hijacked, splurged up the soldiers. And they were friendly. So it was OK. And then we went up to an active firefight.
And then we drove into the city. And we did a gig. I mean, it's the story is all in the book. But it was one of the most intense, three, five days of my life. And I came back to London just before Christmas. And I had a five month old kid. I just looked at the world and life in a totally different way. Like the Western world just seemed to be so absurd with our obsessions, with red lights and green lights and traffic lights and do this and don't that.
And I mean, I just come from a place where people can be walking down the street and get their brains blown out just for nothing, just for being randomly killed. I'm thinking, wow, the world is really strange. But the wonderful thing about it was that we did it. We didn't actually, it wasn't like a bono thing where the world gave us a new American express card to give to everybody. We just did it. And 20 years later, I was in my local pub.
And somebody came up to me and said, hello, you don't know me. And I went, oh, no, it's going to be a selfie. It's going to be an autograph. It's going to be something. And then we're no, no, no. I want to show you a movie that the people of Sarajevo have made about your concert. I went, you killed me, really. And they've done this film called Screams from the Sarajevo. It's won all these human rights prizes and everything else.
And it's, in fact, the mayor of Sarajevo actually was a kid at that concert. Wow. And it's the story of all the kids who were at the concert. And how that one show changed their lives 20 years later. It's an astonishing film. So that's going to be released sometime next year, February or March, whenever we can track people down. But the filmmakers actually went, when I saw this film, I couldn't believe it, because I went two in a minute. You mean you found the truck that we drove in on?
It still looks like that. And I went, yeah. And they found footage of the gig. They found all this cool stuff. And they tracked down all the people that, you know, helped us in, helped us out. And I actually went back there. The guys who were in Skongworks, they went back there on the 20th anniversary. Unfortunately, I've just been diagnosed with throat cancer. And I couldn't tell anybody. And so I had to say, I can't really come. And I said, why can't you? I said, oh, works.
I've got to go into hospitals with some tests. You know, you had to be really sort of evasive. And I hated it, because it would have been quite nice just to say, yeah, I'd love to come. But I actually had a few more pressing issues on my mind at the time. So I went back a year later and did some filming for it, just for interviews. But it was an amazing life-changing experience. It's all in the book, anyway.
Isn't it amazing how you never know who's watching you and who you influence after all these years of doing this? Like you said, the guy who grows up to be the mayor of Sarajevo was at your gig in 1984. Yeah. Well, you never know where life is going to take you. You never know whether, hey, should I turn this piece on, should I turn left? What should I turn right? Right. What happens if I turn left? And if you turn left, hey, who knows what might happen? Who knows who you might meet?
You never know. I think everybody on the journey through life just needs to keep their eyes and ears and arms open. And just embrace everything that you feel that you see here. And I think the world would be a much better place for it. Another thing when you're talking about the film in Sarajevo, another film that was really interesting to me was Iron Maiden behind the Iron Curtain. And you talked about that in this.
I remember seeing this when I was probably 14 years old in Winnipeg, where I grew up, as you know, they played it on the Nightly video show. Here's Iron Maiden behind the Iron Curtain. It was a big special that they promoted for like a week. And the reason why is this was really, you guys were the first band to go to Poland and to Russia in these places. It wouldn't experience that must have been. Oh, yeah, it was.
I mean, I mean, the strange thing was, we drove, we had to drive in and out via some other countries as well. You know, like what was then checked as a varkier. And we might have had to go through an East German board or something like that. But it was just, it was kind of spooky seeing a train full of Russian armored vehicles just being transported up and down, you're thinking, wow, this is real. I mean, this is the stuff that's just sitting there. And they were pointing this stuff at us.
You know, this is the real deal. I mean, early on after I left school, I was kicked out of school. I joined what would be like the Army reserve brief sleep, volunteer reserve, whatever, in the UK. And one of the crazy things was that our unit was supposed to be 24 hours, call out, airportable, straight to the front line in the event that it all kicked off. I was told that my life expectancy and combat was one minute and 45 seconds. Oh, well, get it over with quickness.
But it was chilling seeing that level of activity going on. And yet, it was six, however many years later was, the war came down. And it all just kind of evaporated. It was a big front. It was a big facade. Nobody in those countries, nobody wanted to fight anybody. All they wanted to do was just get on with people. Right. Sure, of course. Were you surprised at the level of maidens' popularity amongst the kids that were there? Because they're fanatical. Oh, Poland was extraordinary.
