A review of the Bruce Air journey
The noise was so pure, so powerful, that in places, I ACTUALLY FELT THE LITTLE HAIRS IN MY ARMS STAND UP. Which never happens.Read the rest [url=http://forum.maidenfans.com/index.php?act=ST&f=1&t=2998]here[/url]
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And Then Me And Bruce Jumped Out The Plane
Jeres is going back to Penzance for Christmas, where he will stay with a chum and spend many hours in the boozer telling Then Me And Robbie Jumped Out The Helicopter stories. "The problem with telling Then Me And Robbie Jumped Out The Helicopter stories is they impress half the people, and make the other half think you're a GREAT MUSICIAN," noted he, solemnly. "Of course the people that think you're a GREAT MUSICIAN are impressed as well."
Which may be true. Sometimes you can't beat a good Then Me And Robbie Jumped Out The Helicopter story. Sometimes the occasion really calls for one. But sometimes it does not, and to sit there going And Then Me And Robbie Jumped Out The Helicopter is plain rude, just crass and showoffy. You have to be smart about these things, especially in the company of non-music business people. Music business people are often rude and showoffy, and won't mind too much if you are too (they are certainly less likely to notice, as they'll be thinking of their own And Then Me And Robbie Jumped Out The Helicopter, or may even be reciting it over the top of yours).
It is a fact of life that many things we do, we do so that we can talk about them afterwards. This starts early on - going further up a tree than strictly necessary, chasing animals and vice versa, drinking far more booze than is strictly necessary for 14 year old… we live in a boastful society, and it isn't terribly healthy. Binge drinking and violence and Telling Outrageous Lies are all nasty habits, hard to break, and generally the fault of a boastful society that demands strange feats of its young men and women, a whole generation of whom have emerged plump and slothful thanks to the lack of a decent war…
Indeed. And for those of us that were never very good at violence, and gave up Telling Outrageous Lies, the need for the Then Me And Robbie Jumped Out The Helicopter story remains. So when EMI's press department phoned up asking if I'd like to send a journalist to Paris to review Iron Maiden on a plane flown by former fencing champion frontman Bruce Dickinson, it was only natural that I should nominate myself for the job.
And so it was in good spirits that I made my way to Gatwick Airport on Saturday morning, while the rest of the country was watching England beat Australia at Rugby. I was running a little late, but I got to Gatwick in good time, and boarded Air Bruce along with an ugly gaggle of excitable journalists and competition winners. On our seats were Iron Maiden goodie bags, which contained lots of stickers, rain coats, Jack Daniels, condoms, and tour programmes, oddly. I wondered if we were in actuality headed off to some street teamers orgy, but that still didn't explain the raincoat. Perhaps they were expecting inclement weather.
But the flight was enjoyable. It was my third, and the first time I'd not suffered from agonising air bubble in the brain syndrome, perhaps due to my diligent sweet sucking. The gentleman sat next to me seemed to be suffering some discomfort however, as his eyes were squeezed shut and he was gripping the seat in front of him with a quite worrying force. He didn't let go until we'd levelled out and Bruce was chatting amiably about seatbelt lights over the intercom.
I did wish I'd not missed breakfast, however, as the food was quite vile. We were served shrink wrapped little trays, containing a few sickly little slithers of chicken, some clammy salad and a rubbery ball of what appeared to bread, but I decided to ignore it. Anyway, flat-faced sticksmith Nicko McBrain was wandering up the aisle grinning beatifically and shaking everybody's hand, which was quite a spectacle. But nothing compared to the glorious spectacle of the world above the earth: I peeped incredulously out my little window, marvelling at the sheer audacity of the clouds, which gleamed and sparkled and poured out before me like a sea of white larva.
