Bruce Q&A
Billboard have done a large Q&A with Bruce Dickinson. Here's a snippet:Q: In the period when you were out of the band (1993-98), did your solo work fulfill you?
Dickinson: The reason I left Maiden was that I genuinely didn't know if I was getting that buzz anymore from doing new stuff. Nothing bad happened, there were no disagreements. The machine ran like clockwork, and that's when I started to get really antsy.
Also, the cult status of the band meant that whatever you did, people would go, in a patronizing fashion, "Oh, nice effort." I didn't think they'd have any problem finding another singer, but their subsequent career path hit a few oily patches on the road.
My own career fell off a cliff, and I decided I'd have one go at completely reinventing (myself), so everybody thought I'd gone raving mad, and I came up with an album called "Skunkworks" (1996). It got great reviews, but the record company wasn't sure.
Then I did a record called "The Chemical Wedding" (1998), which was digging really deep into territory I'd never been to before, but keeping a rock sensibility.
I think it's fair to say it was a fairly groundbreaking album, did really well sales-wise and I could see myself having a successful global cottage industry as an artist. Clearly it was never going to rival Maiden. But at the same time, looking at Maiden, it was obvious something was going to crack.
To read the full article, check it out on Reuters.com.