It’s be quite bewildering. It’s a bit like being received as sort of conquering hero coming back and doing the thing. Doing the metal thing. It’s quite gratifying. The audiences have been getting bigger sort of exponentially. Now were playing to 1000 where as the beginning of the tour we were playing front of 300-400 people.

Are you surprised? Or did you know this in the back of your mind that this was going to be big?

I really think that theirs an actual mood of excitement that’s quite genuine, from kids in the metal community, about the record and now they seen it, about the tour as well. With all of my solo stuff, it has never really busted out, in terms of some type of movement, of people actually going out and saying," You’ve got to hear this record." But that has happened with this record. I actually feel fairly confident that its going to continue, cause the band is so fantastic, and what were doing and what were going to do on the next record is going to be as good if not better than this record.

I thought Skunkworks was a masterpiece.

Skunkworks was a great record.

I think I could have done better promotion than Castle. I think with the right promotion it would have taken off.

I’ve had terribly bad luck with record companies.

You told me Mercury went belly up and now Castle.

Mercury went belly up and Castle went Chapter 11. But even before they went Chapter 11, they really didn’t do anything on Skunkworks. They didn’t have any staff, they didn’t have any distribution. No one knew the record was out. It was insane.

I thought it was a great record.

A lot of kids are discovering that record , now. I was talking to a record store in Dallas, this is anecdotal evidence, but he was saying that when Skunkworks came out it hardly sold any copies and now it’s selling 15 copies a week. That’s just a his store. He’s a specialist metal store, so I don’t suppose that Sam Goddy is seeing anything like that. The other thing is it’s nice that people are buying the record, even nicer if I was gonna get fuc**% paid for it, but there in chapter 11, so what are you gonna do, just put it down to experience.

Are you finding that its easier now for the kids to differentiate you and your solo career from Maiden?

Yes. In particular because the last couple of records, the Skunkworks record, which was a bit like a bucket of cold water for a lot of people, cause it was like, "What is he doing?" some of them liked it and some of them hated it. God, some of the reaction for the hard core Maiden type fans, who only like one particular kind of music and its really really narrow and it was fantastic. I actually really enjoyed that some people hated it. I took great pleasure in that. They were feeling something other than this kind of numbness that you get when you get the same old sh*t day after day after day. One of the reasons I decided to go out on my own was because I was fed up with potentially having the same thing happen to me as a musician. That I would just sleep walk through tour, album, tour and just keep on going and suddenly realize that I would be 49 years old. Hey, pension in 10 years time. Another tour another album another tour another album, get the greacian 2000 down another tour. I used to wake up getting night sweats about it going AAGHHH!! You might as well be dead. You might as well miss all 26 letters of the alphabet and go to point zed and shoot your self now. By choosing to have sort of an interesting life the stress goes down a bit but the rewards when they come are worth it.

Speaking of pensions and grecian formula you are going to be touring with Lynryd Skynyrd?

From an American perspective it sounds really weird, because Skynyrd is almost a country rock band over here. In Europe, they are seen as founding fathers of metal. Southern rock is engrained in Germany, France, and in England. Blackfoot toured with Maiden. Blackfoot was special guests to Iron Maiden on tour and they went down a storm every night, in front of a Maiden audience.

How do you feel about that? I always thought everyone knew Bruce Dickinson in Europe and I thought it would be the other way around, maybe.

Skynyrd over there sold out Royal Albert Hall in London, they are selling out 6000 seats in Germany. They last time they toured in Europe was before the plane crash. Twenty something years. It’s like a legend returned. There’s no southern rebel thing going on.

You guys don’t have rednecks over there?

No. No we do they are football hooligans. We have a thing in England we call the Essex man. He drives a sub compact and he runs the local corner store and he wears shell suits all the time. It’s the same small town, small mind, big jerk-off. There is no sensation of that at all. In fact, they are thought of the rebel yell version of the Grateful Dead. That’s the way they are perceived. They are perceived the same way the Grateful Dead are but with a confederate flag. And the confederate flag means nothing, in Europe. It’s kinda cool, people have it on the back of there car. It’s like an icon, like a Coca-Cola can. It means nothing like it means over here. Over here it’s a big fu*@in deal over here, for obvious reasons. Touring with Skynyrd over here would be a little different. Touring with Skynyrd in Europe there actually strangely complementary. It was actually our agents idea to put the tour out. That was my only scratching of the noodle, is this the right thing to be doing? I went to some journalist at Kerrang and I said we are touring with Skynyrd , the guy said your touring with Skynyrd that’s fu*@in great were all going be there. Metal Hammer, Kerrang they are all gonna be there.

