What Does This Button Do?

by Bruce Dickinson

  ‘I have paid you 500 dollars,’ the major said.

  Cue the bandits mumbling.

  ‘They want another 500,’ said the interpreter. ‘They say they are professionals.’

  ‘I will pay them out of the T-shirt money,’ Major Martin offered in exasperation.

  Another round of bandit mumbling. No deal.

  ‘Let’s have another coffee,’ I suggested, and smiled at them. ‘Why don’t they want to help their own people? I am not getting paid for this.’

  The interpreter relayed. More mumbling and a little bit of discussion ensued. The coffees arrived, thick shots, like black mud.

  ‘They say they are professionals.’

  ‘Okay. Tell them I am a professional too and I promise they will be paid.’

  This went down well. The ringleader gave me a bear hug, and I thought we had resolved the issue. Not quite. In stepped a blue pullover with a man called Trevor wearing it.

  Trevor was, I later found out, assigned to be our personal security. He was not best pleased when Major Martin took us on an unguarded tour round the war zone in a Land Rover, and he was definitely not best pleased now. Trevor claimed to be an off-duty fireman from Glasgow. If you want to see Trevor in reality, there is an appalling, iconic picture of the shooting of a young mother and her five-year-old child captured by a news photographer. The child lies in the street in a pool of blood, and Trevor is one of two soldiers leaping out of a UN vehicle to try to save the boy’s life and protect the other innocents at the scene.

  Trevor had heart and soul, two Heckler & Koch submachine guns and a sidearm, and he was standing right beside me, pointing angrily at the bandit ringleader.

  ‘You,’ he spat, ‘I will personally deal with, if any harm comes to any of these bands.’

  Trevor was probably a rotten fireman, but I suspect he was a very good shot.

  The bandits erupted in a flurry of ‘poor me’ gestures and loud groaning. The interpreter was about to translate.

  ‘DO NOT translate what he said!’ I said. ‘Tell them . . . tell them Trevor is concerned that the building will be damaged if we don’t go on stage soon, and someone might get hurt.’

  Care and maintenance of soft furnishings in a war zone was an ironic bluff, but it bought time.

  ‘What the fuck is going on?’ I hissed.

  ‘These fuckers here threatened to break the legs of the support bands if they don’t pay protection money for using the PA,’ Trevor said.

  ‘Trev, once we’ve done this gig, I don’t care what happens to these bozos.’

  The gig was immense, intense and probably the biggest show in the world at that moment for the audience and for us. That the world didn’t really know didn’t matter.

  Back in the sniper-taped barracks we drank beers with the small, mainly British, UN contingent, plus a few Norwegians who all spoke with Scottish accents. Go figure.

  I asked a young Parachute Regiment officer what it was like being under siege.

  ‘Fucking boring,’ he said. ‘Frankly, I’d like to go on up the hill and kill the fuckers. They are cowards.’

  Former US President Jimmy Carter was coming to town in a matter of weeks to negotiate the peace deal, so our friend never got his wish.

  We, of course, still had to get out. There had been two Sea King helicopters available over the border in Croatia, but one had been shot down the day before. The story was that General Sir Michael Rose was on board and that five 7.62 rounds had been fired through the fuel tanks and main rotor blades by what was described as ‘probably a drug dealer who panicked’.

  The real story was somewhat more serious. Twenty years later, while doing a charity simulator session on a 747 for Help for Heroes, I met the engineer who fixed the shot-down chopper.

  ‘Oh,’ he laughed. ‘No. The Serbs targeted it with 50-calibre anti-aircraft fire to try to kill him and screw the peace talks.’

  The only remaining helicopter was flying us out, Apocalypse Now-style, with belt-fed machine guns pointing out of the sides. We travelled in Land Rovers back across no man’s land on the airport perimeter road. We would have to pass a Serb checkpoint run by a devotee of the Rosa Klebb school of etiquette, known locally as ‘the bitch from hell’.

  On the way, lying in a ditch, was a burned-out Soviet main battle tank. In one of my more stupid acts of bravado, I stopped the Land Rover, got out in the middle of no man’s land and took what would now be called a selfie.

