IRON MAIDEN Singer On Being Britain's Biggest Heavy Metal Export
April 10, 2009Sophie Heawood of U.K.'s Times Online reports: What dawns on you, while watching IRON MAIDEN's live show, with its bombast and pyramids and 20ft robots, is how curiously lacking in aggression it is. Passion, yes, but it's not a fight. (A roadie tells me that he's been working for MAIDEN for 30 years and has never seen a punch-up.) Singer Bruce Dickinson agrees. "Oh no, it's not fighting. It's not a big f***-you at all. That's a pointless waste of energy. There is the potential on the one hand for rage and chaos, or passion and exultation on the other — and that's my choice: to try to levitate all these people who have come along. And I don't do it — they do it themselves — but you have to sort of provide the framework."
He says that he began performing in small clubs, and learnt from one of his childhood heroes, Ian Gillan, the DEEP PURPLE singer, how to bring your audience in. "I said to him one night, 'What's your secret?' And he said, 'Always look 'em in the eyes.' I thought, OK, I'll try it — but how far can I actually see? And I discovered it was entirely possible to look right the way to the back of a show and see somebody. I thought, well, if you grab that person, then everybody around them suddenly goes 'Wow' and you energize that whole area suddenly. I started working that — in the end you can do it in stadiums."
Read the entire report from Times Online.
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