We landed safely, and assembled out the front of the plane for a group photo, and Bruce posed in the cockpit for yet more shots. We were then herded aboard a fleet of coaches, wherein some jovial French Police officers didn't check if we were armed and pretended to inspect our passports, then let us escape off to Paris and our Hotel, which we discovered upon arrival to be cheerful Holiday Inn styled things, conveniently located next door to the ugly Egyptian inspired colossus of an indoor stadium, on whose Pyramid-like exterior crawled tight-trousered young men with scraggly long hair, who pumped their fists at us as we drove by.
Posh voiced young women amongst our number complained loudly about the "cheapness" of the hotel, but I found it rather charming. It did smell of old people's homes, and there was no pool table, but I had a whole room to myself: double bed, television, and a pleasingly hardcore shower which I made use of immediately. Outside the gathering armies roared, and I decided to walk among them, while the rest of our party took naps. I wandered a while, but it was evident we were in the tourist area, with nothing but gaudily signposted hotels and gift shops as far as the eye could see. Eventually, after discovering that bus stations in France stink of piss just like ours do, enjoying a fruitless conversation with a lady tramp, and being shouted at by a gang of small children, I happened upon a cinema, and with a couple of hours to kill, decide to go in and use the little French in my command to see a movie of some kind. As the only words I could remember were "oui", "merci" and "boulangerie", I somehow ended up watching Alien, the directors cut, dubbed in French. And it was an excellent experience - being familiar with the storyline, I missed nothing due to the language barrier, and somehow the film seemed even more atmospheric. I found myself working out phrases and decided to learn French. French is cool. And I had felt like an ignorant, rude imbecile attempting to communicate with my pathetic little collection of words earlier.
Strangely, when the credits started rolling, the lights went straight on, and everybody in the cinema stood up and started hugging each other and talking rapidly. People beamed at me and said things I didn't understand so I fled into the night.
Back at the hotel there was a reception being held, which involved some sausages on sticks and bottles of beer, but I'd missed the sausages and drank water and stood in the corner wondering why there wasn't anybody I knew there. But I was quickly approached by a beaming young lad of about seven foot, atop whose rangy shoulders wobbled a shiny, goblin face framed with two scraggly lengths of blonde hair, who informed me that he was very much in awe of my twiddly moustache, and would like to have his photograph taken with me. I posed for the shot with him, and he told me that he was, "the happiest Danish man in the World."
"This is so awesome for me," he beamed. "I won the competition of the Iron Maiden fan club. There are just two of us here! I flew out from Denmark this morning to London and had breakfast with Bruce! It is a dream."
He told me that he was nineteen, and all he did was "love Iron Maiden all the time".
"I won the competition because I wrote in about my troubles in getting a ticket for the show in Denmark," he said. "First you see I couldn't buy one because they'd all gone, and I looked everywhere! I travelled around the country to get a ticket. One time I finally thought I found one on the internet, and it was, what is it in yours, um, £200? It was about £200, which is a lot for me, but it was Iron Maiden! So I sent the money, but no ticket came, and I rang the man who I sent the number to but he never answered! Never! So I was, um, stolen, ripped from."
"Yes," he sighed, "I was very sad. But soon a man said he had a ticket, and a man said he would give it to me if I drank 30 beers in four hours. And I said, I can't drink that many beers! I will die! As you can see, I am skinny. I will fall and break my head, haha! But he showed me the ticket and it was real, so I drank! I filled my neck with the beers, many of them, and I drank and then he said, OK, you win! And gave me the ticket! And I was so happy! I put it inside my jacket pocket and went to celebrate in a bar until it was the end of the time for drinks."
He gripped my shoulders at this point for emphasis.
"But in the morning I woke up and I realised that the worst had happened! I had lost my jacket! I was so drunk! So I rang the bar but they didn't have it. And I walked around all day, but I did not find it. And then I saw that there was the competition, so I entered and I won! Nobody in my family ever won anything. Everybody is very jealous and proud as well."
The kid explained that he'd waited till everybody else had left the plane so he could run around and grab all the Iron Maiden stickers people left on their seats, and steal the Iron Maiden branded seat covers. "I have over 30," he beamed.
