‘Iron Maiden’s secret to success’ - Bruce talks to O.C. Press

Singer Bruce Dickinson explains how the British metal gods still attract teenage metalheads by the tens of thousands.

To keep the excitement level high, he says, “we just, you know, play a bit less.”

Iron Maiden’s touring schedule is never very full, typically sporting only a handful of stateside dates each time out, and often with a conceit attached, from The Early Days Tour, focusing strictly on material from the band’s first four albums … to 2006’s trek behind the hailed return-to-form “A Matter of Life and Death,” when the group would play the album in its entirety … to this season’s Somewhere Back in Time Tour, devoted to reviving the bulk of the band’s 1984 World Slavery Tour, complete with a wilder pyrotechnic display and the most gigantic Eddie (Maiden’s skeletal mascot) ever assembled.

“When we looked back at the `Live After Death’ DVD,” Dickinson recalls, “the big Eddie at the back that comes out … we said, `Oh, well, let’s just build it the same as we did before.’ And then we found the measurements of it, and we went, `Yeah, that’s pretty small. We can’t do that. We’ve got to at least double the size of it.’ So now it is absolutely monstrous.”

So big, in fact, that a special hydraulic cherry-picker has to be flown with the band in order to lift it.

Could be stunts like that that keep attracting fresh-faced fans. Or it could also be that while so many of Maiden’s peers and progeny have faded out or lost their edge after an album or two, these British veterans - including founding members Steve Harris (bass) and Dave Murray (guitar), drummer Nicko McBrain and guitarists Adrian Smith and Janick Gers, all in their early 50s - have soldiered on, surviving a rocky `90s to re-emerge this decade as one of the enduring masters of the form.

I caught up with Dickinson, 49, by phone while Maiden was in final rehearsals after touching down in Texas, and I began by wondering the same thing I do of all global phenomena: Great though both highs must be, it must feel different to play for 30,000 Californians across two nights in Irvine than it would to encounter 45,000 people all at once in Bogota, or 50,000-plus most anywhere across Europe.

But … how is it different, exactly?
Well, it doesn’t so much go geographically, but it is different from place to place. Over the years, it’s strange how places have taken on different characteristics.

When we first started coming to America 25 years ago, we always used to imagine that the West Coast was the laid-back one, and the East Coast was where it was really happening. But certainly for the last 10 years, we were doing shows in Los Angeles and going, “Man, what a great gig!” The audience reaction is just really in-your-face, and they’re really attentive and listening and informed. It was just really spectacular. I would say, actually, that the West Coast is one of our favorite places to play in North America at the moment.

Well, you have some history here, of course. (Maiden’s widely regarded 1985 live album “Live After Death” and its companion video, finally released on DVD in February, was captured across four nights at Long Beach Arena in 1984.) Do you have specific memories of those shows that stand out the most?
Well, it was just a gorgeous summer. It was a time when metal and rock music were really at a peak, culturally speaking. After “Live After Death,” to be honest with you, I think the sort of hair bands, and one or two of the more embarrassing episodes in metal history that happened around then, tended to take over a bit in the public perception. Which was a shame, `cause of course we were still doing the same thing. And we’re still here doing the same. So we must be doing something right.

How would you characterize metal now?
It’s kinda come full circle. Except, of course, that now more than ever the audience own the music, because of the Internet and downloads and things like that. Audiences have such a choice now. But because of that, it’s really heartening when you see your ticket sales going through the roof. And with no radio advertising, no TV - we don’t even have a record out. Well, we do now …

But it’s a greatest-hits record (”Somewhere Back in Time: The Best of 1980-1989″).
Yeah, and it’s designed - completely designed - to capitalize on people that are new to the band, who need some kind of reference to know what to dip into first. In effect, what we’re looking at is a global phenomenon that is caused by word-of-mouth, and it’s pretty unprecedented.

It does seem that way. When I saw you … I noticed the crowd was astonishingly young. To see 15-, 16-, 17-year-old kids … other bands who have been around as long or longer than you don’t draw like that. What accounts for it?
The heartening thing is that it’s happening in America now. This is what’s been going on in Canada for ages, and it’s what we expect in Europe and South America. When we go into a country and 45,000 people show up in Colombia, 30,000 in Costa Rica … we don’t even have a record company in Costa Rica. These are not old, die-hard fans. These are people who are seeing us for the first time.

And a lot of them are very, very young, which is great, because with all respect to old rockers, they don’t put out like 16-year-old kids. You know, they sit there and nod their heads sagely and ruminate - and they enjoy it for sure. But they don’t really start leaping up and down and head-banging and taking their clothes off and sweating buckets. They’d end up in hospital.

