Background and career
Paul Bruce Dickinson (born 7 August 1958) is an English heavy metal singer best known as the frontman of Iron Maiden. He has performed in the band across two stints, from 1981 to 1993 and from 1999 to the present day. He is known for his wide-ranging operatic vocal style and energetic stage presence. Dickinson began his career in music fronting small pub bands in the 1970s while attending school in Sheffield and university in London. In 1979, he joined British new wave heavy metal band Samson, with whom he gained some popularity under the stage name "Bruce Bruce" and performed on two studio records. He left Samson in 1981 to join Iron Maiden, replacing Paul Di'Anno, and debuted on their 1982 album The Number of the Beast. During his first tenure in the band, they issued a series of US and UK platinum and gold albums in the 1980s and early 1990s. Dickinson quit Iron Maiden in 1993 (being replaced by Blaze Bayley) to pursue his solo career, which saw him experiment with a wide variety of heavy metal and rock styles. He rejoined the band in 1999, along with guitarist Adrian Smith, and has released six subsequent studio albums with the band. Since his return to Iron Maiden, he has released two further solo records, in 2005, Tyranny of Souls and The Mandrake Project in 2024. His younger cousin, Rob Dickinson, is the former lead singer of British alternative rock band Catherine Wheel, while his son, Austin, fronted the metalcore band Rise to Remain. Since Bruce Dickinson joined Iron Maiden in 1981, the band has sold well over 100 million albums as of 2024. Outside his career in music, Dickinson has pursued a number of other activities. He undertook a career as a commercial pilot for Astraeus Airlines, which led to a number of media-reported ventures such as captaining Iron Maiden's converted charter aeroplane, Ed Force One, during their world tours. Following Astraeus' closure, in 2012 he created his own aircraft maintenance and pilot training company, Cardiff Aviation. Dickinson presented his own radio show on BBC Radio 6 Music from 2002 to 2010, and has also hosted television documentaries, authored novels and film scripts, created a beer with Robinsons Brewery and competed at fencing internationally.
Paul Bruce Dickinson was born on 7 August 1958 in Worksop, Nottinghamshire. His mother, Sonia, worked part-time in a shoe shop, and his father, Bruce, was a mechanic in the British Army. His birth hurried the young couple, who were then just teenagers, into marriage. Initially, he was brought up by his grandparents; his grandfather was a coal-face worker at the local colliery, and his grandmother was a housewife. This is referred to in his song "Born In '58" from the album Tattooed Millionaire. Dickinson started school at Manton Primary in Worksop while his parents moved away to Sheffield. Soon afterwards, when he was six, he was also despatched to Sheffield, where he attended a primary school in Manor Top. After six months, his parents decided to move him to a small private school called Sharrow Vale Junior. Due to constant moving, Dickinson states that this period of his life taught him to be self-reliant as he was unable to make close friends. Dickinson has a younger sister, professional showjumper Helena Stormanns, who was born in 1963. He tried to isolate himself from her as much as he could when he was young, supposedly out of spite because she, unlike him, was a planned pregnancy and birth. Dickinson's first musical experience was dancing in his grandparents' front room to Chubby Checker's "The Twist", when he still lived with them in Worksop. The first record Dickinson recalls owning was the Beatles single "She Loves You", which he managed to persuade his grandfather to buy him, which made him more interested in music. He tried to play an acoustic guitar belonging to his father, but it blistered his fingers. By the time he moved to Sheffield, Dickinson's parents were earning a good living from buying property, refurbishing it and then selling it for a profit. As a result, much of Dickinson's childhood was spent living on a building site, until his parents bought a boarding house and a bankrupt garage where his father began selling second-hand cars. The income from their business success gave them the opportunity to give Dickinson—then 13 years old—a boarding school education and they chose Oundle, a public school in Northamptonshire. Dickinson was not opposed to moving away from home because he had not built "any real attachment" to his parents, having been raised by his grandparents in Worksop until he was six. At Oundle, Dickinson was picked on and routinely bullied by the older boys of Sidney House, the boarding house that he belonged to, which he described as "like systematic torture" and meant that he became an outsider. His interests at Oundle were often military; he co-founded the school wargames society with Mike Jordan, and he joined the school's cadet force. This gave him access to live ammunition, which he used to create explosions as booby-traps. Oundle was where Dickinson became attracted to progressive rock and early heavy metal after hearing Deep Purple's "Speed King" being played in another student's room. As a result, the first album he ever bought was Deep Purple's In Rock, which created his interest in rock and metal music. After In Rock, he went on to buy Black Sabbath's debut, Jethro Tull's Aqualung and Tarkus by Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Every term, a band would play at the school, the first of these which Dickinson saw was called Wild Turkey, featuring former Jethro Tull bassist Glenn Cornick. After that, he saw Van der Graaf Generator and Arthur Brown. Dickinson initially wanted to play the drums, later obtaining a pair of bongo drums from the music room for practice. He remembers playing "Let It Be" with his friend Mike Jordan, during which Dickinson discovered his singing voice while encouraging Jordan to sing the high-notes. Shortly afterwards Dickinson was expelled from Oundle for participating in a prank in which he allegedly urinated in the headmaster's dinner. Returning home to Sheffield in 1976, Dickinson enrolled at King Edward VII School, at which he joined his first band. He had overheard two other pupils talking about their band and that they needed a singer and so volunteered immediately. They rehearsed in the garage of the drummer's father, and the band were impressed by Dickinson's singing, encouraging him to buy his first microphone. Their first gig took place at the Broadfield Tavern in Sheffield. Originally called "Paradox", the band changed their name on Dickinson's suggestion to "Styx", unaware of the American act with the same name. They made local newspaper headlines when a steel worker was awoken by their performance and tried to smash the band's drum kit. Soon afterwards the band