What Does This Button Do?

by Bruce Dickinson

  We were also, of course, flying with the prevailing winds behind us, which saved quite a bit of aircraft time and fuel.

  Ed Force One was probably the most photographed plane in the world in 2008. Everywhere we went there were TV helicopters live on the national news, and if the US President himself had arrived, I don’t think the reaction could have been greater.

  As we landed back in Stansted, the plans for the continuation of the tour in 2009 were already underway.

  Alchemy

  The Chemical Wedding movie reared its head again. I met with the sales agents. They were a thoroughly disreputable bunch when it came to representing what the film was about.

  They were attempting to piggyback everything on Iron Maiden, which was, of course, a non-starter. More than that, what really got my Goat of Mendes in a lather was their treatment of Lucy Cudden, our female lead. Lucy is a talented actress who worked extremely hard in the movie. The Hollywood salesmen proudly showed me the poster they were using to pitch the movie. It showed a Photoshopped Game of Thrones-style buxom warrior with a great mane of ringlets.

  ‘Who is that? She’s not in the movie.’

  ‘Er . . . no.’

  ‘Well, why is she on this poster instead of the lead actress?’

  ‘Well, er, the tits – the breasts – are just so much more prominent. And, well, that’s the stuff that sells.’

  While I struggled to avoid thumping this twerp, the movie was actually in the process of setting up. Bushey, north of London, was the location, and the crew set to in earnest. The movie opened on the day of Aleister Crowley’s death, and the mortified Mr Crowley was played with admirable menace by John Shrapnel, a gravel-voiced stage actor.

  Everything was cut to the bone. Exterior shots were expensive and kept to a minimum. Most of the shoot was done at a disused Masonic school, which already doubled for various locations in several TV series. I recognised it because we had shot a video there for ‘Abduction’, from Tyranny of Souls, when we availed ourselves of the autopsy set one evening. Julian Doyle directed that too.

  I had two or three cameo moments in the film. In fact, most of the crew ended up in it at one stage or another. I played the dodgy landlord of Mr Crowley’s flat, complete with comedy bad back. I discover him, dead, from an overdose of heroin. My only two words in the movie: ‘He’s dead.’

  Take five, enter the room, kneel by the body, feel the pulse, check for breathing . . . at which point the corpse made a remarkable recovery: ‘Fucking hell, get on with it or I really will be dead.’

  Apart from me, the shoot was quick. Simon Callow was extraordinary. His preparation was word perfect, and every take was useable. When I hear about the professionalism of actors, Simon is a benchmark.

  Once wrapped, we had to screen it and market it.

  ‘Why don’t we do the Cannes Film Festival?’

  Every objection was made, including the lack of hotel rooms, hideously expensive flights and, of course, the fact that we weren’t invited. All true. So far, so good, so what?

  ‘Let’s just rent a cinema in Cannes, fly down in the Iron Maiden plane with a bunch of journalists and cameras, and pretend that we have been invited.’

  Which is exactly what happened. A day trip to Cannes, watch a movie, do a load of press, have our interviews on the promenade like movie stars, then fly home to bed. No hotels, no permission, and it all worked out cheaper than flying commercial.

  Flying commercial was what I returned to in between the Ed Force One tours, interspersed with radio shows. I flew trips to Lourdes from Dublin, scheduled flights to Tel Aviv from Heathrow and, just to be even-handed, went to live in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in order to service the annual Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca.

  To spice up the mix further, Astraeus also became the national carrier of Ghana, so I flew the 757 on its daily trip to the capital, Accra.

  Ghana is a terrific place: friendly, good food, but like many African countries, there are always small caveats. The government was not terribly disposed to paying on time. In response, the Iron Maiden aircraft was dispatched to Accra. No one would get on it. Eddie on the tail terrified the locals, who thought the aircraft had bad ju-ju. To make matters worse, passengers also refused to board the Virgin plane next door, on the grounds that the ju-ju might be contagious. The money turned up more rapidly, and we agreed to provide a more modestly decorated aeroplane in future.