But with kids and us … it’s like feeding the hurricane. You need those warmer-temperature waters to keep the hurricane fed. We get our energy from the audience, and we fire it right back at them.

Some of why you’re so popular with younger listeners must have something to do with older brothers and even parents handing down records. But I think a lot of it also has to do with metal now bearing so much of your influence.
Yeah, I think a lot of the bands that are around now will all name-check us as being a major influence. Because, you know, we went out and we did things our own way. We went, “Screw the Establishment, we don’t care about radio, we just want to rock the way we want to do it.”

You continue to do that.
Exactly. But the thing I’m really proud of is that the stuff we’ve been doing really stands up to scrutiny. So many of the bands now - the young bands coming up - are much heavier than we are. We don’t have a problem with that - we’re not gonna try to out-heavy them or anything else like that. We just do what we do.

Yeah, but you out-sing the majority of them. I think there’s good new metal, fine, but there’s also just a lot of growling and screaming now.
Look, I’m not gonna diss people’s choices. People choose to sing that way, and audiences choose to buy it. They enjoy it. My son is in a band, and he’s a singer, and his vocals … they’re screaming-growling stuff … and he’s got a pretty reasonable voice. Yet he practices really hard to get the screaming-growling thing without losing that voice every five minutes. So I’m, like, “Hats off to you.” And then I go along to see him at gigs, and I’m like, “OK, I get this.” It’s not how I would sing it. But I get it, within the terms of reference.

At the same time, all the kids in his band are really into Maiden. They love it because of what it represents and its heritage, but also because of what we do right now. So many of these kids who are into the band now have gotten into us during the last five years. Effectively, that means that they’ve been listening not only to our heritage albums - if even that - but to the new stuff we’ve been putting out.

Perhaps, but they must be hoping to recapture some part of your past, too.
Oh, one of the main reasons this tour has seized young people’s attentions in particular is that they have no idea what it was like when Maiden played “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” back then - but they would have given their eyeteeth to have been there.

And now we’re offering them that opportunity. Not by doing kind of a pastiche or facsimile of the World Slavery Tour. But we are bringing those songs back to life with more experience than we did in 1984. Everything in 1984 sounded like we were really in a hurry to get to the end, `cause we were just excited, and still pretty young. We’d come on stage and play everything at twice the speed.

Now, as we’ve gone down the slippery slope of doing this for umpteen years, we have the confidence to give our songs the power they really deserve. A lot of bands along the way lose the excitement level, `cause they’ve been doing it for years. So they get really good at delivering music that kids are gonna look upon and go, “Yeah, but they look kinda bored.” (Laughs.)

You look anything but bored.
We figured this out a while back. How do we stop this happening to us? `Cause all of us would be really disappointed with ourselves if that happened. And we thought, well, don’t play too much. Treat this as a huge privilege. Treat it like when kids get together and they’re in a band, and they’ve got their first three or four gigs - each gig is just like the first time you do a world tour, `cause it’s so exciting.

So to keep that excitement, we just, you know, play a bit less. And we leave gaps in between. That gives us time to recover physically, but more importantly, mentally. It keeps that excitement level there.

That also helps keep a mystique going.
Of course, once you go out, like when we did the initial part of the tour and we played in L.A. and we played in New York … I mean, you could tell the sort of seismic ripples that went through on the Internet after we played L.A. That went all the way through North America. Kids were e-mailing going, “God, you should have seen it, it was awesome, they were fantastic.” The business on this tour … we’ve never done business like this for years and years and years in North America. It’s really, really cool.

I think part of why you endure is that your music has added resonance, especially now. I think your last album reflected our times very heavily.
I think “A Matter of Life and Death” is one of the best albums Maiden has ever made. It stands up to all of our best from the `80s. I’m immensely proud of that album, and funnily enough, it was critically quite well-received. But even if it hadn’t been, what mattered is not so much what the critics say. What matters is what happens when people listen to it and go, “Wow, this is anything but an old and tired band.”

Iron Maiden Confirms Paris & London Gigs

Iron Maiden are to perform at the Ominisport De Bercy Arena in Paris on Tuesday 1st July as part of their Somewhere Back In Time World Tour 2008.

Steve Harris says “We’ve had many great shows at the Omnisport De Bercy venue over recent years and it was actually the first place in Europe we played with the current line up back in 1999. The atmosphere there is always electric thanks to the energy of the fans and we’re really looking forward to playing there again.

