Since then, he has been not only Iron Maiden’s definitive lead singer, but an author, sportsman, a solo artist for five years in the 1990s, a radio DJ and a pilot. Before the May 12 release of “Somewhere Back in Time,” a compilation of the band’s ’80s hits, and in the middle of the most successful global tour of the band’s career, which launched February 1 in Mumbai, India, he sat down with Billboard to discuss his, and Maiden’s, life and times.

Q: When you joined Maiden, how aware had you been of the band?

Bruce Dickinson: We effectively grew up together, musically, because I was in Samson, and all the bands were aware of everybody else, we all gigged together. It’s fair to say Maiden had this momentum about them. It was like standing in front of a truck. They had that energy before they got the deal (with label EMI).

Q: But that took quite a while to build, didn’t it?

Dickinson: It did, but a lot of that was Steve (Harris, bassist and founding member) trying to get the personnel right, trying to get the commitment from people. Once the deal was signed, the press leapt all over it. “Running Free” came out, and it cunningly snuck in under the radar of all the punk stuff. They must have had to restrain Steve, because he absolutely hated punk. The first album (”Iron Maiden,” 1980) went to No. 4, which was an astonishing feat for a band like that.

Q: What were the circumstances of you replacing Paul Di’anno as lead singer?

Dickinson: Things with Paul hadn’t been going terribly well, and they’d made the decision to get rid of him. So they came and took a peek at me. Clive (Burr, Maiden’s then-drummer) had been in Samson for three years, and (the album) “Killers” was being made at Zomba Studios (in northwest London), which back then was Morgan Studios.

We were in Morgan, and Maiden were in the (studio) opposite. So we used to go to the pub and have a few beers and chat. I went over and listened to the Maiden record and Clive would come over and listen to ours.

Q: Had you looked across at the band and thought, “I could do that?”

Dickinson: Oh, I did that the first time I saw Maiden play, in Camden (north London) at the Music Machine. It was like a four-act bill, we were supposed to be headlining and Maiden were third on the bill. They turned up and it was clearly their audience. Everybody left as soon as they’d finished.

I stood at the back watching and thought, “Christ, this is a great band. Imagine what I could do if I was singing with that band.”

Q: It seems as though Maiden developed a common cause because the band members were, and still are, outsiders.

Dickinson: We are still outsiders. We always will be, because that’s our essential nature. I can’t imagine what it would be like to go to vacuous showbiz parties. It’d be a nightmare. It’s just not what we’re about. The show’s the thing. Everything you need to know about Iron Maiden is onstage.

Q: How did you develop your personal stagecraft?

Dickinson: It’s one thing to project a confident air to the back of a club. It’s another to do the same thing in a theatre, then an arena, and it’s quite another thing to do it in a festival. Before the days of camera and side screens, you were just a little speck. It was a rapid learning curve.

My aim as a frontman is always to try and shrink the venue, if you can, to turn that football stadium into the world’s smallest club. At least you have to try. The essence of the Maiden experience is that we want to include everybody in it.

Q: When “The Number of the Beast” hit No. 1 on the U.K. charts in April 1982, it knocked Barbra Streisand’s “Love Songs” off the top. It was almost anti-establishment.

Dickinson: Yes, we had a bit of a history of that. With “Bring Your Daughter … to the Slaughter” (in January 1991) we did a service to the nation by knocking Sir Cliff (Richard) off the Christmas No. 1. I’m still waiting for my (royal honor as a) C.B.E. for that.

Q: You personally have always taken on challenges, whether it’s fencing, broadcasting, being an author or being a pilot.

Dickinson: That’s because I just have an insatiable curiosity about the nature of things, and I think the best way to find out about something is to try and do it. Flying wasn’t on a list. It would be awfully good from the point of view of people writing about us if there was a plan, but there isn’t.

The movie we’re just doing (”Chemical Wedding”) stems from conversations in the pub with Julian Doyle (Dickinson’s co-writer on the film and its director) 15 years ago. As it happens, we’re now having the most successful tour in the band’s history, the band is a global phenomenon, and in the same year, we get to release a feature film, followed shortly afterwards by another feature film with a documentary, DVD, all the rest of it. … It looks like a plan. It’s not. It’s totally random.

Q: So you’re probably not very good at sitting around daydreaming.

Dickinson: I’m very good at daydreaming. Ask any of my schoolteachers.

