What Does This Button Do?

by Bruce Dickinson

  By the time we got to ‘Revelations’ I had put on my rather natty electric-blue Ibanez guitar. It matched the rather stylish electric-blue acoustic Ovation that I still have. The anger built as I tried to communicate with the engineer at the side of the stage. Hot and bothered, I wrenched the guitar off, over my head, and split my forehead open on its wooden edge.

  My head was bleeding profusely as I approached the monitor board.

  The engineer saw the blood and looked horrified. ‘Fucking fix the sound – don’t fucking stand there like a goldfish,’ I ranted.

  I expect I looked like a raving lunatic, which at that moment I was. To prove a point, I smashed my guitar across the mixing desk, and broke it halfway down the neck.

  ‘FIX IT!’ I screamed.

  The sound did not improve, so I threw all the wedge monitors off the front of the stage. Crowds love this sort of thing; they think it’s show time. Sometimes it may be, but sometimes it’s not. This whole spectacle was being shown live on TV across millions of Latin American households.

  I did a bit more singing and then went behind the amps to calm down a bit. A roadie gave me a towel to wipe the blood away from my eyes, and then another member of the crew showed up, very excited. He looked carefully at the wound.

  ‘Rod says can you squeeze it and make it bleed some more,’ he said. ‘It looks great on the telly.’

  Next day, the picture was front-page news: sweaty, bloodstained me, and 300,000 new Iron Maiden fans.

  We relished it all, and the comedown from the show lasted all night. It was a late show in any case, so it was four or five in the morning when we got to the hotel. Our ears were still ringing and alcohol seemed to have no soporific effect; the adrenalin rush was still overpowering the body’s efforts to sleep.

  I walked into the hotel lobby at about 6 a.m. There were no fans. The road was deserted out to the beach, and the sun was deliciously eyeball-roastingly warm, just before it would become scorchingly unbearable.

  It was a strange feeling to be free after six days under siege. I indulged in the forbidden fruit of escaping without a minder and slowly crossed the road, took off my shoes and sat down on the beach, wiggling my toes in the hot sand.

  Not long now, and then back on a plane to the middle of winter. What a fucking weird life this is, I thought to myself. I looked to my left. There was Brian May, eyes closed, face towards the sun, probably thinking something similar. I left him to it. Funny old world, really.

  Much Ado About Cutting

  Arriving back in England, I promptly took myself off for two weeks to a fencing camp in Sussex and arrived back with a coaching qualification. I was rapidly coming to the conclusion that being a rock star was not all it was cracked up to be.

  The rest of the summer I spent training with Great Britain Olympic coach Ziemek Wojciechowski. The fencing competition season kicked off in early September, so it was good for me to try prodding and poking someone other than Americans.

  I was, I think, ridiculously fit. I was training up to five days a week, sometimes twice a day, and if I had a competition, one of those days would be the competition itself.

  Fencing competitions tend to be one-day affairs. As many as 200-plus fencers are whittled down to a final of two by early evening. To get to a final eight would normally involve starting at around 9 a.m. with a pool of five others – so five fights up to three minutes each. The next part involved sitting around and getting cold and bored. Then the same again. Sometimes there would be a third round, until the remaining fencers were placed in a knockout tournament, either from 128, 64 or 32.

  When it came to the knockout encounters, the fights became three rounds of three minutes each to score up to 15 hits on the opponent. Over the years this format has changed in minor ways, but the basics remain the same.

  To win a competition could therefore involve up to 40 three-minute rounds of fighting, each progressively harder as the opposition gets more effective towards the end. It’s a very physically and mentally demanding sport. It’s also an almost incomprehensible sport to an outsider.

  Watching a sword fight in a movie is all about seeing what is going on. Watching a real fencing bout is all about seeing what is being hidden. A fencing point is scored in a split second, and if you, as a spectator, could see it coming, it’s almost certain that the opponent would see it too.