It was like the whole country was coming out to see you. I mean, actually, at times it genuinely felt like there was a bit of a revolution going on. But it was clear that there was so much passion there. And the place that Poland now is not depressing place at all. It's really resurgent. And the people are incredibly proud of their country and what they've done and they're very inventive.
And of course, there's loads of Polish people who have moved and come to England and they work really hard and they're really compatible with UK society. What I think they are anyway. So I think we kind of get on pretty good as a pair of countries. But back then, it was the environment, the local, the poll's like to live in. It was grim. It was dull. It was gray. And it was all this Russian, Stalinist architecture. It was all falling apart. It was all badly built. Nothing really worked.
Everything was just, there were department stores, but there was nothing to buy. And there was a legacy of the Second World War, which was still very much present. So the Russians had taken over the X headquarters of the Gestapo in one town. And they turned it into a department store. But they hadn't changed anything. Walking around in the business, finding a little bit of German writing and so on. Yeah, I've talked to Chamber this way. Oh, no, sorry, it's the makeup department.
It's just really odd. Really odd. There was some of the venues still had bits of the Nazi spy holes still hooked up so that the Nazis could have a look and look at the audience, you know, whatever meetings and rallies and stuff they had there. So it was kind of chilling, but that's pretty much gone now. But it was still hanging around like a really bad smell when we went there.
And it was almost like we were doing a kind of exorcism on all that rubbish that was old, geriatric, evil, nasty, black stuff hanging over everybody. Do you remember the Polish wedding? Because it's on the video, but do you remember it? Well, I do remember the Bible. Actually, I remember the Polish wedding far more than I should considering how much we'd have to drink. And there was loads of bottles of Russian champagne, which is very confusing stuff. Very sweet, very sickly.
It gets you drunk, it gives you a hell of a headache. And of course, lots of vodka. And I'd never really drunk frozen vodka shots before. So drinking vodka in that way really had a pretty profound effect on me for about a week afterwards. Like the world was actually pink. Why is the world pink? And the answer is because your eyeball just bloodshops the world is pink. So that was a lesson learned. But yeah, I do remember the Polish wedding.
And it was not an altogether terrible version of the smoke on the water. It wasn't bad at all considering the state you were in. So this is when Iron Maiden played at the Polish wedding. Did you guys just crash it? Or are you invited or how did that even come to play? It was going on in the hotel. In the foyer of the hotel, some of this getting married. There was a party and everything else. And the pole was just really friendly. So they said, oh, yeah, come on down.
Yeah, it's coming down to the wedding. But I'm like, oh, you're a band? Oh, yeah, come on. Well, I think we probably gave crash to bands. Because we did back in the day. We did that sort of thing. If there was a drum kit or something else, we could normally get drunk enough. And Adrian would get up, start playing the blues. And then Niko would, well, I usually get up, stop trying to play the drums. And then Niko would kick me off. And you know, and I can do it properly. But yeah.
Hey, this is Chris Jericho inviting you to the first ever rock and wrestling ranger at C picture this rock and roll wrestling comedy live podcasting all on the open ocean from October 27th to the 31st, 2018 from my Annie Tanasah. I'm bringing Hall of Fame wrestlers, some of the greatest rock and roll bands of the planet and putting the first wrestling ring on a cruise ship ever. Don't be a stupid idiot. Make the list. Check us out at Chris JerichoCrews.com. Talk is Jericho.
But you mentioned smoke on the water. And one of the things that I really enjoyed with the book as a lifelong maid and fan and as a singer myself was the three biggest influences on your vocal, which was Ian Gale, which of course I knew. But the other two were kind of a surprise, which were Ronnie James Dio and Arthur Brown, the crazy world of Arthur Brown. That was really cool to read your thoughts on that. Well, yeah, I mean, all my secrets are out now.
You see, so people can go, ah, I see where you stole that bit from. Sure. Yeah, that little drill, that's like a copy of the one on rainbow rising when he does blah, blah, blah. I just told true. I mean, I'm the first one to put both hands up and go, yep, kill his charge. If you're going to borrow and if you're going to learn, you must learn from the best.