It’s also tremendous to be able to use the profile of the ‘Live After Death’ DVD to do what is effectively an 80’s show. It will be enormous fun and changing the approach to the songs we play tour by tour keeps it fresh and interesting for both the band and the fans alike. l think ‘Powerslave’ was an incredible show with the Egyptian theme and I’m looking forward to seeing it all again myself.”

“Maiden Mania” is currently gripping the world as tickets sales of the 2008 World tour fly out of the box offices in Australia, India, Japan, North and South America and now Europe.

In Scandinavia this week the band sold out 3 stadium shows in Sweden and Finland with all 123,500 tickets purchased in a mad rush within two hours of going on sale.

The ‘SOMEWHERE BACK IN TIME’ World Tour is in three sections, the travel for the first being by very unique means with the group customising a Boeing 757 aircraft, which will carry the band, their crew and over 12 tons of equipment from city to city. This first section of the tour opens in Mumbai India on Feb 1st, continuing through Australia and Japan before arriving in Los Angeles. The entourage then fly to Mexico then onto Maiden’s first ever visits to Costa Rica and Colombia, then on to Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Puerto Rica and New York, before finishing in Toronto, Canada, on March 16th. Over the 45 day period on this leg alone the band is anticipated to play to well over 400,000 fans in 21 cities in 10 countries, flying close to 50,000 miles in this refitted 757 which will be flown largely by vocalist and Astraeus Airline Captain Bruce Dickinson.

Comments Bruce Dickinson, “Looking at the list of places we would like to play we have always had problems joining up the dots. But without having sea containers all over the place slowing down the whole touring process and by having our own plane it has made it far easier to tour distant places like Australia for the first time in15 years. We have already had a great reaction from fans there, where the arenas in Melbourne and Sydney sold out in less than half an hour respectively!”

The second leg of the tour will be in mid-May to mid -June in North America while the final third leg takes place in July and August in stadiums and major festivals around Europe. In total the band are expected to play to well in excess of one and a half million fans during the whole tour.

Tickets go on sale to the public 10.00 am on Friday 30th of November, but members of the Iron Maiden fan club will get special and exclusive first access to purchase tickets on Wednesday 28th November. Watch the site for further information!

As for the London show, Iron Maiden will be playing their first ever stadium show in the UK at the Twickenham Rugby Stadium in London on Saturday 5th July 2008 as part of their Somewhere Back In Time World Tour 2008. Despite headlining major UK festivals like Reading and Donington many times and selling out stadiums around the World, the band have never before elected to play a stadium in the UK and intend to make this first time a very special occasion.
The 50,000 capacity celebrated home of English Rugby will be transformed into a Maiden mecca with fans travelling in from all parts of the country and further afield for this one and only UK show of 2008.

This will be a spectacular return to UK shores for both Iron Maiden and their fans. Maiden have consistently performed headline stadium shows outside the UK and “Maiden Mania” is currently gripping the world as tickets sales of the 2008 World tour fly out of the box offices in Australia, India, Japan, North and South America and now Europe with many shows selling out within only a few hours.

Steve Harris “It could be a bit of an understatement to say how excited we all are to be playing this show next summer. We’ve got hell of a tour planned visiting old and new fans all over the world but as always it’s great to get home and play here in London especially at such a prestigious stadium as Twickenham. Fans who travel out to Europe for our stadium shows there have for a while been asking us to play one here as the audience in a stadium is much closer to the band than at a big festival and can see so much better. As some people will know I am a big football fan but have heard much about what a great stadium Twickenham is from our rugby mad manager!! So l’m definitely looking forward to savouring that atmosphere We played a couple of nights at Earls Court just before Christmas at the end of our last album tour and you always get such a great feeling playing at home with all your friends and family there. It’s going to a fantastic occasion.”

A full supporting bill for Twickenham will be announced shortly

Somewhere Back in Time World Tour 2008

This first leg of Iron Maiden’s ‘SOMEWHERE BACK IN TIME’ World Tour will open in Mumbai India on Feb 1st, and continue through Australia, Japan, Los Angeles and Mexico, followed by the band’s first ever concerts in Costa Rica and Columbia, and then on to Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Puerto Rica and New York, before finishing in Toronto, Canada, on March 16th. Over the 45 day period it is anticipated that Maiden will play to well over 400,000 fans in 21 cities in 10 countries, flying close to 50,000 miles in the specially refitted plane (full schedule below).Comments Bruce Dickinson, “I have been flying commercial passenger jets for Astraeus Airlines for a few years now and we are commissioning an Astraeus Boeing 757. It will go in for overhaul, painting and conversion in November which will then give us time to ensure we have all the necessary safety documentation, especially with regard to fire safety. It also means it could possibly be flying commercial air routes decked out in Maiden colours for a couple of months before we start!

