Bruce

“I WAS a bit of a Duracell bunny,” confesses Iron Maiden’s irrepressible Bruce Dickinson. 

“To some extent, I still am — much to the dismay of people around me! They’re like, ‘Don’t you EVER stop?’” 

Dickinson is reflecting on the manic energy he brought to the heavy metal titans after replacing original singer Paul Di’Anno. 

In 1981, he was a 22-year-old member of hard-rocking fellow travellers Samson when Maiden’s manager Rod Smallwood came calling.

Unlike many of his peers, including his predecessor, Dickinson didn’t have to rely on drugs and booze to fuel his high-octane performances. 

He continues: “I discovered that having these amazing, ecstatic, endorphin-filled moments — being in front of people and singing with a group in total sync — was way more uplifting than any drugs on offer.” 

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One of the great spectacles in rock is a sweat-soaked Dickinson running and jumping around on stage with audiences in the palms of his outstretched hands. 

Match his physical presence to a rich operatic tenor and an iconic catchphrase, “Scream for me!”, and you have a powerful combination.  

The songs that stretch his vocal cords aren’t too shabby either — many filled with intriguing historical references.

Run To The Hills deals with European colonisation of Native American territory, The Trooper visits the Crimean War’s Charge Of The Light Brigade and Aces High is a pilot’s eye-view of the Battle Of Britain — not your average metalhead subject matter.  

What about the 14-minute Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, based on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem and written by Maiden founder and leader Steve Harris? 

“It’s just epic,” says Dickinson of the closing track on the band’s fifth album Powerslave, released in 1984.  

“It’s one of my favourites to perform.

“I love the storytelling aspect and we’ve got huge screens now to tell the whole story.” 

Let’s also not forget the enduring core band which today comprises bassist and chief lyricist Harris, three virtuoso guitarists in Dave Murray, Adrian Smith and Jannick Gers, mighty drummer Nicko McBrain (now retired from touring after a stroke in 2023) — and, of course, Dickinson.

The singer remembers Maiden’s gruelling, breathless climb to metal’s summit in the Eighties, when he was “run ragged but young enough to handle it”. 

Now 67, he accepts that his unfettered antics have taken their toll on his body, but insists: “Damaging it and knackering it by doing things on stage is a relatively easy fix — drugs take away your soul.” 

I’m speaking to Dickinson to mark the arrival in cinemas next Thursday of Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition, a riveting film documenting their 50-year rollercoaster ride with insightful interviews, live footage and unguarded offstage moments. 

Through the prism of band members past and present, and superfans including Metallica’s Lars Ulrich, Public Enemy rapper Chuck D and actor Javier Bardem, it is 106 minutes of pedal to the metal. 

The movie is the first milestone in a momentous year for the band formed in Leyton, East London, by Harris in 1975. 

In late May, Maiden continue the Run For Your Lives world tour, including a monster outdoor event, Eddfest (named after their shape-shifting undead mascot Eddie), at Knebworth on July 10 and 11. 

Then, in November, they join Oasis, Phil Collins and Billy Idol, among others, in being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame in the US. 

Dickinson says: “We’re about to do the biggest tour of our lives, playing to 2.5million people in six months. 

“People might say, ‘How the hell did that happen?’ to which I answer, ‘Have a look at the film — that is how’. 

“We’ve had lots of tidal waves and earthquakes in our career.”

Crucial to the upward trajectory has been the sense of community around Maiden and their fans, which Dickinson believes is only rivalled by “a very different kind of band, the Grateful Dead and their Deadheads”. 

He says: “We’ve never compromised and have grown on our own terms, creating our own universe. 

“You reach those millions one person at a time,” he adds. “Look them in the eyes — although that is a lot easier in a pub than in a 50,000-seat arena!” 

Though the upcoming tour will send Maiden through Europe, then on to North, Central and South America, Australia and Japan, Dickinson spares a thought for the places they can’t visit “because of the chaos in the world”. 

“There are huge pockets of fans in Iran,” he affirms.

“And in Israel, Ukraine and Russia — all these wonderful people who just want to love everybody else who loves Iron Maiden. It’s tragic.” 

This is cue for him to trawl through the mists of time to the early days again and it’s clear that, above all, it is Steve Harris’s band. 

Referred to as “the boss”, he formed Maiden just before punk upended the music scene. 

Dickinson says: “Steve felt very strongly about punk because many in the media decided it was the ‘acceptable face of heavy metal’ — and that enraged him. 

“Frankly, the first LP wasn’t that well produced so it actually sounded like a crap punk album.

