Bruce Dickinson

Name Bruce Dickinson Age born in 1958 Nationality United-Kingdom Bands Bruce Dickinson Iron Maiden (UK-1)

Paul Bruce Dickinson (born August 7, 1958 in Worksop, Nottinghamshire, England) is a British singer, airline pilot, radio show host, fencer and songwriter, best-known as the lead singer in the iconic heavy metal band Iron Maiden. According to All Music Guide, Dickinson "was the most acclaimed and instantly recognizable vocalist to emerge from the New Wave of British Heavy Metal movement of the early-'80s".

Brief summary

Before Iron Maiden, he was the singer in a similar band called Samson from 1979 until he joined Iron Maiden two years later. In Samson and previous bands, he went by the name of "Bruce Bruce". He made his recording debut with Iron Maiden on their Number of the Beast album in 1982. During previous years, he was in Styx (1976) (not to be confused with the American band of the same name), then went on to sing for Speed (1977 - 1978). When Speed split up, he joined Shots until the summer of 1979.

Dickinson quit Iron Maiden in 1993 in order to pursue his solo career and was replaced by Blaze Bayley, who had previously been the lead singer of punk-metal band Wolfsbane. Dickinson's solo work ranges from the Alternative Rock sound of 1996's Skunkworks, to the all out Metal style of Accident of Birth. Dickinson was releasing an artistic energy he felt was suppressed by Iron Maiden's strict progressive metal format, which he claimed could not accommodate emotional reflection as evidenced in the lyrics of "Tears of the Dragon." After releasing two traditional metal albums with former Maiden guitarist Adrian Smith (which were arguably more akin to the genre than Maiden's epic format), Dickinson rejoined the band in 1999 along with Smith. Both are still in the band to date. Since then, Dickinson has only released one more solo album but says his solo career is not over.

Childhood
Paul Bruce Dickinson was born in the small mining town of Worksop, Nottinghamshire. His mother worked part-time in a shoe shop and his father was a mechanic in the army. Dickinson's birth hurried the young couple into marriage. Initially, he was brought up by his grandparents; his grandfather was a coal-face worker at the local colliery and his grandmother was a housewife.

When Dickinson was about to start school his parents moved from Worksop to Sheffield, the nearest big city, where more jobs were available [citation needed]. Dickinson's first school was Manton Primary. Of this period, he recalled "I grew up in an environment where it struck me that the world was never gonna do me any favours. And I had very few close friends, because we were always moving. I think that's partly why I grew up feeling like such an outsider. I didn't have an unhappy childhood, but it was unconventional, to say the least".

Dickinson's first musical experience was dancing in his grandparents front room to Chubby Checker's "The Twist". The first record Dickinson recalls owning was The Beatles single "She Loves You" which he managed to persuade his granddad to buy him. "I was only four or five but I really loved that scene, The Beatles and Gerry & The Pacemakers. ... I noticed they had B-sides, and that sometimes I liked them even more than the A-sides. That was when I first began noticing the difference between 'good' music and 'bad'." He believes that this marked the beginning of him thinking like a musician.

When Dickinson was six his family moved to Sheffield and set up a house and had regular jobs. He found it difficult to adapt himself to the environment. In his spare time he tried to play an acoustic guitar belonging to his parents, but it blistered his fingers. When moving to Sheffield, he had to change school. He was sent to Manor Top, which he disliked. After six months, his parents decided to move him out to a small private school called Sharrow Vale Junior. His parents earned a living from selling estate. A lot of Dickinson's childhood was spent living on a building site. His parents had reached the stage where they were making profit. Dickinson's parents bought a boarding house where his father sold second-hand cars off a forecourt.

This gave them the opportunity to give Dickinson—then 13 years old—a boarding school education and they chose Oundle, a public school in Northamptonshire. Dickinson enjoyed being away from home. "I didn't particularly enjoy being with my parents, so I saw it as an escape. I think it was because I hadn't built any real attachment to them when I was very, very young." Dickinson was picked on and routinely bullied by the older boys of Sidney House, the Oundle boarding house that he belonged to. Dickinson's interests at Oundle were often military. He co-founded the school wargames society, and he rose to a position of some power in the Combined Cadet Force. At fifteen he joined the school amateur dramatics society.

"I was 13 when I first heard Deep Purple's 'In Rock' album, and it just blew me away! I heard this thing coming out of someone's room one day, and I went in and said 'Whoa! What's that?' And they just looked at me disdainfully and went 'It's "Child in Time" by Deep Purple. Don't you know anything?' But I was too amazed to care. The first album I ever bought was Deep Purple In Rock, all scratched up, but I thought it was great."

