Chemical Wedding Soundtrack Out Now

Warner music Entertainment release the Chemical Wedding Soundtrack album in the UK today, Monday 26th May.

The CD, which is an eclectic musical cocktail, includes tracks from Iron Maiden and Bruce Dickinson, the original film score, dialogue excerpts and epic classical pieces.  It is structured so as to tell the story of the film from diabolical beginning to demonic end.

The original score was written by Bruce Dickinson, Dave Howman, Andre Jaquemin, and Rod Melvin, and can be bought from Play.com, What Records and all good record shops.

The full musical track listing runs :-

1. CHEMICAL WEDDING - BRUCE DICKINSON
2. MEET THE WICKEDEST MAN IN THE WORLD - GEOFF BRETON & SEAN REA
3. HUSH, HUSH, HUSH, HERE COMES THE BOGEY MAN (Remastered) - HENRY HALL
4. YOUNG SYMONDS & YOUNG ALEX MEET CROWLEY - GEOFF BRETON, SEAN REA & JOHN SHRAPNEL
5. 50 YEARS I KEPT HIS WATCH - PAUL MCDOWELL
6. THE SUIT REVEALED (Score)
7. THE EVIL THAT MEN DO LIVES ON - THOMAS NELSTROP
8. MATHERS’ DREAM (Score)
9. SEXUAL MAGIC - SIMON CALLOW & JUD CHARLTON
10. AN ENCOUNTER WITH HIM - SIMON CALLOW & JUD CHARLTON
11. LIA MEETS MATHERS (Score)
12. SYMONDS INTRODUCES DR OLIVER HADDO - PAUL MCDOWELL
13. MESSIAH : PART 2 “HALLELUJAH” - HANDEL
14. HADDO’S LECTURE - SIMON CALLOW
15. SYMPHONY NO.40 IN G MINOR K550 : I MOLTO ALLEGRO - MOZART
16. HADDO’S EXPLANATION - SIMON CALLOW, RICHARD FRANKLIN & ROBERT ASHBY
17. THOSE COCKLESS WONDERS - SIMON CALLOW & LUCY CUDDEN
18. WHO IS IT YOU THINK I AM - SIMON CALLOW & JUD CHARLTON
19. CAN I PLAY WITH MADNESS - IRON MAIDEN
20. PROFESSOR IN SUIT THE JOURNEY - KAL WEBBER, JUD CHARLTON, TERRENCE BAYLER & JAMIE LISA JACQUEMIN
21. EVERY MAN & WOMAN IS A STAR  - SIMON CALLOW
22. FANLIGHT FANNY - GEORGE FORMBY
23. HADDO VISITS THE MYSTIC SHOP - SIMON CALLOW & LILLY DUMONT
24. THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE — JUD CHARLTON & LUCY CUDDEN
25. SIP THE WINE - THE CEREMONY — NATASHA FORD
26. SPARE SOME CHANGE — KARE SILVERSTEN
27. THE WICKER MAN - IRON MAIDEN
28. SEPERATION BY SKIN (Alchemical Mix) - EARTH LAB
29. SHE’S THINKING OF ME - SIMON CALLOW & JUD CHARLTON
30. PRODUCING A MOONCHILD — MIKE SHANNON & PAUL MCDOWELL
31. BEHOLD THE PLACE I HAVE LED YOU - SIMON CALLOW
32. HYPNOTIZING BRENT - PAUL MCDOWELL, TERRENCE BAYLER & KAL WEBER
33. THE CURIOUS CAT COMES WILLINGLY - SIMON CALLOW
34. HE WAS NEVER A CARPENTER - PAUL MCDOWELL & KAL WEBER
35. MATHERS ENTERS THE SUIT - PAUL MCDOWELL & KAL WEBER
36. TIME AFTER ALL IS ONLY RELATIVE - SIMON CALLOW
37. WHERE’S THE DOOR - KAL WEBER & JAMIE LISA JACQUEMIN
38. HOLY UNION - SIMON CALLOW
39. THE LAST FIGHT (Score)
40. PRÉLUDE À L’APRÈS-MIDI D’UN FAUNE - DEBUSSY
41. FELT OUT OF PLACE - MIKE SHANNON & PAUL MCDOWELL
42. MAN OF SORROWS - BRUCE DICKINSON

