What Does This Button Do?

by Bruce Dickinson

  Like music, speaking is a combination of content and performance. It’s not a lecture; it’s not telling jokes. Actually, it’s another theatre of the mind, just without guitars and without Eddie. The whole speaking-circuit scene was a complete unknown to me, but it is a huge worldwide industry. I suppose that, as the world turns politically correct shades of beige, there will always be a demand for oddballs who scream for a living and fly airliners. The one thing I don’t do, however, is talk to people after they have had their dinner. It’s rude to give them indigestion.

  Pilots, of course, are quite social creatures, and I met the head of training for Air Atlanta Icelandic, Arnor, a 747 operator, who was curious about the screaming airline pilot. Having a coffee, I popped a question: ‘Your 747s. How many do you have?’

  ‘Ooh, I think about 15 of them.’

  ‘You wouldn’t happen to have a spare?’

  Arnor thought for a moment. ‘I believe we do.’

  ‘You don’t fancy an Iron Maiden world tour, do you?’

  The next red bus to come along had writing on the side of it. There was a proposal to develop a Maiden beer. The two big ale drinkers in the band were Nicko and me – but Nicko lived in Florida.

  The harsh reality was that some hapless fool would have to drink sensibly and creatively to come up with what would become a beer called Trooper. It was a thankless task, but someone had to do it.

  The world of brewing comes with its own pitfalls, and it turns out that some breweries seek the same high standards that we do. Before we could do anything, the brewer wanted to make sure I was serious.

  I thought my auditioning days were over until my taste buds were placed in the firing line, when I met the prospective brewers, Robinsons of Stockport. I was put through a blind taste-test of 10 different brews, some of which I had name-checked as personal favourites, and the rest of which were their choices.

  To my surprise I identified half a dozen of the beers. Without wasting any more time, Martyn Weeks, their master brewer, set about my nose with hop teas and my mouth with crunchy malt grains and, by the end of the afternoon, we had come to a bare-bones sketch of what our new liquid would be. One thing we agreed on was that the bottle experience should try to be as close to a cask experience as was possible. This meant a beer heavy on flavour yet low on carbonation and acidity. It was to be an everyman beer – something you could live with and return to over time, like an old friend. There are plenty of extreme beers in the marketplace, most of them short-lived. Robinsons and I wanted to create a classic, and I believe we did.

  Martyn made two test brews, and the great day came up at the brewery. Two half-pint glasses, versions A and B, direct from the tank. It was the second version, by a country mile, that got the nod of approval. Trooper was born. As I write this, 18 million pints of the stuff have been drunk worldwide.

  We were looking forward to the next album. To my delight we were going back to Guillaume Tell Studio in Paris, the scene of the Brave New World order. The summer tour of 2014 would set the band up in the right frame of mind for the new record.

  In 1914 people said the war would all be over by Christmas. By 1917 aviation, born with the Wright brothers, had been advanced exponentially by the demands of warfare. At first as reconnaissance aircraft, and then as bombers and fighters, the modern air force was created. Of all the legendary pilots in that war, none was more infamous that the Red Baron, Manfred von Richthofen. Most of his victories were not scored in the red-painted Fokker Dr.I that he was killed in – probably by a bullet from the ground. His death, though, did cement the legend in aviation folklore of the fearsome Fokker triplane.

  At the end of 2013 I bought one. I had talked myself out of the purchase on a regular basis: I didn’t have time, where would I keep it, and any number of other excuses. The aircraft itself was for sale due to a personal tragedy. The builder of the full-sized replica was John Day. He was a master craftsman, and had also built a beautiful Nieuport 17 and a spectacular Fokker E.III. He flew the latter aircraft in a display team dedicated to recreating the sights and sounds of early air combat, the Great War Display Team.

  When flying the Fokker Eindecker in a team practice in 2013 the aircraft crashed and John was killed. His widow put the triplane up for sale. After stalling for a month or so, I turned up on a freezing, rain-sodden winter’s day at Popham airfield in Hampshire. The aircraft was in storage and the engine inhibited.