Dickinson obtained bongo drums from the music room and practiced. Dickinson remembers trying to learn "Let It Be". In a recent episode of BBC2's Seven Ages of Rock, Bruce said in interview that, like Sinatra's My Way, Iron Maiden's Run to the Hills was based on "rising sixths". Whether or not his illustration was correct, it has to be said that Bruce knew nothing about rising sixths when he left Oundle. He never learned an instrument at the school, and as far as his contemporaries can recall, he could not read music. Any technical musical skills that Bruce now possesses were acquired after his stay at Oundle.

Dickinson was later expelled from Oundle for urinating in the headmaster's dinner. Neil Ashford, his co-urinator, was rusticated; that is, sent home for the rest of the term rather than being permanently excluded from the school, on the grounds that the contribution to the headmaster's beans had been Dickinson's idea. Returning home to Sheffield in 1976, Dickinson enrolled at a local Catholic comprehensive school, although not a practicing Catholic himself. In the summer of 1976, he joined his first band. He had overheard two other children talking about their band and that they needed a singer. Dickinson volunteered to do the vocals. They rehearsed in the drummer's father's garage and the band were impressed by Dickinson's singing. It was at this point Dickinson decided to buy a microphone. The first gig Dickinson's new band did was at the Broadfield Tavern pub in Sheffield. Originally called "Paradox," the band changed name upon Dickinson's suggestion, to "Styx", unaware of the American act with the same name. They made local newspaper headlines when a steel worker was awoken by their performance. Of the incident, it was said: "He bottled the guitarist and chucked the drums off-stage". Soon after, the band split up.

University

After leaving school Dickinson didn't really know what he wanted to do. He joined the Territorial Army for six months, which he did not enjoy. As army life was not what he wanted to do, he applied for a place at University. He had met the minimum grades for getting in and read history at Queen Mary College, in London's East End. His parents wanted him in the army, but he told them that he wanted to get a degree first. "That was what they wanted to hear so that was my cover story. When I got down there I started immediately finding and playing in bands."

In college, Dickinson got involved in the Entertainments Committee. "One day you'd be a roadie for The Jam, the next you'd be putting up the Stonehenge backdrop for Hawkwind or whatever." In 1977, Dickinson met a guy called Paul "Noddy" White. He was a multi-instrumentalist and he had a PA and other equipment. Dickinson suggested that they form a band together. This would eventually evolve into the band "Speed", described by Dickinson as sounding like a 'crossover between Judas Priest and The Stranglers with a Hammond organ on top of it.' Dickinson recalled: "It had nothing to do with taking speed, we were a completely drug-free band, we just used to play everything ridiculously fast. Like Speed Metal, but ten years too early." Dickinson was the vocalist and occasionally played guitar. "I got Noddy to give me guitar lessons and I ... started writing stuff straight away. He showed me three chords and I'd write stuff just from those three chords."

Speed didn't last long, but it encouraged Dickinson to continue to work to be a musician. Dickinson spotted an ad in Melody Maker with the caption "Singer wanted for recording project". Since he had never been near a recording studio he replied immediately. He "wailed, wolfed, hollered and made noises" onto a tape and with it went a note that read; "By the way, if you think the singing's crap, there's some John Cleese stuff recorded on the other side you might find amusing." They liked what they heard and Dickinson came down to the studio. The band was called "Shots" and were formed by two brothers, Phil and Doug Siviter. They were amazed by Dickinson's vocal abilities and they started talking about what music they liked. "I started saying Ian Gillan, Ian Anderson, Arthur Brown, and Doug goes, 'That's it! Fucking Arthur Brown, man! Sometimes your voice is a dead ringer for Arthur! We've got to form a band.' This guy's got a studio and he wants to form a band with me! I was like 'Yes'." A song "Dracula" from this session can be heard as the closing track on The Best of Bruce Dickinson, disc two. According to Dickinson this song is very first thing he ever recorded at all.

Dickinson played pubs with Shots on a regular basis. One particular night, Dickinson suddenly stopped in the middle of a song and started interviewing a man in the audience, making fun of him for not paying enough attention. He got such a good response he started doing it every night until it became a regular routine. "Suddenly everybody was paying attention, cause they might be next. The first time I did it, afterwards the landlord of the pub was like ' Great show, lads, See you next week'. So we started sort of building this bit into the show. And that was when I first started to get the hang of, just not being a singer, but being a frontman, too."