You can buy the Chemical Wedding soundtrack from Amazon.com by clicking the link below:

Q&A with Bruce Dickinson

LONDON (Billboard), by Paul Sexton - Bruce Dickinson made his live debut with Iron Maiden at the end of 1981. He had viewed the group’s early emergence from a ringside seat as lead singer with Samson, another of the bands in what the rock press dubbed “the new wave of British heavy metal.”

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.

Chemical Wedding Original Soundtrack

Release Date: 19 May 2008
Format: CD Album

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, (more…)

Bruce talks about The Anthology…

2005’s ‘Tyranny Of Souls’ was your first solo album in seven years. Critically speaking and sales-wise, it received a great reaction. Schedule permitting, of course, is it safe to say that we will we be seeing plenty more solo action from you?

Yeah. Roy and I have a very tentative schedule for another solo album. Obviously, there’s a new Iron Maiden album and nothing will happen before the tour for that winds up next spring. There’s no hurry. It took me seven years between ‘The Chemical Wedding’ and ‘Tyranny Of Souls’, and there were only slight objections. People went, ‘Oh, at last. And about time, too’. ‘Chemical Wedding’ was such a good record, I actually did scare myself with it. So I was pretty relieved that ‘Tyranny Of Souls’ went down so well. Now might be time to move things along, and experiment a bit more. We shall see.

Let’s begin by talking about ‘Dive Dive Live’, which was filmed at the Town And Country Club in California during your first solo tour. Was it a humbling experience to be back in the clubs when you’d become so accustomed to arenas, or a refreshing change?
The entire tour was really refreshing. We had a great time. It’s a shame in a way that we didn’t film ‘Dive Dive Live’ in Europe, because some of those shows were cool. It was an odd video to make, frankly. I thought we’d have lots of hand-held cameras, but what turned up were all these great big cranes and flying jibs. Half the audience was excluded to make room for the camera tracks. It was really unsatisfactory. The budget was obscene and if I’d controlled it I could’ve made about three videos for the same price.I believe the audience that night wasn’t even allowed to drink?
That’s right! They weren’t allowed to do anything. They were corralled in pens like cattle. It didn’t belong anywhere near a rock ‘n’ roll show.

Was it a typical arms-crossed, hard-to-impress LA audience?
Yeah. But the crowd was made miserable by being dry as a bone and bossed about by all these self-important video idiots, or vidiots as I like to call them.

Despite all these reservations, would you say ‘Dive Dive Live’ is a decent representation of your first solo tour?
No. It’s crap, but it’s the only documentation of the tour. At the end of the show, I went into the truck, got the 24-track master audiotapes and threw them in the river. The bloke who was with me, Merck Mercuriadis, was actually on his hands and knees recovering the tapes. I was like, ‘Let them drown you fucker’. These video wankers had come in and ruined what should have been a great night.

While in California, did you experience much of the brain-dead rock star egomania that had inspired the song ‘Tattooed Millionaire’?
[Laughs]. I don’t think you can avoid it. But fortunately MTV and VH1 televise it on a regular basis now. That Cribs show, I think, sums it all up.

The extra encore of ‘Black Night’ by Deep Purple was interesting, not to mention 1970s folk rockers Lindisfarne’s 1971 hit ‘Fog On The Tyne’…
We did that every night. With Janick [Gers, guitarist] coming from the North East of England [as did Lindisfarne], he was familiar with them, and I knew ‘Fog On The Tyne’ when I was a kid. We thought that we were short of material for an encore, and it was a bit wacky, so why not?

And how did it go down with the LA crowd?
We didn’t care.

You’ve said many times since that becoming a full-time solo artist was not on your mind at that point. Did you lose count of the times that journalists asked you that question, and did it rile you?
I wasn’t counting, but I did expect it. How I reacted to it varied upon whether the journalist actually gave a shit or not. Some of them manifestly thought of it as a way to wind me up, but others were genuinely concerned; those that might have been Maiden fans. So the red mist [of anger] didn’t always descend.

