Rod must have had divine guidance, as ‘Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter’ was number 1 in the UK after Christmas, much to the chagrin of the BBC and self-styled pop-music gurus. As a service to the nation it knocked the ubiquitous Sir Cliff Richard from the hallowed top slot and propelled us out of the Christmas break with a grin on our faces.
We actually ended up at number 1 for two weeks, and due to a bizarre legal requirement the BBC were obliged to play short extracts of the song through gritted teeth. It’s a shame they weren’t paying more attention to Jimmy Savile instead of writhing on the hook of a tongue-in-cheek horror-movie soundtrack.
Adrian’s surprise departure left some exit wounds, and these could not simply be stitched up by clever PR and careful manipulation of the UK chart system. An essential piece of the Iron Maiden jigsaw was now missing, and the new piece, in the guise of Janick Gers, didn’t match the space.
There is no reason why Janick should have sounded like a copy of Adrian at all. His style was clearly different, but we were bereft of the melodic duelling with Dave Murray’s more florid style. Dave tended to fuse torrents of notes cascading over the solo sections, whereas Adrian always felt as if his solos were on the edge of a precipice, real cliff-hangers, so that you hung on every note.
Jan’s guitar style and sound were more spiky and less processed, but I hoped that his arrival would see a bit more of the Janick that played on Tattooed Millionaire start to rub off on the Iron Maiden sound. Caught up in the enthusiasm of a first album, it was too much to expect of him, but our next album, Fear of the Dark, was an opportunity to move things on in a world that was changing fast.
The Aleister Crowley movie was gaining some traction at last. The catalyst was a song I had written called ‘Man of Sorrows’. The beastly script that eventually became Chemical Wedding was based on a reworking of Somerset Maugham’s novel The Magician. Maugham had met Crowley, loathed him on sight and created the character of Oliver Haddo, the evil sorcerer trying to create a homunculus or moonchild in his lair in Scotland.
Crowley himself wrote a similar novel, actually called Moonchild but with far less of the Hammer Horror plot of Maugham’s. Maiden’s lyrics are littered with references to Crowley, from ‘Revelations’ to ‘Moonchild’ and ‘Powerslave’.
Julian Doyle and I had frequent script meetings. One rewrite was done by Jimmy Sangster, who wrote many of the original Hammer movies. I actually liked it, but Julian thought it was horrible and too traditional.
We ploughed on, staying in the period up till 1947, when Crowley died of a heart attack. He was taking enough heroin every day to kill a dozen normal mortals at the time.
I had written a rather dramatic first five minutes that took place at the top of K2, where Crowley led an ill-fated expedition. He was a world-class climber, despite his asthma and drug addiction. That scene, plus the demo track ‘Man of Sorrows’, saw the film being optioned by Velvel, Walter Yetnikoff’s fledgling production company. Walter had been executive producer of Ruthless People and now had an appetite for the movies, after CBS Records had been sold to Sony Music for rather more than it was worth.
Walter had three movies he planned to make, and mine was one of them. Money actually changed hands, and I flew out to LA to discuss the script. They were paying the bills so I had no objection to a script doctor coming on board to move things along. In fact, I was interested to see the process, because as far as screenplay writing was concerned, I was making it up as I went along, except for guidance from a few self-help DIY manuals. Julian was dismissive of structure in a traditional sense. I wasn’t so sure, and anyway, this was all a bit of an adventure.
For the next two years the script shuttled across the Atlantic, and I awaited the results of the doctor’s surgery. It seemed to take an awfully long time.
In contrast, the latest Iron Maiden album took no time at all.
The rehearsal space in the barn now had a second-hand studio installed in the cramped confines of its roof. I thought the project laudable but flawed in its execution.
The vocals were done and I got on with winning fencing competitions and writing scripts. I was also busy coming up with a third book in the Lord Iffy series, tentatively taking our oddbod laird back to his schooldays.