The next step in Dickinson's career was taken in a pub called the Prince of Wales in Gravesend, Kent, where Shots were playing regularly. One night, Barry Graham ("Thunderstick") and Paul Samson paid a visit. The legend says that Thunderstick, who was there in his every day guise, became the victim of Dickinson's gimmick. "He looked a bit weird so I did a spiel on it". Obviously impressed with his stage-act, Thunderstick and Samson talked with Shots after the performance. A couple of weeks later, Samson called and asked him if he was willing to join their band, Samson. Dickinson was interested since this meant he could play larger gigs in London. Dickinson wanted to "do things with a bit of a weird edge to it". By then, Shots had almost become a heavy metal comedy act; the show had completely taken over the music.

Samson

Formed by Sidcup-born guitarist Paul Samson in 1977, the band had already been established with their debut, "Survivors", released on an independent label. The band toured quite extensively in the UK. Dickinson finished his final exams in the morning and in the afternoon he went down to Wood Wharf Studios in Greenwich to rehearse with them.

Since he was not sure of what to expect from a professional rock band, he decided just to jump in and make the best of it. "In fact, the first rehearsals I went down to with Samson pretty much set the scene for my entire time in the band. I left my girlfriend who I had been with for three years at University. I told her I was gonna turn into a complete arsehole. I thought it was what I was gonna have to do, frankly. Because it was not at all what I expected. In my naivety I thought people who were in rock 'n' roll bands were great artists, and it was a huge shock to the system to realise that they weren't, that they didn't even aspire to be, really. Some of them did, maybe, but some of them, like Samson, were very frightened of the idea, some of them just wanted to have a good drink, a good shag and take some drugs, and I found that really, really difficult to relate to. I thought 'I've got to find out if I'm gonna work with these guys and we're gonna make music'. And as soon as I sort of accepted that, I thought 'Right, I'd better go down and find out what all this drug-taking and shagging's all about then'."

He did smoke a bit already and he had even tried dope at college. And in Samson it was more of a habit. "I discovered quickly that if you were straight you couldn't actually communicate with anybody. It was impossible. So I just thought I'd have to smoke a joint, otherwise I wouldn't be able to write anything, and that's pretty much how it went. I more or less resigned myself to it. I thought it was just part of the price that had to be paid. To be honest, every single thing I ever did at that time, I believed it was just a step towards my goal, of just wanting to be a singer in a rock 'n' roll band." Dickinson nowadays refers to his time in the band as "a blur of chemicals".

During the first rehearsals they wrote songs that would be recorded and released on the album called 'Head on'. "I had loads of stuff kicking around and they had loads of bits so we just glued it all together." The songs were slipped into the live set on the coming tour, which was to promote the "Survivors" album. This was a step forward for Dickinson as his first real tour was third on the bill with Randy California and his all time hero Ian Gillan. During his time in Samson, Dickinson was billed as "Bruce Bruce" (derived from Monty Python's Bruces sketch about the Australian philosophers), a nickname that was forced upon him by their management. They insisted on making all the cheques out to "Bruce Bruce" which had the effect that Dickinson had to go through enormous trouble to cash them in. The management was one of Samson's recurring problems. They booked the band on rather ill-matched support tours, which saw them playing a venue, only to return one week later with another act. Eventually this chain of events culminated in high court leaving the band unable to play gigs and get paid. When the legal side of things were settled and the band left their management in 1981 they discovered that their record company was going bankrupt. "We made every mistake in the business" Dickinson acknowledges.

Frustrated with the fact that the band never seemed to get anywhere, Dickinson contacted guitarist Stuart Smith with the idea of forming a band. They had a few rehearsals and wrote some material together but then Samson seemed to get a better deal and the obvious thing for him to do was to stick with them. During the "Shock Tactics" tour, Thunderstick left the band and was replaced with Mel Gaynor, a black funk/rock drummer who was in the band very briefly and later ended up in Simple Minds. "When you took Thunderstick out of the equation and replaced him with Mel, this phenomenal drummer, there was no excitement in it there anymore. When he played, he played everything perfectly. Everything was in time, there was no mistakes, there was no danger anymore. So I got bored. I had time to think about the shopping list on stage and that's not good. And I realised that this was what Paul wanted. It enabled him to go into more ZZ Top, boogie sort of areas."

Dickinson's last gig with the band was at the Reading Festival in 1981, a gig which was immortalised by the BBC and subsequently released on the album "Live at Reading 81". "Listening to some of these old tracks they stand up really well" says Dickinson. "Certainly all the stuff on 'Shock tactics' does. When you hear the Reading Live album the band was really cooking. And the songs don't sound dated at all." Around that time, Iron Maiden had began considering change of vocalist due to of increasing problems with