  ‘Fair play,’ the army driver commented. ‘Last bloke who did that got shot.’

  We were under instruction not to look too closely at the bitch from hell’s face. From a distance, she looked quite attractive but, close up, heavy make-up concealed scarring of the sort that comes when you kiss hand grenades.

  According to Trevor, she is no longer on this earth, having been taken out by an allied air strike. She was implicated in the murder and torture of numerous families. We pulled up alongside her at the checkpoint.

  Don’t look at the face of the Gorgon, I thought. And I immediately peered closely at the damage.

  She seemed taken aback.

  ‘Where have you come from?’ she asked.

  ‘Sarajevo.’

  ‘Why were you there?’

  ‘Hey, we had a gig. We’re a rock band.’

  ‘Sarajevo is a dangerous place. Never come back.’

  She handed back the passports, and we drove the short distance to the base where we loaded ourselves aboard the chopper. The other one was having its rotor blades changed in the field next door.

  I was sent upfront and given a headset.

  ‘You fly, don’t you?’ asked one of the pilots.

  It was the outgoing squadron chief trainer, flying with the incoming squadron chief trainer. Two trainers flying together. This could get interesting.

  We lifted off, and after about two minutes: ‘Would you like to see what happens when we go operational?’

  I felt sure that what I liked wasn’t going to alter anything.

  ‘Mmm. Very interesting,’ I said.

  One trainer turned to the other trainer: ‘No pussies in the navy.’

  The other shot back: ‘NO pussies in the navy, aye sir. Going down.’

  For the next 15 minutes I was very quiet as the Sea King was flung round valleys and mountains, power lines and trees. The shadow of the rotors seemed to be almost cutting the grass on the mountainsides.

  Finally, the airport of Split came into view, with a beautiful sunset. There was a party with the navy that night, to celebrate the shot-down pilots’ incredible bit of flying that had saved the general’s life and probably the peace process with it.

  Next day, with almost the worst hangover in the world, we boarded an RAF C-130 Hercules for the four-and-a-half-hour slog back to Lyneham.

  The train back to London was surreal. What passes for normality seemed like a dream, a veneer of certainty over a pit of hell that bubbled yards away from all of us, if we did but know it. Christmas was approaching, and it was a poignant reminder that some people would be spending the festive season without the indulgences deemed essential on the advertising hoardings.

  As I stepped out on the platform at Paddington, late at night, I decided to take a walk in the chilly London air. I tried to collect my thoughts of the previous five days. I couldn’t. The first image that struck me in the street was the absurd number of traffic lights. I sat on a bench and watched them change: red, green, amber, and all the time people measured their obedience, refusing to cross on a red light or drive on an amber. Pedestrians would wait for a green light even though the nearest vehicle was miles away. I sat for maybe 15 minutes watching a spectacle I now regarded as highly ridiculous, then picked up my rucksack and caught the tube to West London. I found a corner in what was then a smoky pub, pulled out a pen and paper with my pint, and started to write some words.

  ‘Inertia’ was the song about Bosnia on the next album I would do – a very different album, with a very different attitu
de and a very different haircut.

  Radio Pirate

  The gods of media had thrown me a bone, offering me a job on Radio 1, which was a live show on the biggest pure ‘music’ station in the UK.

  The BBC was, and probably still is, riddled with focus groups and Machiavellian politics to rival the Borgias. Whichever pair of faulty bifocals had the vision to bring me along to the party, I never found out, but it probably had to do with the Silver Sony Radio Award from 1994 that is pinned to my wall.

  I scripted and presented two documentaries for Radio 1, which – shock-horror – received the thumbs up from both critics and audiences. I can only assume that, having left Maiden, I was seen as being a more neutral character. In any case, I presented a series of live Radio 1 shows, broadcast from London and then Manchester.

  It was the beginning of a 15-year radio career, encompassing Radio 1 and 2, a couple of small digital independents, plus an eight-year stint at BBC 6 Music, where I was on air for six hours a week.