  High definition and slow-motion replays help to explain what often resembles a cat fight with a wobbly knitting needle, but it’s very unsatisfactory. Fencing points are not always pretty, as we expect them to be after seeing sword fights in the movies.

  My satisfaction was entirely personal, and based on two pillars that I thought mattered. One was respect from your peers, the other fencers who shared a common sporting ethos, and the second was respect for the philosophy of the sport. What I liked about fencing was that there was no ending to it. Like other martial arts, every opponent is different, and being an expert is no guarantee of success against an awkward beginner.

  The enemy in fencing is as much yourself as the opponent. It is what I love the most about the sport. I learnt more than I could have imagined when I started to fence, and in just a couple of years I began to compete seriously. It would prompt me to question my very identity.

  It took nearly a full season of competition and training before I started thinking something was not quite right inside my brain. I am not normally a very angry person. I can, on occasion, be a little volatile and I become very passionate about certain things, but destructive anger, seldom. Yet the further I advanced in competition, the more it seemed as if there was a pressure cooker inside my head that wanted to burst. I had never experienced anything like it.

  I went back to the drawing board, the same way I learnt to sing again after discovering a different voice inside my body. A bit of research yielded a series of self-help questionnaires and a book of left-brain, right-brain puzzles by Professor Hans Eysenck.

  After filling in all the spaces and answering all the puzzles, my conclusion was that I used both sides of my brain equally. I was slap-bang in the middle. It explained why I found it easy to talk to different types of people, but it provided little in the way of advice as to whether or not I might be left-handed, or at least ambidextrous.

  The latter characteristic runs in the family. My father and my cousins are all ambidextrous. I fenced right-handed and always had done. I wrote right-handed but wasn’t any good at playing racket sports right-handed. I was left-footed and I used my left eye to sight down rifles or look through telescopes. I also favoured my left ear when listening to the telephone.

  Cross dominance in hand-eye coordination is not uncommon – it’s an excellent set-up for a cricket or baseball batsman. A right-hander with a dominant left eye sees the ball in his peripheral vision a fraction of a second quicker.

  There is a theory that in fast-reaction sports the left-hander is innately quicker in plotting a solution, and therefore able to wait longer before making a decision, all of which puts more pressure on the opponent.

  I was now in my mid-twenties. I looked at my rather puny left arm. There was a degree of muscle wastage from the nerve damage caused by all that headbanging. My right side was much stronger. Fencing is quite a one-sided sport and even my legs had become lopsided as a result.

  I went back to my coach, Ziemek. Could I, perhaps, be left-handed – or at least should I be left-handed?

  I put the sword in my left hand. He asked me just to step forward and back, extend my arm and hit him, not fast, just as smoothly and accurately as I could.

  ‘You are immediately better left-handed,’ Ziemek said. Next, he produced a piece of paper and asked me to draw an irregular polygon with my right hand with my eyes closed, which I did.

  He put the pen in my left hand and asked me to draw the same shape. With my eyes firmly slut, I drew a mirror image of the shape, almost identical and exactly the same size.

  ‘I think you should be the other way round,’ he said. />
  I started again, but left-handed. I was slow and my coordination painful; the muscle memory was all wrong and had to be reprogrammed. My left arm tired quickly and my neck ached – it was twisted on the side from the headbanging injury. Various small muscles in my forearm had atrophied because of the disc problem. This was the rehab for my body, but it was like a revelation for my brain. The anger was gone. The will to win and the passion remained, but the pressure cooker had disappeared.

  The next chance I got, I went to a squash court by myself and took the racket in my left hand. The ball went, unexpectedly, exactly where I wanted it to go. I played with the ball, as opposed to being angry with it. The difference in my head was staggering, as if I had discovered an entire universe of unexpected beauty and movement and, above all, timing. Timing, as in the space between all things, had been unknown to me.

  I went back to training, but now left-handed. All of my fellow fencers thought I had completely lost my mind. It was true. I had lost one mind; now I was using another one.