Well, the Gillon's scream is quite obvious in a cool way, but the deal I never realized before, but yeah, you got a lot of Ronnie James Dio in your voice. Yeah, yeah, no, no. Well, what impressed me about Ronnie was that he just had this smooth delivery, but it just sounded like, you know, it was like, we told him he had good mouth. It was like, you know, like a few thousand, you know, y'all are being Mongolian horses came out of it.
You're like, how the hell does that sound come out of that little guy, you know? Right. But it did. And it wasn't quiet, you know, Ronnie, I mean, my horse is physically quite, it's quite loud when it sings.
As is what helps us, as I see resilience, and as is Ronnie's, you know, and there's a generation of singers now that sound like they're singing really powerfully, but they kind of train their voices, that they're not making a lot of noise, you know, they let microphones do the work and all the rest of it.
But in a room, if you put them in a big room and said, right, don't fill that room acoustically, it's probably, you know, not the thing, but I'm kind of old school like that, and I always had the idea that if you were singer, then you had to be able to fill a room like for real, but without the microphone, you know?
Was it hard to kind of keep that power, for example, if you're talking like about the eighties and you're talking like the power slave tour with the amount of gigs you guys were doing? And obviously you're in your 20s, you're in a rock band, I'm sure you're having some drinks like you mentioned. Was there ever times when you felt like, oh man, like how did you keep your voice powerful during all those shows?
Well, the truth is, I didn't tell me the, it was very frustrating, because we were doing a schedule that was, you know, pretty brutal, particularly given the way I sing, you know, we're always allowed band, and we had terrible problems with monitors, we never really had a very effective monitor set up, and there was no real time to really get into it, there were no innay monitors, I mean, actually I don't like them anyway, and of course there was no recovery time for sickness either.
So if you did get a cold, you had to sing through it, but we were doing five days on, one day break, four days on, one day break, five days on, so we were doing basically five, four, five, four, five, four. When I first joined the band, there was a run of gigs that were like eight, one day, seven, one day, six, one day. We were doing like a two hour show. I mean, that can only end one way for a singer, you know, the voice, you are the destroyer voice, or you destroy yourself.
So you've got to be smart, be sensible. Now, at the time obviously being young, you can push your body, but voices don't, you know, they don't like it when you don't get any sleep, when you're sick, when you're bouncing around, they're different. So you've got to kind of look after your voice more than you look after yourself.
But now, I mean, we now have a set up where, I mean, notwithstanding having a throat cancer thing and everything, I think I'm singing better now than I was in the 80s by a long way. And even though the voice sounds slightly different, you know, if it's a little bit darker in tone, but we haven't changed any of the keys, we still sing all the songs in all the original keys, without detune or anything like that, never have done.
And frankly, we'll continue in that vein, you know, if we don't need to detune it, I think the songs lose something. If they're written in A440, you should play them in A440. There's a reason why they work in that key, you know, all the harmonics or the notes still work in that key. And you drop it by half a step or whatever, it just sounds kind of dirgy, you know. But what we're doing now is we, because the gigs are, every gig is completely crucial now, because they're all big.
You know, they're all 10,000, 15, 20, 30, 40. I mean, we're doing one in the drip in next summer. It's already over 35,000 tickets. I'm believe it. And still selling strongly. And that's not it. It's not a festival. It's all a disaster. Yes, yeah. You know, we could end up with 45,000, 50,000 people turning up just to see us, not a festival. I mean, you've got to be on top of your game here, boy. So we just, you know, three and a half to four shows a week. And that's nice.
And the way we run it is that if we do two shows back to back, we have two days break to make sure we're back up to full power. So, you know, you have a few shows, day, show, day break, show, day break. We go on like that, as we get a day of recovery. So it works out about four shows a week. And that's good. I don't like to do not many shows, because you lose the momentum. Yeah. But you're just going to get it just right, you know?
Well, it's interesting, because the last time we spoke, you had just come back from your throat cancer scare. And you were getting ready to go into her. And you were saying you're just getting your saliva back on all this sort of stuff. And I saw you a couple months later in Vegas, at the very beginning of Book of Souls tour. And you started it on top of the pyramid singing the, it's escaping out of the opening track from Book of Souls. Just it's acapella of vocals. You know, it's just you.