At that point we were told it was time to go to the show, so we did. Maiden fans were all over the great Lego Arena like ants, swarming about shouting and pouring beer over their heads. I eyed them warily and scuttled through the entrance, and made my way to my seat, where I enjoyed the latter portion of Helloween's set.
But Helloween, improbably tight and enthusiastic as they were, paled, nay, disappeared, in comparison to Iron Maiden, who from the off were entirely awesome. Greeted by a deafening roar from the capacity crowd, the band tore forth grinning manically, wee Bruce Dickinson resplendent in a pair of very silly leather trousers and clutching a Rugby Ball, which he gleefully booted into the crowd, and proceeded to lay metaphorical waste to the assembled mob. Armed with an arsenal of material mightier than any in the modern metal pantheon, the set let up not once - from new belters like 'Rainmaker' and 'No More Lies' (the latter eliciting an audience sing-along that drowned out Bruce) to blatant classics like 'Can I Play With Madness' and 'Fear Of The Dark', the thing just kept slamming - the quad assault of the stringed-section out front doing synchronised axe wielding while dear Nicko battered his pods and Bruce ran about the place in a variety of silly guises, from masked weirdo on 'Montsequr' to Grim Reaper to - yes - tin hat for the First World War themed 'Paschendale'. The noise was so pure, so powerful, that in places, I ACTUALLY FELT THE LITTLE HAIRS IN MY ARMS STAND UP. Which never happens.
And then, when the band bid their first adieus, we all roared with joy because, while that would have been better than most band's gigs, we were going to get an encore. And they were going to play 'Number Of The Beast' and 'Run To The Hills'. And they did.
6! 66!
THE NUMBER!
OF THE BEAST!
And
WHITE MAN CAME!!!
ACROSS THE SEA!!!
Proper anthemic shit. I had a sore throat from yelling along. At the afterdrinks thing back in the hotel, I chatted with the journalist who'd been sat next to me on the plane, who didn't like flying. "The problem with life is, as you get older, it gets worse," he said, sadly. "There is less to look forward to you. People die. You will die."
But then Bruce Dickonson showed up, looking like my Dad, and got mobbed, and I decided it was important I greet the man and get a photo, so I was like, "Bruce! You are a fucking GENIUS!" And his manager or whatever grabbed me and went,
"Be cool! If you want to talk to Bruce you have to be cool! You are not being cool!"
So I was cool and got my photo taken with Bruce, which was cool. And once that was done I had no reason to be awake, so I left everybody to go and party in France and went to my hotel room to watch BBC World, and President Shevardnadze was getting booted quite dramatically.
When boarding the flight back home we were greeted by Nicko with a firm handshake and on departure, after a rollercoaster of a flight due to wind and the vicious weather hanging over Gatwick airport, we were met by Bruce, who winked and pumped hands like some weird hand pumping machine, and that was that.
On the tube between Victoria and Old Street a well groomed, silver haired middle aged man wearing an expensive looking suit and carrying a briefcase sat opposite me smiling behind his newspaper, and at each stop he sang:
Down with Bush and Blair
The War Mongering Pair
Let each one resign
Honour the memory of Dr Kelly
He would then smile, and hide his face behind his newspaper. When we got to Old Street, he smiled at me, sang his song again, apologised to the carriage, and scuttled off along the platform. When telling the stories of my weekend afterwards, I liked that bit the best, which made me wonder all sorts of things about the nature of story gathering and telling, and of fame, and of getting one's photo taken with somebody just because they sing songs in a really amazing metal band, but sadly I haven't the time to wonder properly, as this column needed to be finished ten minutes ago and Jeres is shouting at me.
Adam Alphabet
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Another review, albeit full of cliches...
[url=http://www.manchesteronline.co.uk/entertainment/music/indieandrock/stories/Detail_LinkStory=74966.html]Manchester Online[/url]
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And the included pic:
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