  Slowly, Gordon Brander, the Display Team manager, and I pulled off the tarpaulin, and I almost gasped at the aircraft. Despite being a replica, every tiny detail was as real as could be. John had made no concession to modernity. Here was combat, red in tooth and claw. The triplane is a big machine. I mounted the cockpit. I say mounted because you get in and out of a triplane like a horse. The massive prop stood at the vertical, and in front of me, menacingly, were the two synchronised machine guns that made the triplane a deadly adversary in a dogfight.

  A chill went up my spine. The aircraft was primal.

  ‘I’ll buy it.’

  Once the weather improved we could ready the aircraft for a ferry flight to restore her to operational status. I had a home for her in the same hangar as the Bücker Jungmann, and also Gordon’s own Sopwith triplane. Quite a cool hangar, it must be said.

  To get me up to operational status as a display pilot would take some hard work, but there was a busy season in 2014 because of the commemoration of the start of the First World War. The team was much in demand.

  I flew the Bücker Jungmann around to obtain my display licence. In effect, I was performing dummy runs with hedges and trees simulating crowd lines, with my instructor, Dan Griffiths, observing me from the front seat. There was an element of groundschool to pass, and a flight test.

  Dan is a highly experienced test pilot. In fact, he was, for a while, the chief test pilot of the UK Civil Aviation Authority. Luckily, he also flew the Fokker triplane, so there was quite a chance of some knowledge transfer, but no chance of a dummy run on the aircraft itself.

  The Fokker only has one seat. The first time you fly it is, well, the first and hopefully not the last time you land it. On 9 April 2014, according to my logbook, I became a triplane pilot. I made a couple of bunny hops down the runway with the wheels just leaving the ground and then back to a full stop. Old aircraft always operated into wind and, especially with a triplane, any crosswind is strictly verboten. A wooden skid on the tail and the lack of effective brakes ensured that the machine would always operate on grass.

  Forward vision on the ground was virtually zero; the massive wings blotted out the horizon. It was like taxiing a combination of a venetian blind and a bookcase.

  Simply starting the Fokker was hazardous. The massive wooden prop would kill you in an instant, and there was no starter fitted, other than a human being to swing the propeller. In the cockpit – by far the safest place to be – there was a complex ballet requiring four hands and both knees, plus a great deal of shouting.

  Sometimes the aircraft would start almost spontaneously, especially from cold. On a hot day it could take 20 minutes of hard work, always conscious that a mistake could be fatal.

  After my hops down the grass runway at White Waltham, I taxied back to the start. The wind was light, straight down the field. Gordon looked at me from the sidelines. I gave a shrug. Now or never, I thought. I put my thumbs up and pointed down the runway. Game on.

  As I opened up to full throttle the tail rose in a few yards, and suddenly the world came into view between the camouflage and duck-egg blue of the wing fabric. My aircraft was not a red triplane; it was painted in the authentic colours of Lieutenant Johannes Janzen. He survived the war and, to my delight, Corgi made a metal model triplane, which is a replica of my replica, complete with the same paint job.

  In the air the triplane was in its element. I can do no more than quote the Red Baron himself, when he was asked how it was to fly the Fokker: ‘She can climb like a monkey and manoeuvre like the devil.’

&
nbsp; My three landings that day in benign conditions were really quite reasonable. Beginner’s luck. I already had a crazy idea of what the Great War Display Team could do for rock ’n’ roll. Why not a dogfight at a festival to honour the combatants of the First World War?

  Our final show at Knebworth was the obvious location, but first I had to join the team and learn the delicate art of chasing 100-year-old aircraft around at 50 feet above the ground without crashing.

  Two days of team practice put me as Fokker One in the nine-aircraft display. I finished off the 15 minutes of simulated combat by chasing the Sopwith triplane up, down and along the crowd line until we performed a head-on pass; I hit the smoke button and spluttered off wounded, but returned as we flew a final fly-past salute.