And it was really cool to see knowing that only months before, you were still getting back in the groove of vocals. And then now here you are just belting out this tune, all by yourself to kick off the show, to basically say like, OK, I'm back and I'm doing all right. Yeah, well, that thought did occur to me. That I thought, you know what, this is a bit of a statement here. At the same time, your voice is kind of warming up. It is the first bit.
So I kind of climbed the ladder and sneak up the iron where I used to call my smoking plant pot, you know, the steaming cooler and whatever. That's right. My secret plant pot there. But you stand up there and you do the opening line. You're here with the soul of a man, you know. Yeah. And you think, oh, there's a pretty big statement there. You know, as you just hope that you don't screw it up. Then it gets higher. You screw it up, you screw it up really big. Well, that's the thing.
You have no guitars distorted behind you. It's just you, man. You better be good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it would be good. It would be bad. Either way, either way, if you hear it, I'm like, when you're talking to this, no, I was going to mention before. If you turn, he should fail. That's the name of the tune. I could escape my mind. I apologize.
But I want to just briefly put touch on the crazy world of Arthur Brown, because he was known and not very well known in the states, but in England, a really crazy showman that always had different costumes and that sort of thing, which Bruce Dickinson always has during the course of the show, you're always doing different capes and jackets and masks and et cetera and that sort of thing. Yeah. There's always been a bit of the actuality lurking in the back ground with me.
And I mean, when I first saw, I mean, I've talked about it in the book about when I first saw Arthur. And it was really amazing. I mean, I just thought, oh my god, I'm tripping, you know, but I wasn't tripping because I've never taken acid or anything like it ever in my life. But I thought, wow, this must be what it's like to be on acid because I can see the universe and Arthur when it's so cool, I'm 15 years older, and I was just having a massive sugar rush, basically.
But I mean, the excitement that I got and his voice, oh my god. I mean, it really was. He sounded like the voice of God. And he has this funny, like, you know, intonation that he does. But he's got the most extraordinary voice. And when you get into his career, it was a very, very eccentric, quirky kind of career, kind of hit and miss and just very strange. But really wonderful for it because it was all done in, it was also experimental, you know.
And then, in the days before digital, Arthur decided to have a band without a drummer. Really? So he had this thing, actually called the Bentley River Mace, which obviously somebody is called their band that years ago. But the Bentley River Mace was actually a series of tape loops of drums, at which you would put a lot and they would therefore start to turn at different speeds. I think it turned each drum to a different speed, completely analog, right?
So there was no, you really had to play this thing and the tapes would wobble and they'd be unreliable. But that was the rhythm section. And that was Arthur. This huge tripod with a microphone hanging down off it. And Arthur comes on dressed like a high priest. There's two keyboard players with melatrons of ECS3 synth, which I don't know if that's what that is. It's the synth that basically all of dark side of the moon, all those weird, like, that's all VCS3.
There are men's, which was the world's first electric musical instrument. Sure, yeah. Electronic instrument, which is basically you play by waving your hand in the air and was built as a, basically, a bird or a arm that was invented to protect Russian troops and the trenches in the first world war by an inventor called Leon Feremin. And he went, hey, I could turn this into a musical instrument. And he did.
And effectively, if you listen to the original movie, the day the earth stood still by Robert Wise, virtually the entire soundtrack is Feremin. And as soon as you hear one, you go, oh my God, so that's what that is. You think it's a weird violin? Or you think it's a weird woman singing? No, it's a Feremin. So all of this, like, big hotspots was off the ground. So there he is, doing his voice of God, playing this mad drum machine.
All these weird synthesizers going on and suddenly a bloke comes on with a traffic light and starts beating somebody's dressed as a brain. And you're going, okay, this is strange, but I like it. Which led to you wearing Lucha Mass on stage and frog suits for somewhere in time, too, or that was a good one. I like the frog suit. That was fun.
Yeah, the thing with the thing with Arthur was that the original album, the crazy world of Arthur Brown, which has got the hit track on it, you know, the Iron of the God of Hellfire. And I bring you fire, which might have heard fire. Yeah, that was only a three piece band that was Arthur singing Car Palmer from Emerson like Empermer on drums and Vincent Crane who went on to form a comic rooster on keyboards and bass pedals. That was a whole band.