Do you find in difficult, several years ago with Maiden you were playing in front of 100,000 people at Donnington, now you are playing in front of 1,000. Do you find it more difficult to get up for that show or is it more relaxing, so you can go blow it out.

It’s not difficult to get up for the shows.

Are you less or more nervous because they are right there in front of your face?

The thing that makes me nervous about shows is the singing part. That’s the only thing that makes me nervous. If you open your mouth and your voice screws up or whatever or the monitors are screwing up and you’ve got another 4 shows. You end up after the first show saying, "Aw f*@k, what am I going to do for the next three shows.

As far as the metal scene is going it has been dead in the water for a while and now it’s starting to come back. I don’t know if it is part of the kiss tour.

It just ah..

Cycle?

Partly and also because there are an awfully lot of metal fans out there. And they are not buying metal records, because they are not aware of them. Because they’re are no gigs, no promotions, and no activity. At the same time they are not buying anything else either. Maybe buying there old records again or adding to there collection. That’s 2 or 3 million record buyers in the states, who are basically not buying many records, because they are not being provided with the records to buy. Now the scene is starting to wake up , because all these bands are starting to come out of the wood work and starting to tour and all of the people are going to see a band and say, "Wow isn’t that great and maybe go out and see another one ." Ticket prices are cheap, because all the bands have dropped all these ticket prices. This is $10 or $12 bucks tonight, that’s two beers to go and see a band. The tee shirts are $20 bucks. So, relatively it’s a lot cheaper now, to go see a concert, then it was in the middle of the 80’s, when you had these crazy ticket prices and everything was jacked up and money was worth a lot less. So relatively speaking, the price to see a show is halved, at least, and that’s got to be an inducement for things to start happening. One of the other things is that when people go see metal bands, as long and they see decent metal bands and good records at the end of it, I think the satisfaction factor can be munch greater than going to see the product of some corporate A&R department, who’s gone out an head hunted another bunch of preppy nerds, who want to indulge in some shoe gazing and lecture corporate united masses and tell them what they are doing wrong. Record companies are bottoming out. They are slowly realizing that they can’t get out of the contracts immediately with all these bands that are not selling records, but they are gonna have to clean them out in the next year or so and they are gonna have to think of something else to do.

There’s metal.

There’s metal.

Is there anything special for the last night?

No.

Have you guys done the same set list on tour?

We were gonna change things around, but everyone forgot all the fu*@!n extra songs. I’m serious, they forgot them all

No Skunkworks songs?

Just before we went on the road, I played the guys "Back for the edge," and "Inertia," and everyone was like great, we should do those.

(Note: my tape recorded stopped at this point, with out me knowing it, at the time, however it was brief and when this picks up Bruce is talking about the sale of AOB compared to Skunkworks.)

This record has sold 3 or 4 times what Skunkworks sold over here. In Europe it has gone gangbusters, in Japan it has gone real well. Across the board it is going really really good. It could have gone 4 times as good, if we had been doing the OZ Fest. If people had seen this band on the OZ Fest, we’d kick everybody’s asses. Every single night on the tour would’ve been sold out. I can guarantee you. We’d be talking 150,000-200,000 albums by now, because people would just be blown away. Instead it’s going to be a slow build. I always figured it probably was going to be that way, because we have had no breaks so far. When we put the record out we knew we had probably one of the best, it not the best metal records of the year.

Of the year? The decade.

Possibly, possibly. I really think it’s that good, this record. We knew it would be flavor of the month on metal radio. We are on 40 AOR stations and a whole bunch of people just on the cusp. Until you get a break through with the tour, special guests on the arena tour and all of a sudden everyone starts dragging their bones along and the media starts dragging their bones along to those shows. And the basically don’t drag their sorry ass down to Jaxx, unless they are fans. What we’ve done with this tour is prime the pumped. We’ve demonstrated to promoters and anybody who wants to get sold on it, that we are good for 600-700 ticket sales in virtually every major market in the U.S. Which means if you put us on the right act, we’ll sell 600-700 tickets for you, so its worth having us on the bill. And certainly in a 5,000-6,000 seat and even a 3,000-4,000 seat venue that’s a quarter of the tickets. So, that’s significant and that’s exactly what we need. We need to tour with MegaDeth, we need to tour with that kind of act. There are a bunch of acts we could tour with, who we would go out with and we would knock the audience on it’s ass.

Do you worry that maybe some of those more known metal bands look at you as a threat opening up for them, and blowing them off stage.

I’ll be diplomatic about that. We just do what we do. If people should feel blown off then that’s not my problem.

I’ll read between the lines on that.