Q: In the period when you were out of the band (1993-98), did your solo work fulfill you?

Dickinson: The reason I left Maiden was that I genuinely didn’t know if I was getting that buzz anymore from doing new stuff. Nothing bad happened, there were no disagreements. The machine ran like clockwork, and that’s when I started to get really antsy.

Also, the cult status of the band meant that whatever you did, people would go, in a patronizing fashion, “Oh, nice effort.” I didn’t think they’d have any problem finding another singer, but their subsequent career path hit a few oily patches on the road.

My own career fell off a cliff, and I decided I’d have one go at completely reinventing (myself), so everybody thought I’d gone raving mad, and I came up with an album called “Skunkworks” (1996). It got great reviews, but the record company wasn’t sure.

Then I did a record called “The Chemical Wedding” (1998), which was digging really deep into territory I’d never been to before, but keeping a rock sensibility.

I think it’s fair to say it was a fairly groundbreaking album, did really well sales-wise and I could see myself having a successful global cottage industry as an artist. Clearly it was never going to rival Maiden. But at the same time, looking at Maiden, it was obvious something was going to crack.

Q: How did you develop as an artist during those solo years?

Dickinson: I was a much deeper musician by the time I got to “Chemical Wedding” than I ever was during the latter two or three albums with Maiden. I was much more serious about it. Roy Z, who was my producer and collaborator, said, “You’ve got to go back. You’ve done it, you’ve changed yourself around, it’s worked. But the world needs Iron Maiden.”

And I thought, “It does.” Then we had a meeting, myself and Steve. He was a bit leery at first. His main thing was wanting to know, if I came back, that I wasn’t going to leave again. I said, “Quite the contrary — if we glue it all back together again, we could do stuff that’s better than we ever thought possible. It could be bigger than we ever dreamed of.”

And that’s pretty much the way it’s turned out. It’s a really exciting place to be at the moment.

Q: So how would you compare Maiden now with the group of, say, 25 years ago?

Dickinson: The way we play the songs now is in many ways more powerful, it’s more under control. It’s not like somebody running so fast that their legs are running away underneath them, which is kind of what it was like in the ’80s. This is a mature runner now who knows the pace and has always got something in the tank for the sprint when it’s appropriate. We’ve reached that sweet spot.

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Well, we’ve been looking forward to this one for a long, long time. Bruce Dickinson’s intention to produce a movie featuring Crowley in a prominent role was first mentioned on LAShTAL.COM back in 2002 and I’m told by a prominent bookseller that he was discussing it as much as eighteen years ago.

Similarly, Simon Callow has long been linked to Crowley, with suggestions back in the 1990s that he would be performing the role in a movie adaptation of Snoo Wilson’s “The Beast” (aka “The Number Of The Beast”). After seeing his performance in “Four Weddings And A Funeral” there was little doubt that he could bring the character to life. After the death of Oliver Reed and the departure of Alan Rickman to Hollywood’s major league, there are few actors left with the breadth and charisma that the role would require.

So, these two have managed to achieve what few thought possible: a full-length movie derived from a genuine fascination with the life of Aleister Crowley. It’s a labour of love … and it shows.

Let’s get one thing straight, though: in the same way that Monty Python’s “Life Of Brian” was not “about” Jesus Christ, “Chemical Wedding” is not “about” Aleister Crowley. Crowley does appear on screen but not as performed by Simon Callow. Callow plays a University Professor possessed by the spirit of Crowley - and that’s important for a fair assessment of the movie.

The film’s plotline is described in detail elsewhere on this site and I do not plan to repeat it here. It is worth pointing out, though, that the film starts with the arrival at Netherwood House by “Symons” and a fellow student chum. The Crowley they’ve come to visit is played to absolute perfection by John Shrapnel. Okay, the Crowley he plays is of the Cefalu variety - bald and brooding, debauched and drugged - when he should be old and whispy but you can forgive the filmmakers this indulgence in getting Crowley at his malevolent best onto the screen. And the actor’s voice! You really do have to hear it to believe it: redolent with tired menace, it’s no surprise that Mr Shrapnel appears to be one of the most employed actors in the UK at the moment.

It’s a real shame that Mr Shrapnel isn’t given more screen time as Crowley and things move a little too quickly to the modern day (well, to the year 2001) and to a University Campus in Hertfordshire, standing in for the rather more expensive location of Cambridge.