“Steve has always said, ‘My God, I wish I could have remade it with Martin Birch [who produced their next eight records].” 

In the Burning Ambition film, we see the struggles of original singer, the late Paul Di’Anno, who embraced rock and roll excesses to the full, prompting Harris and Smallwood to search for a replacement. 

“Paul was very charismatic with a characterful voice,” says his successor. “He was a bit of a pirate . . . like Adam Ant or a member of band I loved, Johnny Kidd & The Pirates.  

“His look was different to the rest of the metal world — and that was cool.” 

With a rueful expression, Dickinson remembers being described as a “human air-raid siren” after his first gig with Maiden. 

He says: “They were obviously big fans of Paul who came to see me at the [now defunct] Rainbow and one of them sent a letter to a music magazine, Melody Maker maybe. 

“It said what a terrible disaster the show was, like ‘hearing my favourite songs being sung from inside a cement mixer by an air-raid siren’. 

“Even though someone was trying to be insulting, Rod Smallwood took the attitude, ‘When life throws lemons, make lemonade’. 

“He nicked the idea and turned the whole thing on its head, which actually made me laugh.” 

ON EDDIE: ‘EASTWOOD OF ZOMBIES’

MENACING mascot Eddie is an Iron Maiden icon.

Illustrated in numerous guises by Derek Riggs, the shape-shifting creature has appeared on every album cover and in every outlandish stage set. 

He inspired the name of the band’s outdoor shindig Eddfest at Knebworth in July and features in new animated sequences for the Burning Ambition movie. 

Bruce Dickinson calls Eddie the “Clint Eastwood of zombies” and says: “He has a Dirty Harry type of morality about him. 

“You think he’s evil but he’s ambivalent, so you don’t know exactly where you stand with him,” he explains. 

“If you’re basically a good person, you’re probably going to be OK – but he’ll blow you away if you’re not!” 

Dickinson believes Eddie has a future beyond Maiden. “One day, inevitably, we’ll stop playing live. 

“The great thing about Eddie is that he’s eternal. He can have a whole career on his own. We could even write albums for him.  

“In fact, there’s so much you could do with him, whether it’s movies, animation, or an Eddie avatar show. All these things are up for grabs.” 

To Dickinson, sharing the stage with Eddie is a rite of passage. 

“He’s an extension of our world but you just can’t pin him down.” 

A fascinating aspect of Maiden has been Dickinson’s relationship with Harris, not always plain sailing but one that created undeniable chemistry. 

And surely Harris accepts that the flamboyant singer helped propel his band to stadium-slaying proportions. 

“When I was in Samson, people were calling Steve ‘the Ayatollah’,” says Dickinson. “He had a reputation for being uncompromising and rigid. 

“But, as we’ve got older, he’s been much more amenable to ideas that might broaden the vision.” 

However, Dickinson had to set one thing straight from the start.  

“When I first did shows with Maiden, I was thinking, ‘Why am I standing on one side of the stage? I’m the singer’. 

“The answer was because Steve would go running down front and centre playing the bass. Suddenly I would have this big old lump of wood thrust in my ear. I nearly lost a couple of teeth because of it!” 

Dickinson insisted that, as lead singer, he was going to “stand at the front, in the middle — and I wasn’t going to back down”. 

Iron Maiden’s third album, The Number Of The Beast (1982), was Dickinson’s first and its songs including the title track, Run To The Hills and Hallowed Be Thy Name took the band to the next level. 

For the new recruit, making the album was the calm before the storm.  

He says: “It was like 1939 when Britain was at war but everybody was still out sunbathing and reading the papers because nothing bad had happened.  

“Then we hit the road and, wow, we had a No1 album, the single was going crazy and we were doing seven, eight, nine shows in a row. Even our day off was travelling.” 

Despite the overwhelming demands, Maiden enjoyed a rocket-fuelled rise to the crest of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM), a movement that included Def Leppard, Saxon and Motörhead. 

Dickinson says: “The albums we were producing in the Eighties were phenomenal. We created a style with The Number Of The Beast and it continued with Piece Of Mind and Powerslave. The trajectory was fantastic.” 

As the Burning Ambition movie attests, the band began building a devoted following in all corners of the globe. 

In August 1984, Iron Maiden ventured behind the Iron Curtain to play five shows in Poland, much to delight of fans starved of music from the West. 

In January the following year, the band went nuclear in South America by playing Rock In Rio to a 300,000-plus crowd.  

ON FLYING: ‘I HAD ROAD TO DAMASCUS MOMENT’

ANYONE who follows the life less ordinary of Bruce Dickinson will know there’s a lot more to him than just being the singer in Iron Maiden.