  The same problem was not true at RAF Brize Norton, where we had a 757 based permanently to transport troops. I made several trips to Akrotiri, Al Minhad and Thumrait. One in particular was memorable. We flew out to pick up the RAF regiment from Cyprus. They had been ‘decompressing’ for some days after a harrowing deployment in Afghanistan, where they had lost several personnel on the tour of duty. The padre insisted on visiting the cockpit and giving us all RAF service Bibles. I thumbed through it. It was exactly the same as the small volume carried by my godfather in the Second World War.

  The passengers were, as always with the military, outstanding: quiet and unassuming, but always ready to take the piss at the drop of a hat. They were being returned to a world that could not possibly comprehend what they had been through.

  Our destination was unusual. It was not Brize Norton, but the small runway at RAF Wittering, near Peterborough. In the middle of a grass field by the runway, there was a ski-jump developed for the Royal Navy. ‘Home of the Harrier’ said the caption on the side of the wooden structure.

  Lining the side of the runway were all the kids and wives and partners of the personnel on board – probably the loved ones of those we did not bring back, too. Children held up homemade banners reading ‘Daddy, you are always my hero’. I could hardly taxi the aircraft. Julie, my co-pilot, was looking the other way, out of the side window. Her eyes were welling up with tears, and so were mine. She was trying to hide it, but I had to avoid hitting anything, and I could barely see through the tears flooding my eyes and flowing down my cheeks. I applied the brakes, composed myself and wiped the liquid away.

  ‘Clear left, clear on the right?’ I asked.

  Julie looked over at me and nodded. We said nothing, but we both knew how each other felt.

  Bitter Experience

  A new year, 2010, was beckoning, and a new album and, beyond that, a mammoth greatest-hits tour designated Maiden England, which would keep the band on the road until 2014.

  Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas had been booked for early 2010 to record, and we wrote and rehearsed in a studio in Paris. Some of the material was ready to go, some was written in rehearsals. ‘Coming Home’ was specifically written about the headspace that pilots inhabit in their strange internal world. It was an attempt to touch the outside world with what is normally only an internal moment of reflection.

  The Final Frontier was both a delicious wind-up (as in our last album) and a reference for Trekkies everywhere. Space was the theme for the cover, and the idea of comic-book-cover-style single artwork was my idea, but executed far better than I could have imagined.

  I was never 100 per cent convinced about the space monster Eddie, but we did do a spectacular animated video. By and large, we were now avoiding being in videos if we could possibly manage it. The best thing about space monster Eddie was his evil eyes, and they were very scary indeed.

  ‘El Dorado’ was an attack on the banks and wheeler-dealers who had brought down the world economy, along with a sideswipe at the rest of us for being so naive as to believe their bullshit. We finally got a Grammy for that track, having been nominated in previous years.

  Recording in the Bahamas was a little strange. It was not the place it had been in 1983. Most of the charm had been replaced by American concrete. In my hotel I could have been in Florida, Vegas or anywhere else in the USA for that matter. My favourite hangout was a daiquiri shack by the side of the road. I suspect that the sideline of the owners may have been related to the acrid weed smoke coming from the car park, along with the comings and goings of enterprising youn
g ladies.

  The daiquiris, though, were spectacular, and there was a splendid Bahamian soul-food stall next door. During recording of the album, the awful earthquake hit in Haiti and I ended up entertaining a crew from Astraeus in the daiquiri shack, which was unexpected. The Icelandic owner of the company had decreed that Iceland Express (his own brand) must send aid to Haiti, and thus a 737 full of supplies had been dispatched.

  I rented a scooter and rode to and from Compass Point every day. The studio was run down and it was obvious that it was nearing the end of its life. The couple who ran it knew it too, and ours was the last album they made – quite literally The Final Frontier.

  We had to bring in large amounts of equipment to record, and we ended up barely using any of the existing studio kit. The jack-plug patch bay on the desk, for example, was so badly corroded that it was barely usable. It was a sad but symbolic way of consigning the eighties to ancient history.

