BRUCE DICKINSON Talks About Lyrical Inspiration For 'Tyranny Of Souls' Album

IRON MAIDEN frontman Bruce Dickinson's last three solo outings have seen him raid both his library and his DVD collection for thematic muse. Science-fiction-inspired metal is hardly a novel concept, but in mining this well-worn seam Bruce has delved deep into history and chosen a quintessentially British take on all-things fantastical.

"'Quatermass and the Pit', a Hammer classic, is a very inspirational movie for me," Bruce explained to the U.K.'s Terrorizer magazine. "Nigel Kneale is one of my big inspirations — I just watched 'The Stone Tape' [a team of scientists eager to discover a new recording medium take over a brooding gothic mansion only to discover that an ancient and malevolent force lies beneath the stonework]. I've got all the 'Quatermass' TV series and all the movies, but 'Quatermass and the Pit' for me sums up so much of Nigel Kneale's thing about the human condition and about the need for man to survive by his own wits. It's what the heart and soul of this album's about.

"'Navigate the Seas of the Sun' is about carrying on, to go and not return, to raise families, to colonize... 'River of No Return' is the same deal but it's a spaceship on which two people are sent out. They're partners but there's a guilty secret and as they go on through eternity, the secret pushes them apart. It's an allegory of lousy relationships.

"I watch loads of old sci-fi movies and when I started writing this album I had an idea that I wanted to write about the beauty of technology; the beauty of well-crafted machinery and engineering.

"And the idea of space, literally 'the final frontier' and 'we boldly go' and all that. It's kinda what we're here for. Mankind is here to carry on, to survive and we're not gonna survive if we stay on this ball of rock forever. The only way we're going to survive is by technology — that's our future. Mankind is destined to survive; we must keep that in vision, all of us. We mustn't regress to this idea that we must stand still in our muddy boots and eke out a living until finally this ball of rock dissolves when the sun burns out. We're bigger than that."

Look for an in-depth interview with Bruce Dickinson in the new issue of Terrorizer magazine, out on May 26. Click here to stream the entire "Tyranny of Souls" album before it is released on May 24 via Sanctuary Records.