At school, he took up boxing but he “wasn’t very big” and people “would beat the crap out of me”.

So he took up fencing instead, inspired by a metalwork teacher who brought in a “full-on, two-handed sword like Excalibur”.

Not one to do things by halves, he became a champion – so good that he reached the UK top ten, trained with the Olympic squad and is still a member of fencing clubs in London, Paris and LA.

Dickinson harboured other dreams, too. “I was really into aviation and wanted to be an astronaut or a pilot,” he says.

This helps explain how he qualified as an airline pilot and ended up flying Iron Maiden on three world tours, firstly in a Boeing 757 dubbed Ed Force One and then, in 2016 for the Book Of Souls tour, a jumbo jet.

He says: “My love of flying came from my great uncle who was in No. 200 Squadron RAF in the Second World War. When I was five, he’d tell me all these stories.

“But I was rubbish at maths in school and you need to be a rocket scientist to be a pilot so I became a rock star instead.

“Then, in the Nineties, I took a trial flying lesson in Florida for 30 bucks, just to see. It was a road to Damascus moment.”

The next step for Dickinson was training with British Airways, flying a 757. Picking up the story, he says: “From 2000 to 2011, I was a pilot for UK company Astraeus, flying people around the world on holiday. I had to take unpaid leave to go on tour with Iron Maiden.

“You would probably have had no idea I was your captain because no one listens to captain’s announcements!”

During this time, Dickinson hatched the idea to extend his flying exploits to his other job as a member of Iron Maiden.

“I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we put all the equipment, the band and the crew on one airplane?’ To my surprise, our manager Rod thought it was a great idea. Normally, I get told to p*** off!

“So we did three world tours. It was brilliant calling it Ed Force One – I think that was an invention by the fans.”

Dickinson remembers his initial horror when American secret servicemen boarded the plane in Chicago. “I went, ‘Oh s**t! What have we done wrong?’ Turned out Obama was coming in the next day on Air Force One and the men just wanted to have a look at Ed Force One.

“I’ve still got Air Force One-branded M&Ms, matches and a bottle opener somewhere.

“So, I’m thinking, ‘What’s going on in the President’s plane?’ They’re cracking open beer bottles, smoking themselves to death and taking all the red Smarties.”

As the Eighties progressed and the Nineties dawned, the pace rarely slackened and, as we witness in unvarnished detail in Burning Ambition, “the wheels eventually fell off”.  

Guitarist Smith quit in 1990 over “creative differences” and an exhausted Dickinson dropped a second bombshell by leaving in 1993 to pursue his solo career, much to the consternation of his bandmates, notably McBrain. 

“It was a sudden burst of artistic integrity of my own invention,” confesses Dickinson. 

“I knew Maiden were great, but they didn’t allow me to do anything a bit out there.  

“I was still in my thirties and the thought of leaving momentarily terrified me. But then I read Henry Miller’s quote, ‘All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without the benefit of experience’. 

“It hit me like a ton of bricks. I thought to myself, ‘If you don’t jump, you’ll never find out’.” 

As for the reaction to his departure in the Maiden camp, Dickinson says: “The only person I told was the manager, Rod. I don’t know what got said between him and the guys but Nicko got upset about it. And fair enough.” 

He sees what became a five-year absence as part of “a real story of real people”.  

He adds: “We’re a bunch of bizarre brothers who got stuck together. In the end, we had to make it work.” 

So it was in 1999, after Wolfsbane singer Blaze Bayley had gamely attempted to hold the fort, that guitarist Smith and singer Dickinson returned to the fold — for good. 

“To use a football analogy, Blaze had been passed a ball which was a ticking timebomb,” says Dickinson, before recalling his bizarre meeting with Harris and Smallwood to discuss his return. 

They convened in secret at a yacht club in Brighton, entered by a special code — an occasion Dickinson likens to a scene from a John Le Carré novel. 

“Part of me was thinking, ‘This is ridiculous’. It felt like going through Checkpoint Charlie in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold,” he says. 

“But I looked at Steve and realised he’d been through the ringer with all kinds of things. I decided that if he’s up for it, then we should get on with it. 

“I told him, ‘I am the one guy on the planet you can trust. When I say we’ll make a great new album together, we will’. And we did [Brave New World]. 

“Steve and I are very different individuals — but that’s our strength. 

“I’ve certainly grown to respect him. Has he grown to respect me? I don’t want to put words into his mouth.” 