  The album was mixed in Malibu, in producer Kevin Shirley’s upstairs mixing suite, and that’s where I did most of my vocals. It simply wasn’t worth wasting time doing them in the Bahamas.

  As 2010 turned in to 2011, it was the return of the 757, complete with The Final Frontier paint job. It was our longest and, we thought, our last gasp of a round-the-world aircraft tour. Jakarta, Seoul and Belém in Brazil were new destinations – humid and toasty. Our opening show in Moscow was the polar opposite – and we nearly didn’t make it at all.

  The previous day I had flown the aircraft out of maintenance at Southend and into Stansted to be loaded up. On the way, we did an air-to-air photoshoot over the North Sea. The camera ship was a Jet Provost vintage military trainer, and it had severe difficulty keeping station with the airliner, even with us at minimum speed and our flaps deployed.

  The next day, the aircraft developed a problem with its bleed air valve in one engine. Predictably, like loose wires in fire-detection systems and other gremlins, problems always arose when leaving maintenance. We only had a short time to fix the problem. We delayed the flight by over four hours. We even had a new piece of piping manufactured onsite, but it didn’t fix the problem. Ian Day, our tour manager, told me that if there was no change, we would have to charter two aircraft, the cost of which would be borne by the airline. It was half a million pounds.

  No pressure, then, as the captain in charge, representing both Maiden and the airline. One good reason for not being issued with a uniform hat is that there is no provision for wearing two at the same time.

  After we dragged the aircraft out for the fourth engine test run, I called in the engineer: ‘Take a long, hard look at that gauge.’

  ‘Well, I think I see an improvement.’

  ‘Sign the fucking tech log, then, and let’s go, before the aeroplane changes its mind.’

  Moscow was a blizzard, with thick ice on the runways. We flew from the winter fury and two-foot-long icicles into the tropical heat of Singapore with a sense of relief.

  We thought we’d have a fuel stop and a short break in Bali. As we were going there, we arranged a gig. The venue was surrounded by cliffs, including a small one backstage. I decided to climb it 20 minutes before the show. I was about 15 feet up the vertical face when the rock started to crumble. Silly boy. The rock was porous and liable to turn to dust beneath your fingers.

  I had two choices: fall off and try to cling to the wall, or just fall off away from the wall. Fifteen feet doesn’t sound a lot, but believe me, falling down a cheese grater in a T-shirt and shorts is not an option. I pushed off the wall and, to my great surprise, hit the ground immediately.

  I was sure I had broken my foot. I hobbled through the gig, and later, in Melbourne, I had my foot X-rayed. It appeared to be okay. To this day my right foot aches after shows. Oh, well. Do the crime, do the time.

  The Final Frontier was reached back in Stansted on 19 April 2011. We had been gone nearly 11 weeks.

  Jet lag was insufficient to stop the Maiden juggernaut recommencing a tour by truck and bus, starting 28 May and finishing up at the final Final Frontier shows at the O2 in London on 5 and 6 August – the day before my fifty-third birthday. It was a 35-date fourth leg of the tour and, frankly, I think we were all feeling a little fried at the end of it. Unlike the Powerslave tour, we acknowledged it to ourselves, and I had a particularly robust evening with Rod Smallwood.

  There was no question, I said, of anyone walking away, but if we did not manage our bodies as we got older, our bodies might just do the walking on our behalf. Not only that, but we were having – and should be having – the time of our lives on tour. I had no intention of retiring unless I had to. I made the suggestion that ‘little and often’ was a better strategy than trying to reconquer the world every year. We would last longer and be more effective, and the world wouldn’t get fed up of us being in its face every five minutes.

  There was, of course, another greatest-hits tour planned, and we had almost an entire year to recover. I went back to flying, but not for much longer. The airline that I was employed by and which had borne Iron Maiden round the world on its silver wings was about to go bust.

  The writing had been on the wall for some time. Astraeus had been losing money since day one. The Icelandic owner had insisted on using our aircraft at bargain-basement rates – good for his Icelandic travel company, bad for our profitability. To make matters worse, two-thirds of our fleet was sent to Iceland for the summer – except the Icelandic summer only lasts four months. The rest of our competitors were putting their fleets out on six-month contracts at market rates.