HAHAHA!

Do you go on the disaster that is the super highway.

The disaster that is the super highway. It really is a disaster actually. To me it’s just a kind of giant postal service, with out the psychotic men. Web pages are great, it’s when you actually get to the fiction element of the Internet, which is that it is in some way a useful real time communication tool, it’s not, in truth. Unless you happen to be two guys who really enjoy speed typing at each other. It’s not. It’s a bunch of guys flipping each other off every 5 minutes and trying to make inane wacky comments. It is a bit of a medium for people with highly hyper active bird brains. I go on there and sort of troll through the odd site every now and then, this is time consuming and a waste of time and energy and emotion.

Have you’ve seen any of the pages dedicated to you?

Yeah. Some of them are great. What I like is the fact that there is loads of information in there. And if you want to put something on there and post it and everyone can read it, its great. So as an electronic billboard it’s fantastic.

Have you seen my page? The Bruce Dickinson and then some page.

I have seen your page. I do the search engine thing and there are 10,000 entries with Dickinson. 1500 Emily Dickinson’s, let’s get rid of those, then some professor Dickinson, of some university, writing about toe nail clippings. The Internet is so far away from becoming what everybody hopes its going to become, technologically. Regards of software, the hardware is nothing like in place to do it. To do the Internet thing you need everybody with who knows how many thousand baud modems, you build on ISDN lines.

I noticed you had a lot problems in chat rooms. Then when you were on there no one thought you were Bruce.

Yeah exactly. The way to do that is to have everybody with video conferencing capabilities, ISDN real time video, 32bit sampling on the audio. And hey, how many gigabit’s do you want in the short term memory storage in your computer, to accomplish this and this is suppose to sit on every sophomore desk, so they can go and listen to the Spice Girls live on the Internet. I don’t think so. It’s not gonna happen. You need some serious high end computing capability to do that. So I watch with interest with mix amusement and disappointment, theoretically, I could sit in my basement set the band up, set the kit up, and put up two or three cameras and go online. (In Bruce’s announcer voice) Okay, were waiting for the first 200 callers to log into the show. And they log in and they swipe there credit card through. Okay do you want to put your recordable DVD in please. Cause this is yours. You paid for the rights to it. This is your concert. Yours personally on there. Anybody want to ask any questions or stuff before we start. What do you want us to play. Here is your menu of songs we can play tonight. Here’s a set list of 30 songs. Want to pick one? Take a vote, an electronic vote, everybody vote now. All right, it’s gonna be "Powerslave," one, two three, four. That to me is a great way to do the Internet, if some one could tell me how you can do that, then fantastic. I’ll just through out at Bill Gates and go Bill until you can do that, your Internet is s@!t.

What is the deal with your web page? When you click on news, it just talks about Edison. Do you have an contribution?

It’s Bill Yarring at Data Pro, he’s Dave Murray’s brother in-law.

What happen to the mascot?

We had to have another one made. He’s under the bus right now.

Someone stole him when you were shooting "Man of Sorrows?"

They stole him the night before the shoot. The girl who worked for Spitting Image, which is the puppet company that built it, the production girl, she took him home for safe keeping and her flat got broken into. The police said, it’s probably kids, because they took two mirror balls, inflatable stuff, coamputer and a phone.

Maybe it was Steve Harris?

(Laughs) No, he’s got a phone.

Tell me about Adrian playing with you in Donnington 92’? I never knew he did until later. Was that pretty weird? He hadn’t been with you guys for 4 years and Janick Gers is there, was that a pretty weird feeling?

The thing with Maiden I think was there was always this feeling, when I was always with the band, that the publicity was always very carefully stage managed to make sure everything was always one big happy family. Nothing bad ever happened in Maiden world. It was like and east end version of Walt Disney. Well, it’s Rod. He’s my manager and Maiden’s manager and he likes to make sure everything is all nice and neat and tidied up. And I think Adrian coming on stage was part of that, to make sure that nobody thought anything bad had happened and that everybody loves everybody really and that there were no real disagreements. Of course there were disagreements, that’s why he quit. But at the same time, it’s true to say that nobody goes around hating each other or any of that personal animosity crap. It was a little strange having him up there, especially with Janick, as well, and I felt a bit uhh. I didn’t know how Adrian really felt it, to be honest. I felt a bit like that he was being pulled up there for show, more for Iron Maiden’s benefit than his own, but I tend to be a cynic.

(At this point, the tour manager came in to signal the end of the interview. However, we were able to get a couple of pictures with Bruce and he went on to show us his new hand held PC. He was very cool and later on put on one his best singing displays ever.)