Looming large was the option to record a follow-up to Tattooed Millionaire. Janick was totally absorbed in Maiden by now, and there were various suggestions as to who should be my writing partners. I realised that I didn’t know any musicians anymore. In fact, I didn’t know much about anything outside of Iron Maiden, so complete had the submergence been for the last 10 years.
Wing Nut
On holiday in Florida, I picked up the phone and dialled. Trial flight lessons, $35. Microsoft Flight Simulator wasn’t nearly real enough.
17 July 1992 is the first entry in a battered brown logbook that records one take off and one landing at Kissimmee Airfield in Florida. It might just as well have described the journey that Paul undertook to Damascus.
My conversion took place in a Cessna 152, and was caused by half the velocity of the air over the wing squared, multiplied by the coefficient of lift of the airfoil involved. Thus enlightened, my weight was borne heavenwards – or my mass, if you are a Catholic – and, freed of life’s drag by the whirling airscrew boring its way through the air, I thrust my way onwards and upwards. In short, I could fly.
I am not a numbers person; I prefer to use words or pictures. Most pilots are probably the other way round, but numbers or words, the emotional response to a first flight I found overwhelming, life-changing and fascinating.
The Cessna 152 is a tiny two-seat, high-wing aircraft, which on the ground appears flimsy in the extreme. Yet here I was, at 1,500 feet above the Florida landscape with a sunset just beginning and the rolling Everglades and lakes criss-crossed by roads and waterways.
It was a meeting of all worlds: poetic, mechanical, logical, daring, experimental, creative, internal and external. In one moment I realised that this confection of aluminium and rivets was keeping me alive. Moreover, in the air I was an interloper and had to respect the ways of the wind, the temperature, the density of the medium in which I hung, suspended only by a difference in pressure, which, although real, might just as well have been an act of faith.
Yet still the conundrum deepened. Where would I go? How would I navigate? How could I predict what failures might occur and when?
From the outside view to the internal turning over of eternal ‘what if?’ questions, the business of flying was unknowable. If you flew every day for the rest of your life you would never be able to say, ‘I’ve seen it all, know it all and have done it all.’
I took one long, panoramic stare from wing tip to wing tip, and all of these thoughts boiled instantly in my very core. And then my reverie was suddenly shattered. My instructor was quite a serious type, and I think he spotted someone who was about to take flying equally seriously.
‘Now, Mr Dickinson, how do you feel about landing it?’ he said.
I am sure that most of the landing was him, but no matter, I was eager to hurl myself off the precipice. I was supposedly on holiday in Disney World, but in fact I went flying every single day for the next week.
By day five I had five and a half hours in my little log book, and 22 landings. It said I had taken off, climbed, descended, practised stalls, made steep turns at 45 degrees, flown very slowly and simulated engine failures. My instructor asked me how much longer I was going to be in Florida. I said I had to go back to England and start a tour.
‘That’s a shame,’ he said. ‘If you got yourself a medical I’d have soloed you in a couple of days.’
I bet you say that to all the boys, I thought. But somewhere deep down I was kicking myself that I hadn’t joined the Air Cadets.
The Fear of the Dark tour took over, and the next chance I got to fly was in California, in the midst of the tour. Santa Monica airport, a delightful gem and a haven of aviation joy and esprit de corps, was nestled in the
lee of the Santa Monica mountains, just behind Venice Beach. Little did I realise that this airport would begin a new chapter in my life, and that I would return to it for years to come.
Justice Aviation, owned by Joe Justice, was the biggest independent flying school and plane-rental business on the field. I just turned up and asked to go flying. My instructor was a physics graduate who had also graduated from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, and his dad was a colonel in the US Air Force.
I had long brown hair and wore shorts and goofy T-shirts. He was, I thought, very laid-back for such a strait-laced background, so I made a mental bookmark. To borrow a phrase from Arnie in The Terminator: ‘I’ll be back.’
After the USA we finally made it all too briefly to New Zealand. By now thoroughly bitten by the flying bug, I sought out Ardmore airport and went in search of more knowledge.
‘Can I do a spin?’ I enquired.
