Good taste in guitarists. Bad taste in beer. Me and Janick Gers.
© Ross Halfin
. . . But I did.
© Guido Karp
My, how I laughed
© Iron Maiden 1993
The new band. Left to Eddie right: Eddie Casillas, Adrian Smith, me, Dave Ingraham and Roy Z.
© Hans-Martin Issler
Trevor (right) and another tragic day in Sarajevo.
© Associated Press/Enric Marti
A gun that didn’t like Renaults.
No man’s land. The last bloke that did that got shot.
Back home for Christmas.
Back in the game.
© Dimo Safari
Astraeus Airlines try to get the flaps to work.
© Iron Maiden 2003
I’m too fat to get out of the window
© Iron Maiden 2003
Spot the one who’s not been drinking all night.
© John McMurtrie
Shoot the Fokker.
© Iron Maiden 2014
Beer is the key.
© Maiden Brews 2013
Halfway through cancer treatment. I’m already worried about the moustache.
An unorthodox stance and bat to knock cancer for six.
© Ross Halfin
An unorthodox stance and bat to knock cancer for six.
© John McMurtrie
Afterword
An autobiography is a strange beast, and an unruly one. Is it a shopping list of events in sequence? Is it a selection of in-jokes that seemed funny at the time? Is it a pointless exercise, especially if you have just finished your fifth iteration and you are only 25? My answer is that I didn’t want to be any of the above. I just wanted to tell a good story. I wrote in excess of 160,000 words and there are fewer than 110,000 of them left.
Plenty of funny anecdotes never made the cut, simply because they didn’t advance the narrative. Somewhere there is a book of anecdotes, but it’s not a coherent tale.
Had I chosen to include airships, wives, divorces, children and entrepreneurial activities this would have been approaching 800 pages long. It would have been the type of book that people use to commit murder, or help change tyres on London buses. One thing is for sure – it would be a very unread Christmas present.
I made a personal executive decision when I started to write. No births, marriages or divorces, of me or anybody else.
There is enough here to be getting on with. Any more would be overkill, and ‘overkill’, as Winston Churchill observed, serves only to ‘make the rubble bounce’.
Acknowledgements
Mary Henry, for translating and transcribing the Brucey Rosetta Stone, above and beyond the call of duty.
Rod Smallwood for leaving me to it, and Andy Taylor, for warding off the evil eye.
Dave Shack for leading the team, Ed Stewart-Lockhart, Sarah Philp, Helen Curl and Jake Gould for fighting the battles.
To all at HarperCollins, whoever you may be, and most notably Jack Fogg, my editor and lighthouse keeper.
Dave Daniel at CSA Agency and everybody else, you know who you are.
Trains, planes and pubs where I scribbled, and hotel pillows where I laid my head post-scriptum.
About the Author
BRUCE DICKINSON has been the lead singer of Iron Maiden for more than thirty years, and has pursued a successful solo career, as well as a host of interests beyond music. Iron Maiden has sold over 90 million albums and performed over 2,000 shows worldwide, making them one of the most successful rock acts of all time. He lives in London, England.
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Credits
Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017
Cover photographs: © John McMurtrie (front), © Ross Halfin, © Paul Harries, Shutterstock.
Copyright
WHAT DOES THIS BUTTON DO? Copyright © 2017 by Bruce Dickinson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Originally published as What Does This Button Do? in the UK in 2017 by HarperCollinsPublishers.
FIRST U.S. EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-246813-0
ISBN 978-0-06-284225-1 (B&N Black Friday Signed Edition)
EPub Edition September 2017 ISBN: 978-0-06-246815-4
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