  I worked with my own independent producer, Ian Callaghan, to produce a series of semi-documentaries for Radio 2 called Masters of Rock. I say semi-documentaries because they were, in fact, a weekly Radio 2 rock show. We were basically producing a Trojan Horse to tempt the BBC into finally admitting that Radio 2 needed a rock show.

  It was a fascinating time during which I had a succession of interesting interviewees and some very bizarre situations. I developed a show for 6 Music called Freak Zone. Initially, I had been asked to add a further three-hour rock show, but I protested that there wasn’t enough quality new music to sustain six hours a week. Better to condense to three hours and keep the show tight.

  With my playlist firmly in place, Freak Zone became a haven for writers, eccentrics, purveyors of Brazilian beatnik horror ‘music’ and unusual guests who you would never suspect might have, er, suspect taste in music. The snooker player Steve Davis, for example, is a massive fan of French jazz-rock combo Magma.

  The battle at 6 Music was always the tiny budget, and as usual at the BBC it was mismanaged, as some DJs were grossly overpaid for performing on what was a digital-only station with a very small but loyal audience. It was, in fact, not much larger than an FM college radio station, but the big bosses had delusions of grandeur with taxpayers’ money and built lavish studios costing millions. A commercial station could have achieved the same results out of two broom cupboards at a fraction of the waste.

  Being on the other side of the microphone was instructive and amusing. I interviewed Peter Green, the legendary Fleetwood Mac guitarist, at great length on Freak Zone. He’d famously had a major mental health problem, which had disabled him for many years, but was now back playing.

  We spent ages talking about penknives and his extensive collection. I never touched on the subject of music until he mentioned it himself, and then an avalanche of stories tumbled out, including the fact that he’d never wanted to play guitar and only took it up because his brother couldn’t play a Christmas gift very well.

  I caught a very frail Peter Grant shortly before his death. He was in reflective mood, and not at all the monster people portrayed him as during his seventies heyday. I always regretted deadlines in interviews. I hated the pressure of time. People need space to breathe and relax. That is when the truth is spoken, and you find that it’s not the cardboard cut-out character that people expect.

  It wasn’t all London studios, however. I did get to travel, and it was as gamekeeper turned poacher when I ended up in Los Angeles to do a story on the launch of a new album by the nun-devouring son of Satan, the cardinal of carnality, the great and powerful Blackie Lawless (pay no attention to the man behind the curtain).

  Blackie and his former band WASP had been managed by Rod Smallwood. In Maiden we viewed this all with some bemusement. However, Blackie and the gang proved that you can’t keep a good manager down, and they had a fair bit of success.

  ‘Animal (Fuck Like a Beast)’ was their apogee, and Blackie sported a bloodied chainsaw extending from his crotch, plus a firework, which may or may not have malfunctioned to create a new recipe of ‘Blackened Chicken in Jockstrap’.

  Those halcyon days had passed. Rod had moved on and Blackie was making a comeback, and I was there to witness the moment on behalf of the BBC. Blackie had created an album titled Kill.Fuck.Die., a monument to existentialism if ever there was one, abbreviated to KFD, which sounded awfully close to a brand of fried chicken.

  Being backstage, not on stage was odd, but it gave me a little chuckle. It was fun to people-watch, especially when you knew what they should all be doing. Something was disturbing the force and Blackie was not happy, though. In the depths of the dressing room in a theatre by the side of the Capitol Records Building, someone had pulled his porker.

  He was missing a band member – a pig, to be exact. He was, it was rumoured, about to sacrifice the animal live on stage, but a stagehand reported the plot to the LAPD who turned up with the animal welfare people and removed the bacon.

  ‘So,’ I switched on the tape. ‘The pigs stole the pig?’

  Blackie bristled with indignation.

  ‘I lived with that pig,’ he said. ‘He rehearsed with us every day. He slept in my house.’

  The ultimate fate of the pig is not recorded, but sadly it was probably only a stay of execution before pork chops beckoned.

  I sat outside after Blackie’s gig, watching the la-la land scene unfold. I too was bemused. I was weary of the LA circus. The energy in this Hollywood place is lost, I thought. It was exhausted, empty and clueless. I was glad I had cut my hair off.

