BRUCE DICKINSON Slams BLABBERMOUTH.NET 'Twits' Who 'Can't Read English'

IRON MAIDEN frontman Bruce Dickinson was interviewed by Eddie Trunk of the "Friday Night Rocks" radio show on March 14 prior to the band's concert at the Izod Center (formerly Continental Airlines Arena) in East Rutherford, New Jersey. A couple of excerpts from the chat which aired this past Friday night (March 21) on New York's Q104.3 FM follow:

On the catalyst for revisiting the "Powerslave" set on the current tour:

"We said we were gonna do this five years ago. We set out a 10-year plan five years ago for what we were gonna do with the band, and we're following it to the letter, actually. When I got back together with the band, we said, 'We will go out and we will do some of the old stuff as a get-back-together, warm-up tour, and then we will get together and do an album that's gonna be a really good album.' And everybody went, 'Ahhhh, yeah, they all say that.' And we went, 'No, no, no we're really serious.' We came out with 'Brave New World', we did the 'Brave New World' tour, and that was a really big success. So then we went back and then we did the 'Dance of Death' album and we did the 'Dance of Death' tour, and that was an even bigger success. And then we said, 'Oh, by the way, after the next tour, we're gonna bring back the 'Powerslave' album, but the next tour we do in-between will be all-new material. So 'A Matter of Life and Death' came out huge success around the world, a bit of controversy stirred up by a few people that wouldn't shell out and buy the album Tough. We're not a revival band, we're not an archetype well, not an archetype we are actually an archetype but we're not archaic in that sense, that we're some old fossil, dragging the bones of old songs around. What you'll see tonight is not just a celebration of a lot of those songs, it's a celebration of a lot of young, new fans who've never seen us play these songs. But the reason we have those new fans is nothing to do with our history, it's to do with the new albums that we've made in the last three-four years. It's probably less of a case for that in the United States than anywhere else in the world, but everywhere else in the world, that is the case. So if a few people are a little bit behind the times, it's just tough they get left behind. The rest of the world is proceeding at break-neck speed. Witness 50,000 people in Mexico City and so on and so forth through South America, through Europe The doors are falling off when it comes to IRON MAIDEN now."

On planning several years ahead and announcing tour dates in stages rather than all at once:

"As I say, there's all kinds of plans. When we first got back together, we said we were gonna do this, and we did, and then we said we were gonna do this and this and this, and we've done it all. It's like when we put the dates out for the western part of the USA. We said, 'Here's part one of the dates,' and we released the dates for the western part of the USA. And what did we get? We got a whole load of twits ['twit' is a British slang word for an 'insignificant, foolish or annoying person,' according to Wikipedia Ed.] on Blabbermouth that can't read English that went, [adopting the vocal tone of moron-like heavy metal fan] 'Wow, they're only doing four shows in the USA,' because they don't read English. Well, you know, there you go. So for those people who think that people are only showing up because we're doing 'Powerslave', I have to say, 'Think again. You're probably the same sorts of people that don't read English.' And for those people, of course, they can show up to the New York show on the 14th and 15th of June, I believe PNC and Madison Square Garden and a few other places as well. We're doing Chicago, just to annoy people who aren't in Chicago; Cleveland, to really piss off anybody that doesn't live in Cleveland; Boston ahhh, you know; and you just know that Shreveport is just going berserk as we speak, 'Where's our show?' And Washington and a few other places; some of them I may have forgotten."

On putting 100% into everything they do and keeping fans happy:

"We try not to let people down. We're not a reality show. Most of the media is now almost exclusively obsessed with the cult of celebrity, not with the cult of content of any description whatsoever. And IRON MAIDEN is not about celebrity IRON MAIDEN is all about content. So people who care about that kind of stuff, of which there are a large probably a large majority, minority anyway, a hell of a lot of people can come to our show and get some kind of rest from homemade porno tapes, Playboy models and cribs and all the other B.S. that masquerades for content and sort of vacuousness that invades our everyday lives whether you like it or not."