‘No, mate. I can’t let you do a spin . . . but I can do one and you can tell me what you think.’
The nose of the plane went up, the engine note back to idle, one wing dropped so the earth was to my left, and my backside was going the opposite direction. All at once the left-window view said, ‘Sky, earth, sky, earth,’ and the view through the front windscreen said, ‘Earth, upside down, earth getting much bigger, EARTH!’ and abruptly the rotation stopped, the wings levelled and the engine note resumed its normal busy grumble. I sat in silence. I was still in silence when I got back to the briefing hut. What was going on here?
‘I’ve never had a blackboard lesson so far,’ I said. ‘Teach me something.’
What I got was straight out of RAF Central Flying School. Beautifully explained graphs of lift drag and how it related to airspeed and angle of attack. After an hour of that, we went through the spin: how it happened and what happened.
Back in England, I went to Elstree aerodrome and took one more lesson in my unstructured ‘try before you buy’ learn-to-fly course.
Unlike California and New Zealand, England was green and misty, and aircraft seemed to crawl around in the weeds, forbidden to fly any higher than telegraph poles lest they should collide with stray airliners.
Visual navigation in England was more like orienteering than navigating. My flight simulator on my heavyweight laptop used radio-navigation instruments, and these were all fitted to the Grumman AA-5 that I was learning on.
I noticed the instructor had a map, stopwatch and chinagraph pencil and ruler.
‘Why don’t we take a bearing off a radio beacon?’ I asked.
‘Good God, you’re not allowed to do that. It’s not in the syllabus. Stopwatch, paper and pencil, old chap.’
Note to self: must brush up on mental arithmetic.
My next appointment was back in Santa Monica in November 1992. I had a couple of months in the studio to produce what would end up being Balls to Picasso, my second solo album, and I decided that I would be in possession of a pilot’s licence by the end of it.
I got rather more than I bargained for in both departments.
Many people were under the impression that Tattooed Millionaire had been a serious attempt at a solo record, when in fact it was just a bit of fun, well executed and with a lot of record company enthusiasm behind it.
The next record, for me, had to be something much more serious, and what I didn’t want was a ‘same old, same old’ rehash of seventies hard rock. Bands like Soundgarden and Faith No More actually sounded innovative, whereas the ‘traditional’ metal world often looked like transsexuals in need of a shave.
Maiden had always stood apart from any defining tribe, even though we were endorsed by quite a few. My problem was to establish where I belonged in modern rock music, if indeed I belonged in it at all. I had been steered in the direction of working with a traditional metal band called Skin. This was in the erroneous belief that I wanted to make a sequel to Tattoo Millionaire in the same vein. I wasn’t happy with the result. As I scratched my head in bemusement at my lack of creative spark, the thought occurred to me that perhaps my time was done. Maybe Maiden was as far as I got in this life. I could take solace in the advice the cannibal who doesn’t want to eat his neighbour was given by his hungry friend: ‘Oh, stop moaning. Shut up and eat the chips.’
At the end of the Fear of the Dark tour I had been on the bus back to Narita airport in Tokyo. We were going home, and it was another self-satisfied success. I had tried to raise my concerns about the sound and production of our albums, about the assumption of perfection and the lack of honest criticism within the band. Everyone looked at me as if I had lost my mind. Maybe I had, or maybe we were on the slow trajectory to a luxurious creative extinction.
Los Angeles would be the origin of my new future. My tapes from the recording sessions with Skin had been sent off to Keith Olsen, a producer of some repute, with the aim of salvaging, reworking, remodelling and generally reconstructing the album.
Keith had his own studio in LA and had reworked David Coverdale’s records, turning them into American radio monster hits. The problem was that I preferred David Coverdale produced by Martin Birch. The radio success equalled soulless perfection in my eyes. Nevertheless, I turned up in LA, started to navigate my way round the 10 to the 405 to the 5, and the endless numerical cat’s cradle that comprises the freeway system, and arrived on the doorstep of Goodnight LA Studios.