“Looking at the list of places we would like to play we have always had problems joining up the dots. With sea containers in various places it slows down the whole touring process, which is fine if you want a holiday but not if you want to play. It’s great to see places but we don’t want to sit around for a week waiting for gear to get from, say, Australia to South America, so this way we can get to more fans in more places en route in the same time period”

To tie in with forthcoming 2008 releases on DVD of the classic ‘LIVE AFTER DEATH’ concert video (full details coming soon) this tour, aptly entitled ‘SOMEWHERE BACK IN TIME’, will revisit the band’s history by focusing almost entirely on the 80’s in both choice of songs played and the stage set, which will be based around the legendary Egyptian Production of the 1984-85 ‘Powerslave Tour’. This will arguably be the most elaborate and spectacular show the band have ever presented, and will include some key elements of their Somewhere In Time tour of 1986/7, such as the Cyborg Eddie.

Steve Harris comments “l always loved the Powerslave show which I think was arguably our most spectacular ever, so taking it out again is really going to be a lot of fun. Taking our own 757 really makes it a lot more flexible for us and we intend to ram into the specially constructed cargo holds as much of the show as we possibly can. The schedule we have been able to put together due to this flexibility l think is very exciting, taking us to some places we haven’t been in a long while like Australia and some we have never been to like Columbia and Costa Rica. It is always refreshing going to new places and we hear the fans there are incredible! It’s a lot of flying but will be well worth it.

“As always when planning these tours we sadly aren’t always able to get to everywhere that we’d like to for various logistical and timing reasons
and there are probably fans out there who might be disappointed. We promise we will try even harder the next time around to get to those places.”
Full Schedule for the first leg
SOMEWHERE BACK IN TIME World Tour 08

February
Fri 1st - Mumbai, India - Bandra Kurla Complex
Mon 4th - Perth, Australia - Burswood Dome
Wed 6th - Melbourne, Australia - Rod Laver Arena
Thu 7th - Melbourne, Australia - Rod Laver Arena
Sat 9th - Sydney, Australia - Acer Arena
Sun 10th - Sydney, Australia - Acer Arena
Tue 12th - Brisbane, Australia - Entertainment Centre
Fri 15th - Yokohama, Japan - Pacifico Yokohama
Sat 16th - Tokyo, Japan - Messe
Tue 19th - Los Angeles, USA -The Forum
Thu 21st - Guadalajara, Mexico - Auditoria Telmex
Fri 22nd - Monterrey, Mexico - Arena Monterrey
Sun 24th - Mexico City, Mexico - Sports Palace
Tue 26th - San Jose, Costa Rica - Saprisa Stadium
Thu 28th - Bogota, Columbia - Simon Bolivar Park

March
Sun 2nd - Sao Paulo, Brazil - Skol Arena Anhembi
Wed 5th - Porto Allegre, Brazil - Gigantinho
Fri 7th - Buenos Aires, Argentina - Ferrofcarril Oeste Stadium
Sun 9th - Santiago, Chile - Pista Atletica
Wed 12th - Puerto Rico - San Juan Coliseo
Fri 14th - New Jersey, USA - Izod Centre
Sun 16th - Toronto, Canada - Air Canada Centre

The Iron Maiden Fan Club have made special arrangements at as many shows as possible for their members to get first access to buy tickets by way of an special pre-sale in advance of the tickets going on sale to the public.

Latest Fan club first pre-sales have been arranged as follows:
Los Angeles, New York & Toronto - Tuesday 6th November
Mexico City - 28th November
Monterrey & Guadalajara, Mexico - Thursday 8th November

Existing fan club members will automatically receive log in information via a private message. To join the fan club now just click here!

The fan club are also running a special draw for their members whereby 60 winners and a friend will be given first access to the venue and be first to the stage barrier at as many shows as possible. Full details will be announced early next year on www.ironmaiden.com.

We are sorry but it is not logistically possible to arrange pre-sales or first to the barrier competitions in either India or Latin America.
The second leg of the Tour will take place mid May to mid June with further concerts in North America, followed by the third leg European Tour, extensively covering most of Europe in Stadiums and major Festivals. In total the band are expected to play to well in excess of one and a half million fans during the whole tour.