(Part I)

Eric - I want to talk first about your solo career. There's some news circulating around that you will be playing some festivals this summer.

B - That's correct.

E - It's surprising.

B - It surprising to me. I was asked what I was doing this summer. I said, well I am not planning on doing much really, just hang around. They said are you planning on doing any touring, maybe put something together and give the "Best Of" album a bit of a kick? I said not really. Putting a band together is enormously expensive and for a couple of weeks it doesn’t seem worth it. They said what about festivals? I said, well I don’t think festivals would be that crazy really, but see if anybody’s interested. But don’t commit me to anything.

Well, along came these three festivals, Sweden Rocks, Wacken and Bang you head, and I was astounded they wanted me to do headlining stuff and they were one month apart. I said it kind of sounds like good fun and I sat down and realize that I’d just been hanging out with this band Sack Trick. I’ve seen a couple of there shows andthey got this awesome rock drummer and I’d been hanging out with Al Dickson the week before, as well, so I called them up and said look guys I’ve got three festivals to do. It would not be Skunkworks, as such; we’d be doing material from across the spectrum of my solo stuff. Would you be interested since you know half of it anyway? They all came back, yea. I said this is not going to be an alternative type thing, like Skunkworks was. We’re going to do a fairly rocky/metally type set, which Al Dickson can easily play standing on his head. In fact he said yea, the other guy we’ve been playing guitar with is a guy called Pete Friesen, who was Alive Coopers guitarist and was in The Almighty. I know Pete Friesen and he’s a great guitar player and a great guy, as well. So I said, we’d have two guitarist, bass and drums. I said OK, we can just rehearse on our spare time and well show up and the promoters are paying for the equipment. So this sounds like a great day out. And that’s all it is.

E - What affect does this have on Roy? Did you ever think about having Roy, Adrian, Chris and Dickie to do it?

B - Then it becomes a question of gathering people up from the ends of the earth and then it becomes a huge production and that’s not what I want to do. Plus the fact that the gigs are actually spaced a month apart. Suddenly I’d have to fill in the dots and then all of a sudden I’d be touring all the way through the summer and that’s not what I want to do.

E - Does Roy care about this?

B - I’m going to run it past him and offer it. I’m not sure how Roy feels about coming over doing one gig then going back to America, coming over doing one gig and going back to America. It’s a bit pointless. And what I like about working with the Sack Trick guys is I’m working with a band. I’ve always tried to have a band that is like a real band. And if you put people into a situation where they don’t know the guys then stuff can get weird. So I like to keep it a nice tight little unit. Sack Trick guys are brilliant. They’ve got great morale they’re really fun guys to be with it’s really simple and it doesn’t preclude me, at some future date, putting together a complete band with Dickie and Roy and going out and touring the flesh pots of the western world.

E - Is there a chance we could see more than one Skunkworks song being played, like "I’m in a band with an Italian Drummer?"

B - [laughs] We’ve got to bear in mind that this is a big time metal festival. They will be getting more of the metal end of the set.

E - Back from the Edge could be...

B - We’ll play Back from the Edge, of course. Until we get together and start playing a few of these tunes. I’ve already got a preliminary set list, which should really rock.

E - Do you want to divulge that?

B - No, no, no. Not until we’ve actually played it and tried it out. Then we still might be adding a few things. We’ve got to bear in mind they are festivals and therefore the idea is not go out do something weird back end experiment. It’s to go out and rock and have a blast.

E - As far as learning Chemical Wedding material, from what I understand the GURU went through intensive one on one sessions with Roy for several weeks. Is that something Alex is working on?

B - I’ll be interested to see how that works. There’s Probably only two or three tunes that I’ll consider playing off of The Chemical Wedding. So I don’t think that will be a big issue.

E - As far as new solo material, from what I understand you and Roy have already written a bunch of material. What are the plans on that front? Everyone was expecting a new solo CD this year.

B - That’s all been pretty much kicked aside since we are planning to reconvene a Maiden towards the end of this year.

E - Did the ‘Best Of’ fulfill the purpose of reaching the Maiden fans that maybe weren’t familiar with your solo material?

B - I’m not sure to be honest with you. Certainly in the US it ran into problems initially.

E - What type of problems?

B - September 11. I had already done all of the promotion in Europe and everything. It was the American promotion that got nailed. It actually has been selling steadily in America. Doing rather respectfully well.

E - What type of sales compared to ‘The Chemical Wedding,’ which sold around 40,000 units in America? Is it comparable to that?

B - No, because obviously Chemical Wedding there was a big hoo haa and it was a new album. But this one is selling at the moment is selling 200-300 copies a week, which is really respectable and it doesn’t seem to be dropping off. I talked to a journalist yesterday, for the cover story for Discoveries Magazine, who picked up a copy of the ‘Best Of’ played it and said, s**t this is great stuff. What are all these records I don’t have and bought the catalog and loved all of it. I was like you’re the kind of guy I want to reach. So, I just think it’s a great record and a great asset to have out there. And it seems to be doing what it was intended to do albeit not grandstanding and selling gazillions of records but then without the huge press thing, without touring and without what is was never intended to be it’s never going to achieve those. You really don’t go out and do loads and loads of touring on a retrospective best of record. It’s my impression anyway. Cause otherwise you are going to overexpose your self and I’m very conscious of the dangers of that. Because I’ve been doing pretty much all of the Maiden promo. All the high profile stuff. If I came out again with an album this year and turned up in September going, Hi guys it’s me again. And by the way I’ll be see you next march when the new Maiden album comes out, or whenever it does, I’ll be here again. Every three months I’m here again. It’s too much.

E - How did the Clive Burr shows come together? When did you discover he had MS?