Keith listened to my set of tapes and rough mixes.
‘I’m interested because you can actually sing,’ he declared. ‘You really have a voice.’
Damned by such faint praise, I suggested we scrap all of it and start again. I wasn’t in the mood for half measures. I was also paying for it myself. I wanted a dark and emotionally jagged record, in line with my thoughts at the time. One of the albums I referenced was Peter Gabriel’s third album, which I regarded, and still do, as a masterpiece.
Keith imported session keyboard players to work with me, plus different drummers, guitarists and backing singers. It was fascinating but artistically barren. The level of technical expertise in all of them was astounding, but they were smooth and effortless. Life is not like that, and nor did I want my own music to be like that.
The icebreaker in all this was Keith’s engineer, the rather colourful character that was Shay Baby. He was an ex-US Marine who had done his time in Vietnam and now did his time in the recording studio. As I reworked and waded through musical treacle, trying to find my way through the Grimpen Mire to a Sherlock Holmes moment of revelation, Shay provided me with the compass.
‘Come see my buddies Tribe of Gypsies,’ he suggested. So I did.
In another revelatory moment, I had my faith in music rekindled by this astonishing combo. The main writer and lead guitarist Roy Z had been a crack addict, and was essentially saved by music from a life of gang violence. The conga player was already an ex-gang member and had done time in jail. The bass player, Eddie, was so cool that even the gangs in the barrios gave him respect and agreed a truce around his house. Eddie was a rock. The whole Latino scene in LA was unknown and a mystery to a rich Anglo kid, but my saving grace was that they were all rabid Iron Maiden fans.
If they’d been a man-of-war, I think they would have sunk half the Royal Navy, they were so good. There was love, power, passion and soul, and no money, no managers, no politics. Watching their gig was both inspiring and depressing, because they deserved so much more than half the bands out there.
I went round to Shay’s house and met Roy Z, one on one, plus a guitar or two. He was embarrassed to ask if we could write together, assuming that the almighty Bruce Dickinson wouldn’t be interested. I was equally convinced that Roy didn’t need an old crock like me making suggestions when it was manifestly clear that his band was sensational.
By mid-afternoon we had each other bouncing off the walls. By early evening we needed small buckets of beer to calm down. All it took was Roy playing one guitar riff, which turned out to be the opening to a track called ‘Laughing in the Hiding Bush’.
/> ‘I thought you might be able to do something with this,’ was how the process started.
Back in Goodnight LA Studios, I was halfway through the second incarnation of my solo effort and I realised that the previous day’s efforts with Roy Z had made it obsolete overnight. I was going to have to start again. To scrap one album is understandable; to scrap two is careless; to scrap three is just creative payback for 10 years of making music in the same silo.
I was renting a small house in Brentwood, just up the road from where the O.J. Simpson murder occurred. A heaving mass of sinful carnality it certainly was not, at least not on the streets after dark. Indoors perhaps was another matter. LA is a very early town. Maybe the movies and the 5 a.m. make-up starts have rubbed off on the rest of the population, or maybe the stupidly early joggers are just prescription-drug addicts living in plain sight. But in any case, after getting back from the studio in the evening, bed was really the only option.
I was on track to deliver my now third attempt at the album, which I was determined to finish in the UK, with Shay Baby in charge of production and using elements of what I had already recorded in Goodnight LA. Crucially, I would bring over Roy and Tribe of Gypsies to West London and finish new recordings at the Power House Studios in Stamford Brook.
I was also on track to get my pilot’s licence before the end of February.
Pilots’ licences come in all shapes and sizes, and the USA issues its own, which are recognised by, but are not the same as those of European authorities, and in particular the British.
I was using the US syllabus and the licence would be ‘an original issuance’ of a US licence. I went on to garner various other US licences up to commercial pilot and flight instructor for single- and multi-engined aircraft. I stopped short of bothering with the Airline Transport Pilot Licence because by that time I had a British airline pilot’s licence and was rather busy with a multitude of other activities.
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