Dickinson signs off with a heartfelt statement: “The music is the thread that holds us in Maiden together. Whatever we started, we started well — and when eventually we finish, we will finish well.” 

As the time approached 10:30 Tuesday night — nearly three hours after Bruce Springsteen had marched onstage at Inglewood’s Kia Forum alongside 18 of his musical comrades — the 76-year-old rock legend told the crowd he hadn’t intended to be there.

“This is a tour that we never planned,” he said. “The E Street Band is here with you tonight because we need to feel your hope and your strength. And we want to bring some hope and bring some strength for you.”

It wasn’t impossible to believe him.

After a two-year trek that finally wrapped last summer amid the release of a massive box set and a splashy Hollywood biopic, Springsteen might’ve been expected to spend 2026 counting his money and his accolades. Yet the way he tells it, the actions of a “corrupt, incompetent, racist, reckless and treasonous” president and his administration spurred him back into action.

“If you’re feeling helpless, if you’re feeling hopeless, if you’re feeling betrayed, if you’re feeling frustrated, if you’re feeling angry — I mean, I know I’ve been,” he said.

Tuesday’s show was the first of two this week at the Forum.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Thus the hastily arranged Land of Hope & Dreams tour: two months of U.S. concert dates that began last week in Minneapolis, where federal immigration agents killed two American citizens in January, and will wrap May 27 with a stadium show in Washington, D.C.

“The White House — this White House — is destroying the American idea,” Springsteen proclaimed during Tuesday’s gig, the first of two this week at the Forum.

Before we get to the performance itself, let’s acknowledge that the Boss is sticking his neck out here. Sure, he’s protected by his wealth and his celebrity; sure, he’s preaching to the choir in every city he and the E Street Band visit.

But what other musician on Springsteen’s level is speaking out the way he is right now?

On Tuesday, he introduced “Streets of Minneapolis” — a brand-new protest song in which he mentions both Alex Pretti and Renée Good by name — with a vividly detailed monologue about the circumstances of their deaths. Then he led his players through a fervent rendition of the driving folk-rock tune.

“It’s our blood and bones / And these whistles and phones / Against Miller and Noem’s f— lies,” Springsteen sang — one lyric that might’ve inspired President Trump this month to urge his followers to boycott the singer, whom he compared in a social media post to a “dried up prune who has suffered greatly from the work of a really bad plastic surgeon.” (In truth, Springsteen probably enjoyed that.)

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Whatever the risks of his speechifying, you had to admire — here in our age of political infotainment — the natural finesse with which Springsteen threaded his prepared rhetoric into Tuesday’s set. He knew just when to have the E Streeters vamp so he could talk about NATO and USAID; he knew when it was wiser to lead the audience in a chant of “ICE out.”

Indeed, as much as he was speaking his mind, Springsteen was providing his fans with an opportunity to work out their own anxieties in rowdy singalong versions of classics like “Born in the U.S.A.,” “No Surrender,” “The Promised Land” and “Out in the Street.”

If the concert’s animating impulse was outrage, the prevailing emotion was joy, even — or especially — when the music was at its most pointed, as in covers of Edwin Starr’s “War” and “Clampdown” by the Clash.

With an extra E Street member in Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello, Springsteen made “Badlands” and “Death to My Hometown” shimmer and stomp; “Murder Incorporated” was a gritty soul-rock rave-up, while “Youngstown” got a scabrous guitar solo by Nils Lofgren that reminded you of his other gig in Neil Young’s Crazy Horse. (Springsteen’s wife, Patti Scialfa, who said in 2024 that she has cancer, wasn’t part of the band Tuesday.)

About halfway through the show, Springsteen sang “American Skin (41 Shots),” the early-2000s song about racialized police violence he wrote after Amadou Diallo’s killing by four NYPD officers; he followed that with “Long Walk Home,” which he described as “a prayer for our country.”

Bruce Springsteen

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Played back to back, the songs made you think of how little agreement we’ve come to over the last quarter-century about who gets to be called an American. The identity is always under attack, and it’s always being defended.

Anyone but a Bruce stan would admit that Springsteen leaned a little hard on recent stuff here: “House of a Thousand Guitars,” “My City of Ruins,” “Wrecking Ball” and the like.

Yet as with his speechmaking, he can still read a room. “It’s gotta be done,” he said with a grin as the band revved up “Hungry Heart,” one of a handful of old pop hits he did that broke from the evening’s topical throughline.

Near the end — in an encore that went bang-bang-bang with “Born to Run” into “Bobby Jean” into “Dancing in the Dark” — Springsteen, his shirt drenched with sweat, took a seat onstage and thanked members of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center for attending the show. (Also in the house Tuesday: Henry Winkler.)