But was there a particular point on that first tour where you smiled to yourself and thought, ‘This is cool… I can do this on my own’?
It was probably when we were doing shows in Europe that there seemed to be a little bit less pressure. We were in Helsinki in the frozen North [of Scandinavia] and I recall thinking, ‘This is absolutely brilliant’. We were losing pounds of sweat and it was marvellous fun.

Were there any nights when it didn’t go to plan?
[Straight-faced]: Yeah, the night that we recorded the video. [Laughs]. There was also a night in Germany when I had a Ritchie Blackmore [tantrum] moment; a cup of water might have ended up in someone’s camera. They just got a bit too close.

By the time you started work on the ‘Skunkworks’ album, was an element of doubt registering in your mind? It had taken three attempts to record the previous album, ‘Balls To Picasso’, and its experimental feel had been greeted by an air of bemusement?
Yeah, the strange thing about ‘Balls To Picasso’ was that we got talked into making the album less heavy than it should have been. With hindsight, Roy [Z, guitarist] and I both feel it should have been produced differently. In fact, Roy should have produced it himself. But at the time he was relatively unproven. So we went with the received wisdom of others.
After the reception to ‘Balls To Picasso’, I threw the baby out with the bathwater with ‘Skunkworks’. I was trying to wipe the slate clean with a little artistic self-destruction. I was sure that one or two tracks on that album would wind up the purists, and they did. One guy in New York issued death threats, saying he’d stamped on the record and burned it with branding irons. That was a little extreme; it was only a record. But if people were reacting that strongly then I knew I had to be doing something right.

You’ve said that Skunkworks was an attempt to “take a flamethrower” to your life. It was certainly brave to sever just about all ties with the past, hire Nirvana producer Jack Endino of all people and begin anew.
You see I love Jack’s stuff. His secret life is that he’s a massive Rainbow and AC/DC fan. He used to say, ‘You mustn’t tell anyone I have these records in my collection or my credibility’s completely blown’. That’s what annoyed me about that era. So many quote unquote grunge bands were simply trying something different to the LA, cocaine-up-the-nose cock rock thing. The bands they really wanted to pay homage to were the same ones that I grew up idolising; Deep Purple, Sabbath and AC/DC with Bon Scott.

Did you almost feel parental towards the young musos you’d pulled together as Skunkworks?
Er, in a strange way, yeah. [Laughs]. If being parental is closing the bedroom door and looking the other way. On occasions I’d visit the back of the bus and think, ‘Don’t go there. Or if you do, make sure you take a Kleenex’.

Whilst acknowledging the validity of this time in your career, do you now look back at it as some kind of mid-life crisis?
[Contemplates in silence for a moment]. Um, not really. I’d already had my mid-life crisis a bit earlier than that. I’d realised that if we didn’t get some kind of life after I’d left Maiden, then there was no future as a singer or a musician. Where I didn’t want to end up was on the metal or rock cabaret circuit. Plenty of bands do end up there, and I’m sure they have a laugh, but music’s too much of a cathartic experience for me. It’s too life changing.

What do you recall of the two Skunkworks shows included here, filmed in Pamplona and Gerona in 1996?
We were intercepted by a French Mirage jet fighter as I flew us into Spain, which was a little concerning. I’m staring out of the cockpit window at this jet, which is just hanging there. I was tempted to slow down, as the thing would’ve just fallen out of the sky, but that would have been like annoying a wasp. I called the flight controller who said: [in best Monty Python continental voice] ‘He has come to take a look at you’. So we all waved at him, he gave us this Gallic daggers look and then dived away. When I called the controller back he said: ‘You are very lucky’ [laughs].

The Spanish footage was shot for a Japanese video EP, but what we get here is pretty much a full concert from the era. How did it make you feel to see it again?
I thought it was pretty darned good, actually. The Skunkworks video was what ‘Dive Dive Live’ should have been. It also reminded me that there was a crisis at the second show when somebody stole my trousers.