  After Sarajevo I had taken a look at the publicity photos and noticed that the band all looked terrific apart from the odd-looking fellow with the lank hair who didn’t look like Jesus anymore. That was me. My hair was for the chop.

  Taking inspiration from the aeronautical genius Clarence ‘Kelly’ Johnson, I decided to name the next album Skunkworks and also to develop a band of the same name. The record company were horrified. They’d hoped to trade on the Bruce Dickinson name with its Iron Maiden, traditional heavy-metal connotations. They wanted to worship the statue; I wanted to blow it up.

  Thanks to our Sarajevo experience I thought the band had been blooded sufficiently to make a plan. I pulled out my favourite Soundgarden and Alice in Chains albums and made contact with legendary Seattle producer Jack Endino. I got back in touch with Storm Thorgerson.

  ‘Storm, I want to do an album cover based around a Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird and the design philosophy of Kelly Johnson’s Skunkworks.’

  How could he possibly refuse? It was exactly the sort of project Storm loved.

  Great Linford Manor is a rambling old farmhouse studio in Milton Keynes. We moved in, jammed and regressed to the seventies. Jack Endino is a wonderful man with an extraordinary manner. With a gait like a benevolent spider and an air of mad-professorial uncertainty, his eyebrows alone could keep a room in thrall. His voice was a low rumbling drawl, which meant the word ‘pain’ could extend for several minutes before disappearing over the horizon.

  This was one coherent band, although the amount of ganja being smoked probably stretched the credibility of the word ‘coherent’. All the musicians were several years younger than me, so I left them to it. They had more brain cells to lose than me.

  Skunkworks was finally released to shock and horror. Not only had I cut my hair (shock-horror) but I had the temerity to vary the sound of my output even more than the last album.

  I received hate mail in profuse quantities. I was quite pleased. I could never make a record to satisfy the bigots, so best we parted company and they could forget about me. In a sense Skunkworks was a version of what Bowie tried to do with Tin Machine. It didn’t work for him and, ultimately, it wouldn’t work for me either, but it set a lot of things straight and taught me in one year what I had forgotten during 10 years of Iron Maiden.

  Skunkworks is an interesting record and I think it’s a good one. Its one big Achilles h
eel is what Chinese medical practitioners would call ‘lack of joy’. It is a dark, angry, sometimes magnificent but brooding album. It is one gigantic index finger elevated and pointed at the world.

  We toured Latin America, which was chaotic but hugely uplifting, and we toured Europe, supporting traditional metal band Helloween, which was massively depressing. It was the wrong music for the wrong tour. I needed a free-thinking rock audience, not a conservative metal ghetto.

  Edison and the Light Bulb Moment

  Aviation and music had already started to coalesce in a sort of unstructured huddle, mainly because I enjoyed doing both, but also because the one – music – gave a purpose for the other. The very first incarnation of Iron Maiden’s Ed Force One, for example, took place on the brief Skunkworks tour of clubs in the USA.

  We rented an eight-seater Piper Navajo. She was a tired old girl, and if there weren’t holes in the floor, maybe there should have been. Still, we rented the aircraft and packed ourselves and a few pieces of kit in the back. Everything else we needed, we hired at the destination. It was exactly the model for the Iron Maiden tour to come.

  I don’t know what the landing fee was for a 747 at JFK airport in 2017, but for a lowly Navajo back then it was 16 dollars. The small general-aviation terminal rolled out a red carpet, and then rolled it back up again once they caught sight of us.

  ‘Do you have a limo?’

  I shook my head. ‘Do you have any luggage trolleys?’

  He shook his head.

  We found some supermarket trolleys in a small lot nearby. We stacked up our equipment and pushed it all the way round to the British Airways terminal, which was locked and deserted at 4.30 in the morning.

  Pre-9/11 there were no cops, no pre-recorded announcements and no paranoia about bombs or terrorists or any such things. We were, of course, flying back in the cheap seats. That didn’t matter. I sat on the kerb by my supermarket trolley as the sun came up. Concorde was parked, silent and gleaming, the dew twinkling on her white delta wings.