  The winters were always a problem. Only two aircraft were needed in Iceland. The other nine cost half a million a month each to park up, unused.

  It was a death sentence for over 500 employees at Astraeus, and the end of one of the best experiences of my life in working almost 10 years with the company.

  There were plenty of other things to occupy my attention in 2012. The last of our three greatest-hits tours was commencing shortly, and it was one of my favourite eras, covering the Seventh Son album in all its epic glory.

  We emerged into the Floridian sunlight to rehearse for our Maiden England tour, 100 dates starting with some of the biggest US and Canada shows we had done in ages.

  Even on tour, aviation kept popping up in unexpected places. A visit to Boeing in Seattle meant meeting my namesake, Bruce Dickinson, the manager of the 747 and 767 projects. I flew the 787 simulator, and the instructor watched me fly a few landings before he asked, ‘Would you like to see what she’ll do?’

  At eight miles out, with the autopilot engaged, full flaps and gear down, plus a 46-knot crosswind, we failed an engine. I sat back and watched as the autopilot adjusted and performed a perfect landing, stopping itself in the middle of the runway. He was right; it was impressive.

  The chief test pilot for the 747 was seated in the back impassively.

  ‘Well, go fly the 747-800 next,’ he stated. ‘Bear in mind, for this aeroplane, the pilot needs to show up,’ he added dryly.

  Little did I know that a few years later this experience would stand me in very good stead.

  The US tour was a spectacular success. Our days of tour buses were long gone. We were chartering planes to take us around, and even starting to adopt American practices such as basing ourselves in one place and commuting to shows. It made sense and it made days off useable. In America it was so easy to accomplish. I chilled out as a passenger and discovered the joys of backseat driving.

  We had several months’ break between the end of the USA leg of the tour and the beginning of the European one. Tours were increasingly becoming summer affairs, as there would inevitably be an element of outdoor festivities involved at some point. None of us objected. We had done plenty of winter tours in the USA and Europe, and summer, late spring and early autumn seemed infinitely preferable to the snow and ice. Winter was for hibernation or making albums.

  Even though Ed Force One was history, history itself had us in its gunsights. I coul
dn’t believe it when Rod phoned me to tell me he had arranged for a Spitfire to open the show at Donington – as in a real Spitfire from the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight. The idea was that it would fly over the top of the stage moments before we started our own intro tape for ‘Aces High’.

  We had a helicopter on hand to film it. Our camera guy wasn’t quite au fait with the language of air displays, so I did a bit of mediation. I spoke to the Spitfire pilot beforehand.

  ‘What height are you cleared to?’ I asked.

  ‘Two hundred feet.’

  ‘And what do you propose to do?’

  ‘Well, come in low over the back of the stage, make one pass around the crowd and then exit back over the top of the stage.’

  I was visualising it, and a large internal grin started to develop.

  ‘I suppose,’ I began, ‘that there is always a possibility that, through optical illusion, the aircraft may seem to be much lower than that.’

  ‘Yes, that’s quite common.’

  I’m saying nothing further save that the roadies hit the deck on the final pass. It was a heart-stopping moment, and Donington’s collective jaw dropped. Grown men fought back tears. It was a Griffon-engine Spitfire, which has a distinctive growl, as opposed to the whistling howl of the supercharger on a Merlin engine. No one will ever forget that moment. It upstaged everything.

  The Maiden England tour part two lasted the summer of 2013, and at the end we returned to the USA for a brief spell. After that came Latin America and the beginning of the last leg of the Maiden England tour. The pace of work and projects intensified as, like red London buses, you wait all day for one to come along, then 10 turn up at once.

  For a year or so, I had been farmed out to do corporate speeches. At first I was deeply suspicious. My initial gig was to 200 travel agents at a conference in Malta. I had absolutely no idea what to do, and I rambled back and forth for 45 minutes and then shuffled off into a corner. There were a few more bookings until, one day, in Sweden, the light-bulb moment happened and IBM’s global conference gave me a standing ovation.