  None of this is supposed to be dangerous to the crowd, and very stringent rules exist to ensure that this is the case. While danger is minimised to the public during the course of the action, it is never far away for pilots when chasing each other close to the ground.

  Far and away the greatest hazard is getting close up and personal with the tail of an aircraft, and flying into the disturbed air and propeller wash. The primitive flying controls and aerofoils used on the wings make for a double whammy. Not only will the aircraft suddenly and without warning drop a wingtip towards the ground, but the pilot has to be quick and use absolutely every flight control in whatever axis it takes to keep from turning into a smoking ruin.

  At altitude it is merely uncomfortable, but being thrown on your side at 50 feet above the ground in front of 25,000 people at the Duxford air show certainly warrants your full attention.

  To Ride the Storm

  After the summer I wanted to clear the decks for what was to be a very important Iron Maiden album. Steve was unhappy about writing in a rehearsal studio. He had a point. Anyone could stand outside with a digital recorder and bootleg the album before we had even recorded it. Instead, we went direct to the recording studio and rehearsed, wrote and recorded in the same place. It was one of the best decisions we ever made.

  I had broached the possibility of a jumbo jet for a world tour. Rod was jumping with excitement about it. The tour would start in February 2015. The album itself had so much going on that it quickly became a double album. Digital recording in my case meant trying to get my digits to play the piano. I had two aviation songs on the album: one was ‘Death or Glory’ – about the Red Baron and life and death on the front line in the air war – and the other was ‘Empire of the Clouds’, my two-fingered piano-based epic.

  I sat at home with a very modest electric piano I had won in a charity raffle and started doodling, coming up with some small sequences and an atmospheric intro. The plan was to write a Great War aerial warfare epic, and a piano intro was the opener. ‘Death or Glory’, though, said it all in a much shorter span.

  I have at home a few artefacts that I purchased at an auction of airship memorabilia. At the auction, anything German was going for ridiculous prices: crockery, bits of aluminium from crashed Zeppelins, all going for crazy money. What interested me was the British aviation heritage. Two items in particular I found fascinating. One was a pocket watch of one of the few survivors of the R101, the British airship that tragically crashed on its maiden voyage, killing most of those on board; the other was a tankard from the R101 – possibly a promotional item. It was a leather-embossed case with a pewter mug inside. Faded in the brown leather could be seen the airship itself, complete with its registration G-FAAW.

  Around the rim of the pewter was inscribed: ‘Welcome aboard from the airship crew’.

  Late one night, after coming in from the pub, I sat playing the intro over and over. On my bookshelf I had several rare airship volumes; one of them, To Ride the Storm, is a classic analysis of the R101 accident.

  I closed my eyes and, instead of seeing a row of First World War aircraft at dawn, with mist hanging in the trees and frost turning to dew on their air frames, I saw a great silver cigar hanging in the sky.

  I could handle the pewter tankard and the watch. They were a tangible link back to the fateful day of the crash, and they drove me to the piano – a concert grand this time – in the studio, till long after the rest of the band had gone home. ‘Empire of the Clouds’ grew into the story of the R101, the greatest flying machine the world had ever seen, truly so big that the entire Titanic would have fitted inside.

  It was a story of human error, hubris, compassion, heroism and sheer bad luck. The rest of the album was no less ambitious, and unless a song was obviously brief, we saw no reason to compromise on the grounds that people had short attention spans. Iron Maiden fans are quite used to engaging their brains.

  By the time Kevin Shirley, our producer, arrived, we already had two or three songs ready to go, and the rest were works in progress. Once we got stuck into the business of tracking, we worked fast. Maiden is a curious mix of old-school playing – all of it for real – while using new technology simply to represent what we do naturally.

  Basically, digital hard drives enabled us to capture every sound – good, bad or indifferent – that we played. Because of the internal geography of the studio, it was easy to cluster in a circle around the drums. The building’s previous incarnation as a cinema from the thirties made for a drum room par excellence. The nooks and crannies in the walls contained guitar speakers, each in isolation. Each musician had his own headphone mix, controlled by a tiny personal mixing desk right by his side.