The various characters are introduced competently enough: Victor, Lia, Mathers (see where we’re going with this?) and, of course, Simon Callow as Oliver Haddo, a stuttering and ineffectual crusty old professor. A small budget is apparent in the locations and the filming but it looks no worse than your average UK TV detective series and the acting is certainly better than I would have expected. An honourable mention has to go to Lucy Cudden who manages to create a sympathetic and attractive character out of Lia, never lapsing into “distraught stumbling female” mode.

But it’s Callow that stands out in the bulk of the movie. His transformation from stuttering fool to arrogant bombast is simply astonishing. The scene where he is first introduced to his students in full Crowley-possessed mode is especially well done: who’d have believed that we’d see a prominent actor in a professionally produced movie reading out loud the whole of Crowley’s “To Pe or Not To Pe” from “Snowdrops From A Curate’s Garden”? As the movie progresses, Haddo’s behaviour becomes increasingly outrageous - often to really excellent comic effect. The visual gags involving the fax machine have to be seen to be believed, as does the sequence where Haddo shaves the pubic hair from a not-very-Scarlet Woman. And it’s on this point that I’d like to focus for a moment. This is not a serious film: it’s a comedy. It professes to be nothing more than a rollicking ride and that’s what it delivers. No-one will leave the cinema with an increased understanding of Thelema, of occultism or even, to be honest, of Crowley. But most will have enjoyed the ride and just might have seen enough of Crowley to want to read a little more. But there’s no point in criticising this movie for failing to deliver what it didn’t intend to deliver in the first place.

So having declared that the film isn’t serious - and it isn’t - I feel it’s only right to point out that there’s actually a couple of quite intelligent sub-plots going on. First, there’s cyberspace as astral plane. Not an astoundingly new idea but quite well handled here, although it’s hampered by being set in 2001 on this score: a more modern take might add all manner of “Internet as Aethyr” and “code as Angelic script” conjecture, but I guess they wanted the male lead to be attractive to the female members of the audience, despite having been born in 1947 (an essential plot device that I shan’t explore here). Lopping seven years from his age certainly would have helped. Secondly, there’s the whole issue regarding Haddo’s personality. He doesn’t become Crowley; rather he becomes an exaggerated pastiche of the man and it’s clear that this is done for a reason. I suspect that what it’s saying is that Haddo permits himself to become what he perceives Crowley to be…

So, in summary? We have an amusing romp, an effective and fundamentally English comedy made by individuals with a genuine interest in the subject - people who have struggled for years and against all odds and expectation to bring something fresh to the screen. If you see this movie and you’re offended by its flippant treatment of Thelema, then just console yourself that you’re not a member of the movie’s target audience. Just sit back and take it for a ride. You’ll be glad you did.

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Apollo Regent Street (London) - www.apollocinemas.co.uk / 0871 220 6000

Click the link below to view the official film poster.

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The jam session was reportedly filmed by directors Scot McFadyen and Sam Dunn of Banger Films Inc. — creators of the critically acclaimed, award-winning documentary “Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey” and its soon-to-be-released follow-up “Global Metal” — for the upcoming IRON MAIDEN documentary that follows the band’s current “Somewhere Back in Time” tour.

When the three brothers in the north of Argentina who are into heavy metal decided to upload on the Internet some music videos filmed in their bedroom, they never imagined that only 15 days later their music would be in demand by millions of people, and they would be showered with proposals.

“They never studied music,” Miriam Fernández, mother of Emilio, 16, Agustín, 12, and Martín, 11, who live in the northwestern province of Salta, told IPS News back in October 2006.

They “learned to play on a Spanish guitar, which they finally broke in pieces because they would drop it, and they’d use it to hit each other when they were fighting,” the woman said, stunned by the reception of the videos.

Now they have a drum set their father obtained in exchange for a computer, a second-hand electric guitar and a bass guitar lent to them by a friend. With these instruments, and a passion for music no doubt nurtured by their parents, the lads hopped on to the Internet and caused a sensation.

Bruce Dickinson jamming with LOS GAUCHOS:

LOS GAUCHOS performing a cover of IRON MAIDEN’s “The Trooper”:

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‘Lord of the Skies’ and ‘Maiden Voyage’

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Written by Bruce Dickinson, front man of the legendary Iron Maiden, and Julian Doyle (Time Bandits, Life of Brian), Chemical Wedding is an occult thriller starring Simon Callow inspired by the life of the infamous Edwardian mystic, Aleister Crowley. It will go on general release in cinemas on the 23rd May.

