We’ve Got A File On You: Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson

10:30 AM EST on March 1, 2024

John McMurtrie

We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.

Bruce Dickinson, one of the towering, imperial icons of heavy metal, has never quite gotten his due as a solo artist. The Iron Maiden singer has made seven albums under his own name — including The Mandrake Project, out today. Each record boasts a devoted, cultish fan base, but none have become a hit on the scale of Maiden's albums. The Mandrake Project might not do Powerslave numbers, but the time does feel ripe for a rediscovery of Dickinson's solo catalog. It's been nearly 20 years since the release of Tyranny Of Souls, his last LP, and with Maiden working steadily in the intervening years, The Mandrake Project and its accompanying tour represent a much rarer spectacle. There are grown-ass adults who weren't alive the last time Dickinson played a solo gig. His upcoming show in Santa Ana, California – the only US date to be announced so far – sold out in hours. The Mandrake rollout has felt exciting, in a way Maiden's last couple pre-release cycles haven't.

Understandably, Dickinson was excited to talk about The Mandrake Project, its accompanying comic book series, and the rest of his solo career. That's a lot of what you'll find in our conversation below. (His publicist also didn't want him to get bogged down in the weeds of Iron Maiden minutiae; maybe that will be our second interview.) As a solo Bruce superfan, I was more than happy to hear stories about the making of masterpieces like Accident Of Birth and The Chemical Wedding. The Mandrake Project lives in the same universe as those records, and like them, it's built on the two-man creative core of Dickinson and guitarist and producer Roy Z. There's always been a go-for-broke spirit to the solo records that you can't get away with in a band with the GDP of a small nation. On a Bruce Dickinson album, you can hear our man invoking Ennio Morricone, banging away on the bongos, or singing over a 10-minute-long, Beethoven-inspired ambient piece. The pleasure of hearing him sing on these songs is distinct from the adrenaline rush of a Maiden gig — it's subtler, more complex. The Mandrake Project is for connoisseurs.

It's here that I have to confess that I was barely holding it together for much of this interview. I'm only where I am today, writing about metal for a living, because Iron Maiden cracked my skull open and reprogrammed me when I was 12 years old. They're my favorite band, and they have been for more than two decades. I had met Dickinson once before, briefly, at an event for his memoir at Saint Vitus Bar in Brooklyn. But this was our first real conversation, and it took a lot of mental effort to maintain my composure. There are a few moments in the transcript below where I revert to a fan's shorthand, or let small factual errors slide. I've tried to annotate them where relevant. I do dozens if not hundreds of interviews with musicians each year. I wouldn't be doing any of them if I hadn't bought The Number Of The Beast with my lunch money. "Full-circle moment" is a cliché, but there's no other term to describe how it felt to go deep on this music with Bruce Dickinson.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The Mandrake Project (2024)

I know some of the musical ideas for the album have been kicking around for quite a while. When did everything start to shape itself in your mind into what became The Mandrake Project?

BRUCE DICKINSON: I thought I was on the right track in 2014, but it turned out not until I got back together with Roy [Z]. That was in 2021, when I was allowed back into the USA after COVID and Maiden and throat cancer and all that stuff that interfered with everybody. In 2014, I was gonna have one comic. Maybe the comic would tell the story of the album, or the album would tell the story of the comic. It would be a concept album. So far, so conventional, in a way. Never got the chance to finish that off, but what lockdown did was give me the chance to write a completely different story, which is a three-year, 12-episode comic book. That means that the album, in my head, was liberated from the straitjacket of having to obey a story. It could just be a musical story. It could just be a musical adventure. And so, it didn't have a literal storyline to it.

We started collating songs that we had. The first thing that we did when we got back together was we wrote two brand new songs. And they were "Afterglow Of Ragnarok" and "Many Doors To Hell." And I went, "Wow, those are pretty catchy. Wow, great!" We already had all the other songs. Some of them were less developed than others. "Mistress Of Mercy" was just a thrashy guitar riff and a chorus. We hadn't developed the tracks or done backing tracks for it or anything. There were no drums on any of the songs. There were guide guitars. There were no keyboards on any of the songs.

The lyrics were half-finished, or in some cases, not even half-finished on probably half the tracks. So there was a fair bit of fixer-upping to do. The great thing was that we had these two [new] tracks that we [did] full-on. And that gave us a kind of lens through which to view the redevelopment. It's like, you think you had plans for a house, and then seven years later, you still haven't built it, but you realize you've got a whole new bunch of building materials. The house is gonna look a little bit different now, you know? And effectively, that's what we did. The oldest song on the record is the last song on the record ["Sonata (Immortal Beloved)"]. It's 25 years old.

What was it originally written for? Did it just not fit Tyranny Of Souls?