B - Before Christmas. The idea of the show was mooted and of course everybody went, yea that sounds like a really good idea, if Clive’s into it then we’ll do it. Initially it was one show a Brixton, turning rapidly to two shows at Brixton, which then morphed into three shows at Brixton. It changed from being, oh we’ll just get together do a days rehearsal dust off some old equipment and go play a set. A bare bones stage with no production. It changed to, we’ve got to have the full Rio production because we just have to and cause it’s Iron Maiden so we have to do the full thing. And that means that well have a lot of start up cost on the first show so we’ll make all of the money on the second show or we’ll make even more money if we do the third show. So having these enormous start up cost therefore we play three shows and not one, then the webcast was added to the last show, then the single came out and it went in the top ten. So, then we had to do Top of the Pops on the third night. Steve still only wanted to rehearse for three days and I said, "Woe, hang on Steve. It’s been 14 months since we’ve done this. I think we need longer than three days. And he said, "umm okay." So we had seven rehearsals booked in over a period of about 10-12 days with some rest time so people could recover after the shock. In particular me since the voice takes a bit of time to get adjusted. As it turned out we only had three days in the end. Adrian got tendenitious in his hand, we lost a day with him. Nicko got a viral infection and we cancelled the last rehearsal before the show. Steve cancelled the rehearsal early on cause he had to do something on the DVD. So we ended with 3 or 4, but basically not a whole lot.

E - How much money did you raise for Clive.

B - I don’t have the final figure yet cause some stuff will still be coming in, but it’s approaching £250,000 (My recorder cut off, but it’s around this figure).

E - What is his outlook?

B - Short answer I don’t know but I do know that there are two types (Again my recorder cut out but B - said something to the effect that the first type is aggressive and he doesn’t have that one). The other one is more gradual and relatively predictable. It can progress at a very slow pace and you can slow it down. He’s had MS for 5 years. So, knowing Clive he’s bearing up very well and he’s really trying to fight this thing.

E - As far as "Rock in Rio" I was really impressed. No offense but I was not impressed with your previous live recordings, post "Live After Death."

B - Neither was I.

E - But "Rock in Rio" is just as good if not better than Live After Death.

B - That’s what I have been saying in the interviews. 21^st century Maiden is better than "Live After Death" era Maiden. I think it really shows a way forward for the band.

E - And it’s really hard to beat "Live After Death" because it sounds phenomenal.

B - It does sound phenomenal and of course Martin Birch produced that and it was a great live record. There were overdubs on "Live After Death." We fixed up a few things. Guitars we fixed up. Vocals we fixed up on "Run to the Hills" and probably a few lines else where, as well. And of course we had three nights to pick from. So, we assembled this from three nights and re-did a few things. "Rock in Rio" is one night and we overdubbed nothing. Although, Steve did admit that he took one or two lines when I didn’t sing at all, cause I was pointing the mike at the audience, and he just cut and pasted a couple of lines that I had already sung and dropped them in. For which we got all of this bulls**t from this jerk off on the web calling me a liar and everything else, which really annoyed me.

E - Really?

B - Yea.

E - Do you guys actually pay attention to what people say on the board?

B - Generally no. But I objected to being called a liar. I really took exception to that because I’m not. All the other stuff about can I sing anymore or are my feet too big or whatever people want to go on about, that’s opinions and that’s what bulletin boards are for. But it was this thing of being called a liar, which was repeated several times. It was like however did this obviously had some axe to grind. If you did this on any other web forum you end up in court. It’s called slander. And the other thing is I was just annoyed because this is a great fu**ing live album and without blowing my own trumpet too much, I thought I sounded great that night.

E - You had one night to record this where with "Live after Death" you had four. Was the whole band a little on edge knowing you can’t blow this?

B - I think we were. I certainly was. I was really hyped up for it. It was the biggest audience we’ve ever played to an audience with which I was certainly very familiar. So, I was really conscious that they were expecting a great gig. It was being televised anyway that night going out to a potential audience of 100 million across all of South America and on pay per view in the states and we were shooting the DVD there and one shot at the live album so, not too much pressure. [Laughs] We had our road crew do the usual thing of doing the sound checking all of our gear and I walked out there going I hope all of this works.

E - When I saw you on the BNW tour you had a lot of banter with the audience where as here you didn’t.

B - They cut it out. You have to get the bootleg. There’s a whole rant on Britany Spears.

E - Is it going to be on the DVD?

B - I don’t know.

E - When is the DVD coming out?

B - They finished it, I think. They were doing the DVD equivalent of mastering it during the Brixton shows. So, assuming it’s all approved I figure we can probably shoot for a release in May.

E - Is this a momentum killer by not releasing it as the same time with the CD?

B - The ideal scenario was to release it last September almost simultaneously like the live album and the DVD a week later. And we kept delaying it, delaying it and delaying it until eventually we could delay the live album no longer. We said we’ve got to go with the live album now and we just hope we can get the DVD in before the summer. It may have worked out better in the end doing it this way.

E - In my opinion Donington‘88 was possibly the best Maiden show ever. Has Rock in Rio eclipsed that?

B - Well, I think so. (The recorder cut out again but you didn’t miss much)

E - Was Donington‘88 the best Maiden show ever?

B - No, I don’t think so.

E - What was?

B - I think you could pick a whole bunch of shows off the last tour. You could take anyone of half a dozen shows off the last tour. I’m looking at it purely from the point of view of playing. You could pull out the last show (Rock in Rio). You could actually pull out a couple of shows at Hammerstein Ballroom. You could pull out Universal Amphitheater in LA this time around, an awesome show. So they’re a whole bunch of shows off these last couple tours that I think anyone of them could be turned into a great live album.

GO TO PART II