So even that was pretty, it was a pretty strange set up. Pete Townsend of the Who was the executive producer. And the whole story is one of the world's first concept albums. Oh, really? And it's what made to Quadriffinia. And Tommy, because the story of the album, of crazy world of Arthur Brown, it basically, it's kind of Dante's in Ferno. It's the story of a man's descent into hell. And he has a trip and then he goes down into hell and finally comes up against the door.
And he's going, oh, it's so hot in here. Let me out the door open. And then this voice says, oh, I am the God of Hellfire. Oh, right there. You've arrived. So it's a story of a man's descent into hell. So it's a pretty cool concept for 1967, I think it was. Very ahead of its time, absolutely. Just as we wind down here, just a couple more questions for you, Bruce. There's a couple of things you mentioned, maiden being bigger than ever. And there's a very interesting story in the book.
And I can tell you played it close to the vest, but that meeting that you had in the pub was Steve Harris before you came back into maiden back in 99 or whatever it was. Was that kind of a secretive thing, like almost an espionage where you guys had to meet in a dark room or how would that go? Wow, it was a little bit strange because, you know, Rodney's paranoid about a lot of the things in control over the thing, you know, getting out into the media or all this kind of stuff.
So we ended up, it was just very odd. It was a sort of place that neither of us would normally be seen dead in. It was like a yacht club or something and from bar. And there was nobody in it except for the other guys in the band hanging out of the corner. And me and Steven, you know, at first it was a bit awkward of first because we hadn't seen each other by and large for five years.
And I'm coming back and I'm like, you know, I'm trying to tread gently because there's no point in trying to, there's no point in trying to talk about the old days or anything. Let's just talk about what we can do in the future. And we can, you know, we can re-hatch ancient history once we are underway and once we're really doing something. I think we both had to, you know, we both had some issues of trust. And so you've got to just, you've really got to give the other person space.
So it was quite a fragile moment actually and quite special. And I need to say, look, why do you want to come back? And I said, because we need to make everything great again. Well, that sounds like somebody else doesn't it? I really didn't mean it like that. Let's make our own main great again. But it was one thing that I think it was Eddie Cassey from my solo band said to me. And I said to them, I said, are they going to ask Victor to reach on Maiden? I know it.
And when that happens, I said, my feet won't touch the floor. I said, and I'm not going to be able to do solo records with you guys and go on tour and stuff. And Eddie said, hey, man, they said, that's cool. I said, you've got to do it. I said, okay, I said, why am I going to do it? And he went, because the world needs Iron Maiden, right? Yeah. And I went, yeah, actually, the world does need Iron Maiden. You're right. That's a really good region.
And so I just went in with that kind of attitude that, you know, we need to be back. And we need to be back properly. And we need to be back in ways that people don't even realize how good we can be and how far we can take this thing. Because I'd learnt so much when I was outside of Maiden, that I could bring back and throw back into the pot. And I think we'd all learnt a lot, you know, even Steve, you know, his experience had been, you know, when I was in the band. Right.
Everybody had learnt so much. You know, how to dose of the outside world, whether we liked it or not. And that rubbed off. And we're a much better band now, I think, than we were in the years before. Was one of the caveats for you to come back was to bringing Adrian back? Yeah. I mean, it was, it was always, Adrian coming back was never going to be an issue. Gotcha. And because one of the first things that Steve said, he said, I always wanted to be guitarist anyway.
Because it's more than enough guitar parts to play. That's the truth. And Adrian is just really integral to our sound, you know. I mean, so Adrian and Dave together, I mean, what a beautiful set up. Yeah. And all those first few albums that we did. And then, you know, when Adrian left, you know, Yannick had actually been in the band for longer than Adrian had been in the band. When Adrian came back. Right. So Yannick had kind of established his own niche as well.
So now we had three little niche guitar players here. So let's play around with it. And of course, it meant that we had more, a lot more songwriting firepower as well. So the actual fact that the songs started getting, you know, divided up in a much more kind of round robins or the way. Right. Well, that was your songwriting partner too, as always, Smith Dickinson writing those tunes that you guys put together. Well, well, the one I mean, I mean, I've got used to write a lot with Adrian.
But then on Kevin Soma, I wrote with Steve. And then, you know, everybody was just writing a little bit with everybody else, you know, which is nice, you know, how it should be. Good chemistry. Two last questions that when you left, Maiden, I was wondering this. They put out a single for How Would Be That Name. And you may, it's actually, there's a picture of it in the book from the live record. And Eddie is actually running you through with a pitch fork in hell.
