THE TIME HAS COME!

Last month, Iron Maiden vocalist Bruce Dickinson had a chat with metal-is from the middle of his hectic promotional trip round the world. This month, in the second part of that interview, he tells us about some of the songs on the band's new album, 'Brave New World'. Who came up with the title 'Brave New World'? Bruce: I suggested 'Brave New World' for the title within a couple of months of rejoining the band and everybody pretty much thought it was a decent idea, so I set about re-reading Aldous Huxley and writing the words for the song. Then after recording 'Wicker Man' or thereabouts, in a sudden fit of enthusiasm, we all decided that 'Wicker Man' would be a great idea for an album title, because of the fantastic imagery to do with the movie. So we stayed with that until we got the artwork back just after Christmas and that just didn't cut it, so then it went back to 'Brave New World' and by this time, there was a massive panic, because everything had to be changed around! As you say, some of the song titles on the new record, such as 'Brave New World' and 'Out Of The Silent Planet' seem to relate to book titles. Yes, although with 'Out Of The Silent Planet', what I did in my tiny infantile brain was that I based the song on a chunk of the movie 'The Forbidden Planet', whose sub-title is 'Monsters From The Id'. So it's a pretty straight sci-fi romp. And was 'The Wicker Man' inspired by the film of the same name? I came up with it and the song is really actually nothing to do with the film, but it does have the line in it, "The shadow of the Wicker Man is rising up again". I was going to call it 'Your Time Will Come', but Steve said, '''The Wicker Man''s cool' and I said, "Yeah, it is kinda cool… oh stuff it, yeah, 'The Wicker Man'. Bang! There's a video!" So 'The Wicker Man' is only to do with the song by association. What the song is about is destiny and that it's your turn today to have your day in the sun. It's your turn to change the world, the day when you wake up and think, 'God, I could do anything today!' It's like the first day of spring - and that's the 'Wicker Man' association, because in the movie, the Wicker Man is the sacrifice that creates this island of eternal spring on which Britt Ekland leaps about covered in blue dye! I tried in the song to get the idea of what it was I felt when I was standing in front of 50,000 people on a really, really great day, like a Bercy (an arena in Paris) with Maiden, when you're singing something and everybody gets it and they're singing along with you - exactly what it feels like at that moment - and I tried to encapsulate that in different little ways in the lyrics, as if to say, "You can do that too in your own life, your time will come" sort of vibe. Does 'Ghost Of The Navigator' have anything to do with the film called 'Flight Of The Navigator'? 'Ghost Of The Navigator' is a sort of a metaphor for life. I won't go into all the various bits of free association by which I arrived at the lyrics, but it's basically a navigator smashing his way through the seas on a journey which is uncertain even why he's making it. He might not make it, it's like he's destined to do this journey because of his past, why he doesn't know, where it is even he doesn't know, he just has to go there, and he's determined that he's not going to get distracted by the ghosts of all the other navigators who failed before him. He ploughs on through day and night and all the hallucinations of lack of sleep, his compass is swinging crazily, and he's still going on. And that's what the song is all about, it's kind of a metaphor for life. It's like, why do people carry on? It's because they want to feel things. And that's what the message of the song is. The line of the song is "Nothing's real until you feel" and that's what the navigator is searching for the whole time. He's just gonna carry on 'til death, until he feels it. Another song which sounds like it has an interesting story behind it is 'Dream Of Mirrors'. That's one of Steve Harris', isn't it? He has a lot of dreams. He's always been a bit of an insomniac. Steve's obviously fairly introverted and has a lot of stuff to do with déjà vu and out of body experiences and this kind of stuff, and 'Dream Of Mirrors' has a lot of themes that he's dealt with in other songs, but this one is just really, really well-executed and the chorus is drop-dead one of the best things he's written in years. The lyric is just fantastic, it's really, really memorable and it's a great tune. You're describing these songs in terms of stories. Do you need to find a story line in order to write a song? If I don't have a story, I need to create one, a little myth just for myself to write it. I find it more difficult to relate to songs that don't have stories associated with them or don't have a story that I can manufacture in my head. If I can put a movie together in my head when I'm singing a song, then I find life much easier. Does that mean that when you perform them live, you're acting them out? Yes… Getting into character? It's not quite like that. It's almost like channelling the song. It's not acting, the song is just playing through you and you're seeing it in your head as you tell it, you're telling a story basically. But that's how I view it, yeah. Your voice is sounding fantastic on the new record… Yeah, a few people have said that and I'm dead chuffed! And I'm also pleasantly surprised, because the whole thing was live, so I sang each song five or six times when we actually put the tracks down in the first couple of weeks and that was it, it was done, so I was blown away. The triple axe attack of Dave Murray, Janick Gers and Adrian Smith is sounding good too. We call them 'The Three Amigos' and The Three Amigos did a terrific job! Basically, I don't think you could really assemble an ego between the three of them in terms of an adverse ego, they were all incredibly collaborative and we never really noticed that there was an issue about people having a different guitar parts or arguing about solos, because they would just go off into a huddle in the corner and 15 minutes later, they'd reappear and go, "We've fixed it all up - he's doing this, he's doing this and I'm doing this", and off they'd go and do it. There was a lot of very smart guitar thinking. Between Dave and Adrian and Janick, there's three very, very clever guitarheads. Was 'Brave New World' an easy album to record? It was the easiest Iron Maiden album I've ever recorded. It was probably one of the easiest albums I've ever recorded full stop, because it was all done live, so all we had to do was go in and just do it. In fact, the worst part about it was sitting on our asses, waiting for all the performances that we'd done to be run through the microscope and assessed and graded and put in their proper positions in the order of life on the record, because that's quite time-consuming. We can rattle off performances one every five minutes and in a day, the band has done enough work to keep the producer busy for a week and I suppose that that was the bit that me and Janick found frustrating, because we wanted to be in there, getting on with it. After five weeks, when I went back in to say, "Okay, what do I have to do on my lead vocals?" and I was all geared up for a week of pain and suffering and headaches, Kevin (Shirley, producer) just said, "No, you're done." And I was. I think I had to sing two words and maybe four lines of a chunk that I hadn't sung originally, and that was it. It was strangely anti-climactic after all the work we put in on the pre-production. We rehearsed the songs like we were going to go and do a gig with them and then basically we went into the studio and did a gig, but in the studio. Kevin has a unique way of putting together the sound in the recording process. Effectively, he has a monitoring set-up that he brings with him which enables each member of the band to have their own eight channel mixer, so they control completely their own environment and you get exactly what you need to give a great live performance. For me, it was just a dream. I could really sing and let rip and of course, my voice had just come from doing all the rehearsals in Antwerp, so it was in really shape, it was fit and really strong. It was great. So Kevin had a major role in making this album easy to record? Yes, he did. We couldn't have made this record without him - no question. You now have an incredibly long tour in front of you, stretching out until the end of the year. Are you looking forward to that? Yeah. It's two months around Europe and then we have a few days before we do America. Then it's these big dates in America and then we've got a few days before we go down to Australia and New Zealand, and I'm doing backflips over the idea of playing down there in Oz, 'cause it's such a fantastic place, and we have a week's break at the end of that, so we can just chill out and investigate Gods Own Country. Then it's into Japan for two weeks, which is always a blast, and then it's back to South America. As I go through it in my head and I look at all the places we're gat we're going to do, ioing and I think of wht's really bloody exciting, you know? So I can't honestly say that I'm not looking forward to any part of it.

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