  You’ll Believe a Drummer Can Fly

  I came very close to quitting music after the Powerslave tour. I was in no mood for any more backstage politics or solitary confinement in tour buses or gilded cages. I didn’t expect others to understand, because I’m sure for many it might seem like the ultimate dream, but I wanted more than the challenge of standing still successfully. When it came time to go back to the grind, I thought we might change radically, just for the hell of it.

  It’s not good to be in a minority of one in a five-piece band. I was taken to one side and quietly put out of my misery by Martin Birch, who told me that my little ‘acoustic’ numbers were not the stuff that was required. It was all pretty straightforward, and if you are going to be crushed, better to get it over with and move on.

  I’m not one to sulk for longer than five minutes, so I relaxed and thought, How can I enjoy the next year?

  A small birdie sat on my shoulder and whispered in my (left) ear: ‘Why don’t you just be the singer and let everyone else get on with it?’

  So instead of thinking about the big picture, I just thought about me, myself and I. For a while, it was quite a relief.

  We went to Jersey again, this time a different hotel, to write the next album. I did not write any songs, so I went off to Europe to enter some fencing competitions.

  I had some pretty odd ideas about stage clothes. There were certainly some Spinal Tap moments coming our way, and I wanted to make sure that we were at the forefront of the excitement, however unwittingly.

  The album Somewhere in Time took a great deal of inspiration from the movie Blade Runner. The album sleeve, and even the intro-tape for the show, owed a great deal to the Ridley Scott classic.

  ‘Cyborg’ Eddie was our most sophisticated walk-on monster, and the stage set was a fabulously complex creation of aluminium girders and ramps, which rose up with inflatable clawed hands underneath.

  The idea was to use a lot of inflatables, but the technology was in its infancy, and so was some of the execution. Half the time the inflatables didn’t inflate – not fully, anyway – and often it looked like the great clawed hand was giving the finger to the audience until the other digits managed to pump up the volume.

  Eddie’s head, the great inflatable version, often took its time to get a second wind, and sometimes it just looked like a baggy bin liner. There were plans for overhead inflatable spaceships and, my favourite, a spacewalking astronaut on an extendable scaffold above the audience.

  Alas, the spaceships either didn’t fit the venue or health and safety dictated nothing hanging over the crowd, and we just gave up in the end.

  At least we had an exploding singer at the end of the first song, only that didn’t quite work out either. I had decided, while the balance of my mind was disturbed, to have some stage clothes manufactured, as opposed to stealing them from fancy-dress shops. I remember the instructions I gave to the seamstress.

  ‘What I want is a sort of d’Artagnan outfit, but from outer space. The bottom should look like a strange space lizard, recently killed, then patched together, preferably green and scaly-looking. Got that?’

  So now you know.

  In keeping with the Blade Runner theme, I wanted a leather jacket with a giant, illuminated beating heart, plus rope lights pumping sequenced light around a sort of exoskeleton. I’m sure now it would all be done by CGI, but back then it ended up being designed by our monitor guy, John Thomson.

  The jacket weighed around 10 kilograms (about 20 pounds). It was full of copper wire and the power source was a six-volt lead acid battery, plus an on/off switch pinched from a bedside lamp.

  The power consumption was such that my beating heart went into cardiac arrest about two minutes before the end of the first song. The entire contraption is now somewhere in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, where it is either locked up or being used as a bedside lamp.

  My idea was to have a black leather-looking suit that Velcroed from top to bottom at each side. Embedded up the sides of the legs and arms would be flash pots, so that, in mock-Vitruvian Man pose, I would dissolve in a puff of smoke at the conclusion of the first song.

  So much for fantasy. As soon as I saw the 20-pound pigeon-chested jerkin I was saddled with, we had to compromise. We ended up with one tiny flash pot, highly unreliable, stuck on top of a glove, with a nine-volt battery and a bizarre firing mechanism. It was very unremarkable even when it worked, and when it didn’t I was the loneliest quick-change artist in the world as I ran off stage with the device still live and liable to go off at any moment. Road crew dived for cover as I disarmed it before getting rid of my weight belt and illuminated straitjacket.