It's like, roses, like, yeah, yeah. Did you know about that? I think that was probably what I think. That was probably what I did. Yeah, I was like, yeah, yeah, thanks. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Did you know? Did you just see it? I didn't know. Of course I didn't. What did you think when you saw it? I thought, yeah, yeah. I think you go, I bet you think you're pretty clever, Mrs. Moore. Yeah. Don't worry. So that's when I decided to design Edison, just to wind him up.
Edison was the guy in the cover of accident of birth. The crazy clown. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And he said, he's pretty freaked out with something. I'm down there. I said, Eddie, son, I went, hey. No, it's not Edison. He invented a light bulb. He's got three, three broken ones on the top of his head. It's a bright idea. It's drawn by Derek Riggs, but it's just a crazy one. Why do you hear me on how I'd be, I know, you're not a clever idea. Last question is something I've dealt with for years.
I was always known in the 2000s when I was wrestling for, I had really long blonde hair. And then one day I made the cardinal sin of cutting it to where it's like, how can you still be Chris Jericho with short hair? And I loved your description of when you cut your hair and the reason for it. Did that surprise you the reaction that you got that you had cut your famous hair? Yeah, but it didn't surprise me. But honestly, I think people go over it extremely quickly.
It's like really, it's like hair thing. It's like, this is super important to the music or whatever. And maybe if it wanted to, people, it is, but I think now the world has moved on where if you want to have long hair and your long hair looks great and you're happy with it, have long hair. If you want to have short hair, have short hair. It's like, it's not prescriptive, guys. You can wear, you can be whoever you want to be.
Now, as long as the music's cool and it's real and it's authentic and it's you, that's all that matters. I loved how you said though you looked at the promo picture of the band. You saw three young guys and one old guy was straggly long hair. Yeah. And he was like, well, they come to town. I mean, I mean, Jesus, Jesus, like, ascended into heaven age 33, right? Right. At 33, most people really, that's kind of cut off point for you being Jesus.
And after 33, really you start to look like a homeless person, you know, so maybe that's a good time to start. Bruce, it's so great to talk to you, man. And once again, your book is great. And congratulations on that and your health and everything like that. You guys back out again this summer? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We're going out for basically three months in Europe this summer. And it is going to be an amazing show. We've got it. We've got to top the last show. Oh, yeah.
I honestly thought that that last tour we did, I was, I mean, if somebody had come up to me at the end of the last tour and gone, hey, tonight is not the last night. We're going to do another month and a half. I would have gone, yeah, bring it on because I was having the best time of my life on that tour. Anyway, that was the end of it. That was the end of the book of Solstur. And we were already planning the stage set as the last notes were dying away for this next tour.
And we were agonizing going, what the heck are we going to do? Now we're going to really change the way people look at the set and change the way people look at us. And make this next tour really cool. I really think we might have done it. It's going to be really special. The set is going to be really special. The physical set. But also, I think the actual songs that play. I'm going to knock people socks off. What's your favorite song to sing nowadays? You have one?
My favorite song off each album. I have any album. What's your favorite song to sing live? There's one. Oh, Jesus. That's not a song. It could mean. Wow. On the spot. I'll be honest with you. I do like the nice plug you want. Because you can really get stuck into them. You know, so. Rhyme Nation Mariner. Sign of a call. Interesting. The long, long. And blood bothers. Great tune, man. Great tune. Well, Bruce, thank you so much, man. I appreciate you calling.
And I'll see you this summer somewhere down the road. Yeah. Sure. Well, cheers, man. Thanks, Bruce. Thanks, Chris. Thanks again to the legendary Bruce Dickinson. His new autobiography is called What Does This Button Do? It's a great read written by Bruce, as we talked about. And you can really hear it in his voice. It's a lot of fun. It's a great story. You can get it wherever you buy books, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, your favorite local bookstore, Kindle, just go check it out.
And also check out Iron Maiden this spring, the legacy of the Beast Tour kicks off in Europe on May 26th in Tallinn, Estonia. They have date scheduled through August. Get your tickets at Iron Maiden.com. What's the set list going to be like? Because the last show was Heavy on the new stuff. Which means they're going to do a tour. Heavy on the old stuff. I'm excited. What kind of a nugget? So they're going to play still life would be great. Prower, Phantom of the Opera would be a lot of fun.