Then he offered one final homily before closing with Bob Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom.”

“These are hard times, but we’ll make it through,” he said. “We’re the Americans. What do they say? Americans do the right thing after they’ve tried everything else.” He shook his head as though he were running through a mental inventory.

“F—!”

Tzruya “Suki” Lahav, a violinist and poet who played with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in the mid 1970’s on some of the band’s most beloved LPs, has died. She was 74.

Yonatan Albalak, her son, posted on Facebook April 2 that his mother had been “gathered into infinity after a short and hard battle with the cursed disease” of cancer.

“She wrote songs that touched people’s hearts,” he wrote, describing her as “a special woman, smart, pure in heart and loving life. She was the best mom I could ever ask for.”

Lahav’s tenure with the group lasted only between 1974 and 1975, yet she contributed several standout moments to Springsteen’s catalog. She performed on “The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle” and its follow-up, the smash “Born to Run.” She played the famed violin intro to the classic single “Jungleland,” and performed the multi-tracked choir on “4th Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” after a church vocal group failed to turn up for the session. She also played on a fan-favorite, widely-bootlegged cover of Bob Dylan’s “I Want You.”

She entered Springsteen’s camp after her husband, Louis Lahav, engineered on Springsteen’s 1972 debut album, “Greetings From Asbury Park.” Lahav told the Jerusalem Post in 2007 that she joined the group as “a young girl in a flowing white dress from Kibbutz Ayelet Hashahar in the Upper Galilee, barely out of the army, barely married … I went from kibbutz harvest music to rocking with Bruce.”

She remained a major artist in Israel for decades after her tenure with Springsteen. She recorded with the Israeli rock band Tamuz, and wrote songs for prominent Israeli artists like Rita, including “Yemei Hatom” and “Shara Barkhovot.” She won the ACUM Lifetime Achievement Award and the Arik Einstein Prize there. In 1990, “Shara Barkhovot” was Israel’s submission to the Eurovision Song Contest.

Tom Skinner, an entrepreneur who was on The Apprentice in 2019, appeared on Question Time in Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, which featured a debate about social media giants

TV personality Tom Skinner squirmed under interrogation from Fiona Bruce during a showdown about social media on Question Time.

The presenter of the topical debate programme accused Mr Skinner, 35, of being “part of the problem” amid the debate around the pros and cons of apps, such as TikTok and Instagram. The entrepreneur regularly posts videos to his 536,000 TikTok followers, including clips of him eating full English breakfasts at his favourite café. He told Question Time he also makes money by promoting products on Instagram, TikTok and other apps.

But Ms Bruce fronted him on his use of the platforms, suggesting he himself was actually playing into the challenges young people and their parents face with social media. Meta and Google were this week found liable for causing addiction in users in a landmark £2.2million legal case, which led to last night’s debate around how they government should help protect children from such addiction.

Addressing Mr Skinner, the host said: “As you said, you are benefiting from social media, you make part of your living that way and, part of the reason you are able to do so is because of the addictive algorithms that will push people towards yours (social media content)… It is giving you a platform, and job opportunities come your way because of it. In the nicest possible way, you are part of the problem.”

The remark led to a wry smile from Justice Minister Jake Richards, also on the panel in Clacton-on-Sea, Essex. Dad-of-three Mr Skinner hesitated as he answered, eventually insisting his videos are harmless.

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Ms Bruce, presenter of the programme since 2019, said: “How can you on the one hand say ‘people shouldn’t be doing it so much’ but, on the other hand, you are benefiting from it?” It left the entrepreneur stuttering again, before he went on to stress the importance of the roles parents should play in protecting children.

“It’s bad. It’s bad when people sit on their phone all day. I’ve seen it myself. I’ve done it myself, I sometimes know I’ve got to be up in four hours and I’ve sat there and I’ve scrolled my brains through, watching absolute nonsense,” Mr Skinner, from Romford, east London, said.

Other panellists defended Mr Skinner, arguing his clips are innocent and “do not drive the worst of the algorithms”. The case this week heard Meta and Google both were negligent in the design or operation of their platforms — including the “infinite scroll” feature that was claimed to trigger addiction in users.

The jury also decided each company’s negligence was a major factor in causing harm to a 20-year-old woman, who says her use of social media as a child addicted her to the technology and worsened her mental health struggles.

Both firms have strongly rejected the verdict and plan to appeal. Meta said: “We respectfully disagree with the verdict and are evaluating our legal options”. A spokesperson for Google added: “This case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site.”