  I grew a beard on tour. In Las Vegas, Rod asked me to shave it off. I shaved half of it off, vertically. There are pictures. I’m not sure what the audience made of it; they probably thought I was off my face.

  Mind you, I was very lucky to have got as far as I had on the tour. For a variety of reasons and hazardous situations, I nearly didn’t make it.

  I was busy fencing with my buddy Justin, and we would train together with shades of Rocky, doing sprints up and down the steep hills.

  We devised a weekend adventure, which involved trains, planes, ships and two fencing competitions in Belgium and Holland. We would return by overnight sleeper train to Cherbourg, where there was a morning flight back to Jersey, which took all of about 10 minutes, according the schedule.

  On the way to France, we missed the ferry, caught the later one across the Channel, and missed the train. We slept on the floor of the ferry terminal, my head in my fencing bag, until we got the 5 a.m. train and fenced all day in Antwerp. We slept in an attic and had a very early start on the next train to Holland, fenced all day and went to Paris. Two bottles of cheap wine and several hamburgers later, we boarded the train to Cherbourg, which, according to my Thomas Cook European Rail Timetable (don’t leave home without it), only ran on a Sunday night. We soon found out why. There were 600 French sailors on it. We went in one of the couchette compartments and thought better of it. We opted to sleep in the toilets instead. They smelt slightly better.

  Snow was on the ground on our arrival as we trudged through the darkness, unwashed and unloved, until we found a café that clearly never shut, and hot coffee revived us.

  There is not much demand on a Monday morning in Cherbourg for taxis to the airport. By the time we found one, the plane had gone and the next one was in 10 hours’ time.

  ‘Nicko can fly,’ I suggested. It was true – Nicko was learning. His instructor was a very jolly fellow called Charlie, and Jersey Aero Club was a very salubrious place to have Sunday lunch and watch the planes go by.

  I managed to work out a French payphone and got him at the hotel.

  ‘There’s just two of us,’ I said.

  ‘Ere . . . ooh. I dunno. See, I haven’t got my licence yet. Maybe Charlie could do it with me.’

  ‘There you go. You can have a bit of a lesson on the way.�
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  What could possibly go wrong?

  Justin and I waited in the deserted café-bar in Cherbourg airport. No sooner had we arrived than it shut. After two hours, a lone small aeroplane, tossed around by the wind, landed and taxied up to the window. It was, as far as I could tell, the only aircraft in the airport.

  This was a first for me. I had never been in a light aircraft before, so my curiosity was overpowering the overall fatigue caused by three days of sleeping on floors, attics and in toilets, and drinking cheap wine in between fencing competitions.

  The aircraft in question (I now know) was a Piper Cherokee 140. It was a single-engine, low-wing monoplane, and it had four very small seats. The 140 stood for horsepower. The same aeroplane also came equipped with a 160-, a 180- and even a 200-horsepower motor, but all of them only had four seats. Therein lies a clue as to what happened next.

  In flying magazines there are always two regular types of column. One is ‘I learnt about flying from that’ and the other is ‘That worst day’. Pilots love to talk about disasters, partly as a learning process, but mainly to remind them how invincible they secretly are because that sort of thing would never happen to them.

  Justin and I showed our passports to the gendarme and we walked over to the plane.

  There were only two doors, one for each pilot, and you had to climb on the top of the wing to scramble into the two back seats.

  Charlie looked concerned. ‘Are they very heavy?’ he asked about the two bags we were carrying. My fencing bag, about the size of a golf bag, just like Justin’s, was full of wet clothing, a stainless-steel mask, all manner of bits of wire and tools, plus half-a-dozen weapons and spare clothes for a trip away.

  ‘Not really,’ I said, trying hard not to expose the groove in my shoulder caused by dragging the wretched thing halfway across Europe.