They've played that recently. I would, Alexander the Great. That would be cool. I'd like to hear that. Or what else would be fun to hear? The prophecy. How about that? That'd be pretty obscure. An infinite dreams. Back in the village. Come on, Maiden. Open up the vaults and play some obscure tunes. Once you can get those tickets at Iron Maiden.com. And also get the Fuzzy tickets at FuzzyRock.com. As we hit the road in Europe, joining Steel Panther. Starting January 28th and Patty.
We're heading all across Europe. Then we'll go back to the United States. Starting February 28th and New Orleans. We've got through fire, Santa Cruz, and Dark Sky Quire. Coming along to rock with us. We're doing over 30 dates in the US going all the way from New York City to Los Angeles. And everywhere in between. So go check out FuzzyRock.com for all the city's dates, venues, and ticket information. You know we're doing the VIP meet and greets as well. So get it on that before they sell it.
Nobody does the VIP pre show like Fuzzy. We give you a whole mini concert. Take requests. Meet you. Take pictures with this. Sign your stuff. It's one of the best in rock and roll. Great value. Get your tickets at FuzzyRock.com. And check out the Fuzzy VIP experience at FuzzyRock.com as well. And remember, there's still a couple days left to make the list on Chris Jericho's Rock and Wrestling Rager at C. If you booked your cabin by this Monday, January 15th, you take a picture with me.
And the list. I'll even put you on the damn thing. People say, how do I get on the list? Here's how you do it. Book your cabin before January 15th. And I'll put you on the list at Chris JerichoCrews.com. Remember, we set sale October 27th. And for as little as 150 bucks, you can reserve your cabin. And when you do that, everything is included in the price. All inclusive. All the food, all the activities, live podcasts, stand-up comedy shows, rock and roll shows, meet and greets, signings.
All of this is included in the price of your cabin. All you pay for is alcohol and gambling. Plus, you get to see the whole sea of honor, tournament, free of charge, and get to meet all of the great legends and up-and-comers coming on the Rock and Wrestling Rager, Jim Ross, Jerry the King-Luller, SoCal Vales, our special cruise director, Mick Foley, Rick of the Dragon Steamboat, Ray Mysterio, keeping it 100 crew with Conan, Disco, and Furnow and Shane Helms.
Be on the darkness, tell them some scary tales with Tim and Dave. Don Callis of Paul Lasavere will do in live, kill in the town podcast. Colkaban and Marriederosa are doing their unprofessional wrestling show. It's very, very funny stuff. Brad Williams, Ron Funches, Jim Brewer, speaking of Funny Through the Greatest Stand-up comedians in America today. Jim's gonna be rocking with his band, The Loud and Routy, as well, Great Rock and Roll band.
Bustal open radio will be the Dave LaGrecca, hopefully, Bully Ray as well. Phil Campbell, The Bastard Suns, Fuzzy, with a painless being top 40 now. We're hotter than ever. King is gonna be with us. The stir is gonna be with us. The Dave Spivak project, Spewie's been on the show. Go check out his new video, Get Out of My House on YouTube. Now, The Darlings of Rock and Roll, The Cherry Bums will be there. Shoot to thrill, The World's Greatest Female Tribute ACDC Band.
Blizzard of Ozzy, The World's Greatest Ozzy Osborne Coverband. And, of course, Ring of Honor, presenting the Sea of Honor tournament board the ship. Matches happening in the middle of the ocean on a ring in the middle of the cruise ship. And the winner of the Sea of Honor tournament gets the Ring of Honor World Heavyweight Championship. The future Young Box will be there.
The villain Marty Skirl, Cody Rhodes, The Brisco Brothers, Dolan Castle, Frankie Gizarin, Adam Page, The Beautiful Brandy Rhodes, so many more being announced in the upcoming weeks. Speaking of being announced, coming up on Wednesday. All right. My former best friend, Kevin Owens, and Sami Zayn, returned to talk as Jericho. Nothing but laughs and stories and a great time. So, be here Wednesday. For me, Sami Zayn, Kevin Owens.
Until then, stay hard, stay hungry, peace, lovin' hugs, and a big, you boy. Run to the hills!