DICKINSON: No, it wasn't written for anything, it was just written for the hell of it. Roy had done this ambient soundtrack after coming home late from the movies and seeing Immortal Beloved, with Gary Oldman as Beethoven. He just did this 10-minute ambient track. Bed of guitars and synths with a drum machine, never changing, no big drum fills or anything, just the drum machine. So, we were mucking around, and he played it to me. I said, "Well, I don't have any words in my book of spare words that might fit. This is something totally different to anything I would normally sing on. I'll tell you what, let's go and see what happens." I had no notes, no lyrics, no nothing. And I basically made it up on the spot. It has a posh name: stream-of-consciousness, dear boy. But the first verse of that song is the only time I ever sung it. The same with the chorus. The second verse, I couldn't think of anything to sing, so I didn't sing anything, then the chorus happened. I'd done that once, so I could do it again. I changed a couple of things as well. And then after that, I suddenly twigged what the story was. It's basically a twisted version of Sleeping Beauty. There's the queen — not the princess, she's the queen. And I went, "Wait a minute, it's the queen from "Taking The Queen" [from 1997's Accident Of Birth]. In "Taking The Queen," she dies. Now, she's dead, and the acolytes are still around her, looking at her. And along comes the prince out of the dark forest — no, not the prince. The king. The king comes out of the dark forest. Why? Because he loves her? Yeah, maybe, but more, he needs her. Because without her, he's not king anymore, possibly. That story came to me quite quickly. [laughs] And again, the spoken word is all on the spot, made up. The original performance.

So, we kept that song, and we sat on it for ages. We didn't know what to do with it, because it was such a different tune. And finally, my wife was listening to it in the car. We were driving around LA, and she went, "What's that song?" I said, "Oh, that's something we did mucking about in the studio. It's very different to anything else I've ever done. I don't know where it goes, really." She goes, "It's the most beautiful thing." She's almost in tears, and so emotional. I go, "So, you think it should be on the album?" And she goes, "Divorce if it's not on the album." So we put it on the album. And I'm so glad we did, because the song before it, "Shadow Of The Gods," is the second oldest song on the record.

Yeah, that was what was supposed to be a Three Tremors song, right? [Note: The Three Tremors was a planned vocal trio featuring Dickinson, Judas Priest's Rob Halford, and Ronnie James Dio — then, when Dio died, Queensrÿche's Geoff Tate. It sadly never got off the ground.]

DICKINSON: Yeah, along with "A Tyranny Of Souls." So those two tracks were written, and I think "Shadow Of The Gods" came at a similar kind of time frame. I did a vocal on it. I think I did the vocal in 2014. Some of that vocal still is on the record, but most of this stuff, as I say, a lot of it, I had one verse and one chorus. We had to write more words. "Mistress Of Mercy" was really just a sketchpad of me with an acoustic guitar, and then the funny little Jeff Beck guitar riff [imitates main riff]. That was written on keyboard, because I couldn't play it on guitar, but I could play it on keyboard. I said to Roy, "Could you play that on the guitar with a beat underneath that's completely out of time to that?" [laughs] I'm still not sure we pulled that off.

When we did "Fingers In The Wounds," and [new band member] Mistheria sent his keyboards over, that changed everything. Because I suddenly went, "We'll have this big, lush keyboard thing, and then go into this sparse keyboard thing, big rock chorus, and then we'll go into Morocco, and go to Kashmir or somewhere like that." Which is not in Morocco, obviously, but "Kashmir" in terms of the Zeppelin influence. There was something rhythmic and weird, and completely left-field. And there's a few moments like that on the album. "Resurrection Men"…

Oh, big time, yeah.

DICKINSON: I said to Roy, "I want to do a guitar intro to this that sounds like it just came from a spaghetti Western." It's, like, surf guitar. As soon as we did it, I went, "Imagine that we're Quentin Tarantino, and we've got that, and we're making a record. What would Quentin Tarantino do next?" Answer: bongos. Has to be bongos! So, it's my bongo-playing debut.

You're playing those?

DICKINSON: I'm playing the bongos.

I love that.

DICKINSON: It hurt like hell, as well, because I don't have any technique. I just batter things extremely hard. So then, the same thing with "If Eternity Should Fail," [from Iron Maiden's 2015 album The Book of Souls] which became "Eternity Has Failed." Because I kind of repossessed the song from Maiden. Originally, the keyboard that's on there at the beginning of the Maiden [version], that's the demo that I played at Roy's place. The sound is allegedly a trumpet. But it doesn't sound much like a trumpet to me. I actually wanted real mariachi trumpets, which would be completely atmospheric, like Ennio Morricone. Well, no, I'm not really fit to wipe his boots. But that sort of effect: [imitates trumpet fanfare]. With shakers and rattlesnakes in the background. We never got as far as getting mariachi trumpets, but Roy found this Peruvian flute player who did the equivalent on flute. I said, "Well, that'll do. That sounds great." Then I just added the funny little percussion things that happen there. Again, that song got reworked, and I tweaked the words that were there from the original demo.

One of the reasons I put the original demo on the B-side of the first single was I wanted people to be able to compare the demo that I did with Roy, the Maiden version that they did of the demo, and the finished version of my version of the demo, revisited. Purely and simply as a kind of: "This is how creativity works." You can see what changed. So, when the album comes out, people will hopefully start comparing the three of them, and say, "I see what he changed there. Why'd he do that?"