Iron Maiden: Still Up For The Challenge
Bruce Dickinson recently spoke to Canada's Chart Attack about the group's forthcoming CD, "Dance Of Death", due on September 9 in America through Columbia Records. Click [url=http://www.chartattack.com/damn/2003/08/1201.cfm]here[/url] to read the full article.Chart Attack also has a Toronto live report, [url=http://www.chartattack.com/DAMN/2003/08/0618.cfm]check out[/url].
source: [url=http://www.chartattack.com]http://www.chartattack.com[/url]
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Iron Maiden: Still Up For The Challenge
Tuesday August 12, 2003 @ 04:30 PM
By: ChartAttack.com Staff
Iron Maiden
As they roar through a tour in support of their soon to be released new offering, Dance Of Death, those crazy British purveyors of true-metal, Iron Maiden, paid a visit to Toronto, and when they did, the band's ever-talkative vocalist Bruce Dickinson sat down backstage to let us in on what's up with the new CD.
"The writing style's a bit looser," says Dickinson as he lounges on a red couch before the Amphitheatre show. "We were prepared to be a bit more open with our emotions on this record than we were on Brave New World, and on Brave New World in fact we were more open than we were on a lot of the previous albums."
Don't worry Maiden fans 'cause that doesn't mean Dickinson, bassist Steve Harris, drummer Nicko McBrain, and triple guitar team Dave Murray, Adrian Smith and Jannick Gers have gone emo or anything.
"Every Maiden album is a challenge because you have to stay within the tramlines of what Maiden is, or else you lose it," says Dickinson. "To develop within that framework can be tough, so you just have to relax about it and you have to sometimes not try so hard and just wait."
Fans will be happy with new tracks like "Wildest Dreams, " New Frontier" and "Montesegur," because they have that classic Iron Maiden sound, but in Dickinson's opinion getting that Maiden sound is all about waiting for inspiration to hit.
"The key thing about writing a Maiden album is patience and waiting 'til the right idea comes along," he says. "It's not about locking yourself away and writing feverishly every day for six months, it's probably about playing pool for about six months and then going, 'Ah, an idea! Great!'"
According to Dickinson when inspiration does indeed hit, it hits like lightening.
"When it does happen it happens very quickly, and when we get a really good idea it can be turned into a song in 24 hours," says Dickinson.
Having been part of a touring act for more than 20-odd years Dickinson now looks out to a mixed crowd of elder metalheads and their kids, so how does Bruce feel about performing for a multi-generational fan base?
"It's flattering, but sometimes confusing when you go out live — depends on where you go because you get an audience of under 23 year olds and when they're going nuts it's great for us, but when you get an audience that's much older it's frustrating 'cause the night before we might have played to a bunch of kids that were going wild and then you go out and you're playing in front of a bunch of people drinking Coke and eating fries," he says. "You just think 'Why did you come?' But ironically if we went to a show we'd be that person eating fries and drinking Coke!"
—Tim Melton