Er… stole your trousers?!
Yeah. And being on a bit of a budget I only had one pair. They were black fake leather snakeskin. Where in Pamplona am I supposed to find a pair of those on a Sunday morning? We finally found some women’s disco diva shop that had a pair of stretchy PVC ones that I could just about get into.
I noticed during the show that everyone down in the pit was staring anxiously up at me with a look of awe on their faces. I thought, ‘Well, we’re going down well tonight’. Then I realised that my pair of hairy bollocks had released themselves and were swinging around. The trousers had split! So I walked manfully off the stage. We were only about three songs in, so we used black Gaffer tape to cover me up. You’ve heard of the Brazilian wax, afterwards I had the Pamplona version. I suffer for my art!

The DVD’s third live segment was shot in South America during the tour that that 1999’s ‘Scream For Me Brazil’ would later document. By that point you’d been back together with Adrian Smith for two albums, and agreed to return to Iron Maiden after an absence of six years for you – longer still for Adrian. A dip in album sales had also been converted to a steady rise. How would you describe the mood on those dates?
I was a little sad. We’d put together a great band with Roy [Z] and the Tribe Of Gypsies guys, and we’d found a sound that was unique. The ‘Accident Of Birth’ album [in 1997] had made a big start, but I can look back on ‘The Chemical Wedding’ [1998] and say that it was a really groundbreaking and influential album – not just for me, but metal in general. I’m still immensely proud of it. We had such a blast touring it – even some of the acoustic jams we did at radio stations, which we’ve been unable to release – but I’m so glad we were able to liberate all these tapes.

What do you recall of the Sao Paolo show that was filmed?
The concert was part of the Skull Rock series, and with us on the bill were the Scorpions and Jason Bonham, I think. On that particular night we went down an absolute storm, which the Scorpions were very gracious about actually, because a lot of the audience left after we finished.

The footage presented here was originally a bootleg. What’s the story of how you came to use it for your own purposes?
It was a bootleg from the TV screens, but it was also filmed for TV. So we approached the TV company. The quality of some of the show wasn’t good enough to be used, but the sound is untouched – it comes straight off the mixing desk.

The devotion of the Brazilian fans is well known. Would you say that it’s unique?
Well, it’s not just Brazil. Argentina and Chile, Mexico, the whole South American continent has always been big on metal. It’s not just my solo stuff, it’s the same with Maiden. We were one of the first bands to go there for the very first Rock In Rio [in 1985, a show that was reportedly seen by 200 million people throughout over 60 countries]. Brazil has a unique musical culture because it’s such a melting pot, and it has more people under the age of 21 than anywhere else in the world, so the potential is enormous. They’re not stubborn about that they’ll listen to, and they do so with great attention, so they’re a joy to play for.

Unless you happen to be a particular student of Bruce Dickinson’s career, the role of guitarist/producer Roy Z might go unnoticed by some. Have you ever sat down and contemplated where you might be, for instance, had he not played you the riff to ‘Accident Of Birth’ down the phone? And you’d not flown to LA the very next day to make that album together?
[Laughs]. I don’t tend to dwell on things like that, but on such strange coincides empires have been known to fall and rise. Small pebbles dropped in large ponds make big ripples.

Roy Z has certainly been in a big rock in your life.
Yes he has indeed. And I think he believes to be in the lives of many others, if there’s any justice in the world. As a producer and mentor, Roy is second to none.

Let’s talk now about the range of promotional videos that are also included here. Many of these you have either storyboarded or been involved in the production of. So you are a believer in the hands-on approach?
Yeah, well I quite enjoying mucking around and having fun with them [laughs]. So I’ve directed a few and co-produced a few of the others, and had a hand in storyboarding virtually all of them.

Are there any of your videos that you’re especially proud of, or perhaps even some that you now have reservations about?
There are no reservations about them, no. They are what they are. ‘Inertia’ and ‘Back From The Edge’ [both from ‘Skunkworks’] are two of my favourites. I directed both of those, so that’s probably why. I’m particularly proud of the underwater stuff in the swimming pool. To this day, people still think that’s trick photography, but we didn’t have the budget for that.