The film tie-in will be self-published by Dickinson and Doyle under the Matador self-publishing imprint to coincide with the film’s release.

Dickinson, who has a small cameo role in the film, has stated that “On several levels, I think it will be nice for them [Iron Maiden fans] to see somebody from Maiden doing something else that gets the band’s name out there and also potentially gets a bit of respect for heavy metal and all the rest of it…. But, in addition, I think they’ll just enjoy it. It’s a rollicking good story.”

Synopsis

At Cambridge University a groundbreaking experiment integrates the human brain with a super-computer using a state-of-the art ‘interactive suit’. One of the Cambridge boffins is an obsessive follower of the turn-of- the-century occult leader, Aleister Crowley, and has reduced Crowley’s rituals to a series of equations and entered them in to the system. Bumbling academic, Professor Haddo (Simon Callow) is the willing volunteer, desperate to get inside the mind of the long-dead Crowley. The computer feeds directly into Haddo’s brain, transforming him from a shy and stuttering academic into the charismatic but sexually depraved Crowley who wreaks havoc around the Cambridge campus. Haddo believes himself to be the reincarnation of Crowley and as he plays out Crowley’s rituals, his associates realise he has knowledge that only the real Crowley could have. Could this be Aleister Crowley reincarnated, and if so, how do they send him back to the hell from which he came?

Matador

Matador is a leading UK-based self-publishing services provider offering a flexible, high quality service to authors wanting to self-publish. Recommended in the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook 2008, we set high standards in the content, production and marketing of self-published books. We pride ourselves on offering a quality service to authors, who include David Hewson (Saved), Caro Fraser (Breath of Corruption) and Polly Courtney (Golden Handcuffs). The company selectively helps authors self-publish about 150 new titles a year.

Matador – serious about self-publishing

http://www.troubador.co.uk/matador

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Bruce will also be appearing after the film to do a Question & Answer session, along with writer/director Julian Doyle and star Simon Callow.

Tickets are available via http://www.apollocinemas.co.uk or from 0207 451 9944

Find out more at the Sci-Fi London and Chemical Wedding websites.

Chemical Wedding will be on general release at the end of May - we’ll bring your details of when and where nearer the time.

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Produced by London-based Focus Films, the movie, entitled “Chemical Wedding”, stars Simon Callow (IMDb) — of “Amadeus”, “Shakespeare in Love” and, appropriately, “The Phantom of the Opera” — as a Cambridge professor who becomes a reincarnation of Aleister Crowley (a role that, at various points, Malcolm McDowell and Roger Daltrey were said to be attached to); John Shrapnel, Kal Weber, Terence Bayler and Geoff Breton also star.

Crowley, who lived between 1875 and 1947, has been Bruce Dickinson’s idol for many years. The Iron Maiden song “Revelations” is said to refer to Crowley’s classic claim that he was the “anti-christ 666? reincarnated. In other words, the Devil himself.

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Overview:
Chemical Wedding is a feature film written by Iron Maiden front-man, Bruce Dickinson and long term Monty Python editor, Julian Doyle, who also directed the film. The film is a gothic sci-fi extravaganza set in Trinity College Cambridge, where a scientific experiment goes awry resulting in the resurrection of the infamous Edwardian Occultist Aleister Crowley, who was immortalised into pop culture by the likes of The Beatles, Jimmy Page and Ozzy Osbourne.
Tracklisting:
Chemical Wedding – Bruce Dickinson
Hush Hush Here Comes the Bogie Man - Henry Hall / Val Rosing.
Fanlight Fanny – George Formby
Man of Sorrows – Bruce Dickinson
Wickerman – Iron Maiden
Can I Play With Madness – Iron Maiden
Separation - Skin
Une Faune Apres Midi - Debussy
The Alleluya Chorus - Handle
(Excerpt) Violin Concerto - Mozart

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The film is directed by Julian Doyle, who co-wrote the screen play with Bruce and who first stepped into the Iron Maiden world back in 1988 when he wrote and directed the intriguing promotional video for ‘Can I Play With Madness’.   ‘Chemical Wedding’ will be launched at Cannes Film Festival on May 17th when Bruce will fly Ed Force One full of VIP’s for a special viewing of the film.  The film stars Simon Callow as Professor Haddo a reincarnated Aleister Crowley who was once dubbed “the most evil man in Britain”.

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