  The whole monitor set-up belonged to Kevin, and it was the key to getting the results out of us.

  On 6 October we started, ironically with ‘The Great Unknown’, and on 25 November we finally put ‘Empire of the Clouds’ to bed at the mixing stage.

  On 12 December I was diagnosed with head and neck cancer and the world stopped dead in its tracks.

  Fuck Cancer

  Six weeks previously I had come to the same conclusion via self-diagnosis on the internet. I knew something was wrong in my body. I was sweating a bit at night – maybe it was the sheets in the hotel.

  There were occasional flecks of blood when I cleaned my teeth – maybe I was brushing too hard.

  I felt as if I was about to catch a cold, but I didn’t – hey, it was November and there were lots of bugs going round.

  Lastly, one of the glands in my neck was swollen – see excuse above – except there was an odd smell coming from the back of my throat, like rotten cheese. It was quite disgusting.

  I plugged the symptoms into search engines and, given my age, came up with a diagnosis of squamous cell carcinoma, probably related to HPV infection. This I then ignored. I had an album to do, I was singing well and I was having a great time. The last thing we needed was a Google hypochondriac.

  Nevertheless, the lump in my neck got bigger and my sweaty episodes were now sometimes in the daytime as well. As the last note rang out on the finished mixes of the album, I asked someone at the studio to call a doctor.

  The French doctor was sharp, and even with his limited English his advice was clear: ‘You must have a CT scan on your head and neck; you must have a chest X-ray; and here are some antibiotics in the unlikely event that it is an infection.’

  I decided to do everything back in England.

  My doctor in England felt the lump. ‘Are you losing weight?’ she asked.

  ‘Ha, ha. I wish.’

  ‘They all say that,’ she replied grimly, and sent me downstairs for an ultrasound after taking an armful of blood for testing. The ultrasound guy probed around; his assistant was a bit of a Maiden fan.

  ‘How are you with needles?’ he asked. ‘I want to poke your lump and take a few cells out.’

  This was Monday 8 December. On Wednesday the blood results came back, all good, but I sensed – I knew – there was something else.

  On Friday I had three missed calls from the doctor.

  ‘You have squamous cells in your biopsy, which are cancerous.’

  That evening, I was in front of the head and neck
, and ear, nose and throat specialist. A year and a half previously, I’d had a full ENT check-up. I was right as rain.

  It was a gigantic room on Harley Street with a huge desk – and a very eminent-looking doctor. She opened her folder.

  ‘I have here a letter stating that you have head and neck cancer,’ she stated bluntly. I was momentarily taken aback at the starkness of the approach. I decided to return service.

  ‘Okay. So what is it? Where is it? Why is it? And how do we get rid of it?’ I countered. I think she rather liked the approach.

  ‘Well, you are taking it rather well.’

  ‘I could roll around and chew the carpet if it makes you feel better, but let’s get on with it.’

  ‘Do you have any plans for the next few days?’

  ‘As of now, my only plan is to get rid of this, and my only goal is to achieve it. If that doesn’t work then I’ll have to think of a new plan.’

  Monday was an MRI scan of my head and neck with a dye that made the cancer visible and also made you want to pee yourself. Next was a chest X-ray, and after that a day in hospital under anaesthetic having my tongue and any other bits biopsied.

  I was beginning to feel quite important, but in among the bravado was the temptation to despair. For three days or so, all I noticed were hospitals, churches and graveyards. By God, London was infested with the bloody things.

  On the way to the pub, I considered how I felt about my cancer. Nobody could answer the question, ‘Why me?’ Actually, I reasoned, it’s probably just shitty bad luck. Nobody was out to get me and my cancer was an aberration. I thought about hating it, but I’m not good at long-term hating – I’m a momentary, flash-in-the-pan sort of chap when it comes to anger. I would say life is too short to hate cancer; I would treat my cancer as an uninvited guest and politely but firmly dismiss it from my house.