Is the directing of videos something you’d like to become more involved with further down the line?
It’s pretty unlikely because I’d want to do everything my own way.

One thing that very few fans will actually have seen is the Biceps Of Steel movie, filmed at the Rainbow Theatre in London during your time with the band Samson.
[Laughs]. Yes, it’s classic stuff.

What was it like to work with Julien Temple, the old Sex Pistols director?
Believe it or not, it was Julien’s first feature film. So I’ve no idea what he made of it. I don’t think we even spoke to him. We just turned up, slapped on a load of make-up and did our thing with these great polystyrene Marshall cabinets. With belching bouncers in orange boiler suits, it’s a fantastic piece of nonsense, it really is.

Did Julien come up with the concept, or the members of Samson?
The concept, which is crass in extremis, wasn’t ours! Oh no! I’ve no idea who thought that one up. It was the typical concept dreamt up by someone who didn’t understand metal. They’d obviously sat back and thought, ‘Samson. And super-roadie. Yes, and we’ll have two huge Marshall stacks that kill everybody at the end’. Yeah, right! That video comes under the category of ‘What a wonderful piece of kitsch’. It also sums up pretty much the whole of Samson’s career, and also the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal.

It’s more than a little tongue-in-cheek. You have no reservations about bringing it out of the closet after all these years?
Oh God, no. I’m not embarrassed by looking at things that might make other people cringe. I find it incredibly amusing. It’s like looking back at anyone’s family photographs; ‘Oh my God, did I really look like that?!’ If I felt a bit insecure about sharing stuff like that then I wouldn’t want to, but it’s great.

Does that ‘no regrets’ attitude apply to the rest of your career?
Yeah. You have to look at decisions you’ve made and learn from them. I don’t think you can go back re-vamping your past, or regretting it. Only if you’ve hurt others by what you’ve done. But as long as it’s your own career that’s been potentially damaged, it’s all a learning experience.

How do you feel about the release of ‘Bruce Dickinson, Anthology’?
It’s not before time. There’s so much stuff on it that people will either be unaware of, or would like to have but didn’t know where to get it. The Samson video, for example, has been changing hands for an absurd amount of money. Chopping it all together in one package, everyone’s got access to it. We spent loads of time making the promos, yet the people that bought ‘Skunkworks’, ‘Accident Of Birth’ and ‘The Chemical Wedding’ would’ve had no real access to them because MTV didn’t show them. Now everyone can see all the fun we had.

The DVD’s cover art looks fantastic.
William Blake comes to the rescue again! As the inspiration for ‘The Chemical Wedding’, he played a huge part in my life and the painting we’ve used here is called Whirlwind. I rather liked the irony of that because in some respects I’m a bit of a whirlwind myself.

You are indeed. With so many things going on in your life – making your own music and with Iron Maiden, plus deejaying for the BBC and working as an airline pilot – how do you fit it all in?
[Shrugs]. I just get on with stuff. There are still one or two things that continue to loom, like a movie project that’s almost been made, but they’re in a continual state of suspended animation. They have been gathering dust for 15 years so I don’t lose sleep about them anymore, I just get on with everything else.

2005’s ‘Tyranny Of Souls’ was your first solo album in seven years. Critically speaking and sales-wise, it received a great reaction. Schedule permitting, of course, is it safe to say that we will we be seeing plenty more solo action from you?
Yeah. Roy and I have a very tentative schedule for another solo album. Obviously, there’s a new Iron Maiden album and nothing will happen before the tour for that winds up next spring. There’s no hurry. It took me seven years between ‘The Chemical Wedding’ and ‘Tyranny Of Souls’, and there were only slight objections. People went, ‘Oh, at last. And about time, too’. ‘Chemical Wedding’ was such a good record, I actually did scare myself with it. So I was pretty relieved that ‘Tyranny Of Souls’ went down so well. Now might be time to move things along, and experiment a bit more. We shall see.
Source: www.screamforme.com