split up. After leaving school with A-levels in English, History, and Economics, Dickinson confessed, "I didn't really know what I wanted to do." The first thing he did was join the Territorial Army for six months. Although he enjoyed his time in the TA, Dickinson realised that it was not a career choice, and so he applied for a place to read history at Queen Mary College, London. His parents wanted him in the army, but he told them that he wanted to get a degree first, which acted as his "cover story", and immediately began playing in bands. At university, Dickinson got involved in the Entertainments Committee: "one day you'd be a roadie for the Jam, the next you'd be putting up the Stonehenge backdrop for Hawkwind or whatever." In 1977, Dickinson met Paul "Noddy" White, a multi-instrumentalist who owned a public address system (PA) and other equipment, with whom Dickinson, along with drummer Steve Jones, would form a band together called Speed. According to Dickinson, the band was called Speed because of the way in which they played, rather than a reference to drug-taking. In Speed, Dickinson began writing his own material after White taught him how to play three chords on the guitar. Although Speed would play several gigs at the Green Man pub in Plumstead, the band did not last long, but it encouraged Dickinson to continue to work towards being a musician. Dickinson spotted an advertisement in Melody Maker with the caption "Singer wanted for recording project" and replied immediately. He recorded a demo tape and sent it with a note which read: "By the way, if you think the singing's crap, there's some John Cleese stuff recorded on the other side you might find amusing." They liked what they heard and invited Dickinson down to the studio to make "Dracula", the first song he would ever record, with a band called "Shots", formed by two brothers, Phil and Doug Siviter. The song would later appear on the second disc of The Best of Bruce Dickinson compilation. The brothers were impressed with Dickinson's vocal abilities and asked him to join their group. Dickinson played pubs with Shots on a regular basis to small audiences. One particular night, Dickinson suddenly stopped in the middle of a song and started interviewing a man in the audience, heckling for not paying enough attention. He got such a good response he started doing it every night until it became a regular routine used to catch the audience's attention. Dickinson states that this experience taught him how to be a frontman. The next step in Dickinson's career was taken in a pub called the Prince of Wales in Gravesend, Kent, where Shots were playing regularly, when Barry Graham ("Thunderstick") and Paul Samson paid a visit. Impressed with his stage-act, they talked with Dickinson afterwards and invited him to be their new singer. Dickinson agreed to join their band, Samson, but only once he'd finished taking his History finals two weeks later. Until that point, he had been neglecting his university education. As a result, the university had tried to expel him for failing his Second Year exams and not paying his accommodation fees, but he was saved because of his role as Entertainments Officer. After writing six months' worth of essays in the space of two weeks and some last minute cramming for his exams, Dickinson achieved a 2:2.
After meeting Paul Samson and Barry Purkis at the Prince of Wales, and while still undertaking his final university exams, Dickinson joined Samson onstage at Bishop's Stortford to perform one of their songs, "Rock Me Baby", cementing his role as their new lead vocalist. The band had already released their debut album, Survivors, in 1979 on an independent label, two months before Dickinson joined. Immediately following the completion of his University work, he met up with the band at Greenwich's Wood Wharf studios to learn the Survivors album. Although the tracks did not suit his vocal style, the band soon wrote the majority of the following Head On album in their earliest rehearsal sessions, some of which were immediately incorporated into their live set. It was during these early rehearsals that the nickname "Bruce Bruce" came about, derived from Monty Python's "Bruces sketch". The name became very tiresome as the band's management continually wrote dud cheques, made payable to "Bruce Bruce", as a joke. Dickinson later commented that he did not like it but considered it "a sort of stage name" and accepted it. Dickinson was dismayed to learn that not all rock performers were "great artists"; he felt that some, such as Samson, were only interested in women, drugs and alcohol, which he was unable to relate to. Although he had smoked joints before, Dickinson discovered that it was impossible to communicate with other band members if he was sober, deciding that it was "the price that had to be paid". While fronting the band, Dickinson also came across Iron Maiden for the first time, who were supporting Samson at the Music Machine in 1980. As Dickinson recalls; "I was watching them, and they were good, really fucking good, and at that moment, I remember thinking, 'I wanna fucking sing for that band. In fact, I'm going to sing for that band! I know I'm going to sing for that band!' ... I just thought, 'This is really me. Not Samson.'" Dickinson remained in the band for another year, recording two studio albums with them—Head On and Shock Tactics. However, Samson soon ran into difficulties with their record label, Gem, who went out of business and failed to finance their European tour in support of Iron Maiden. The band were turned over to RCA, which began neglecting the group, and so they promptly fired their management team and the resulting injunction meant that their equipment was reclaimed and they could not be paid for their concert performances. The band's last gig was at Reading Festival, after which Dickinson was approached by Iron Maiden's manager, Rod Smallwood, who asked him to audition to be their new lead vocalist.
Dickinson went to audition for Iron Maiden at a rehearsal room in Hackney in September 1981 and immediately discovered that this was a much more professional operation than he was used to with Samson. In the practice rooms, the band played through "Prowler", "Sanctuary", "Running Free" and "Remember Tomorrow", before asking Dickinson to sing the same songs again in a recording studio, and he was immediately inducted into the group. Iron Maiden had a strict and organised routine that suited the band's writing style, which Dickinson described as a "time table". After a few gigs, they began writing new material for their third album, The Number of the Beast, released in 1982. In the wake of Samson's contractual problems, Dickinson could not legally be credited on any of the record's songs, having to make, what he called, a "moral contribution", later revealing that he had contributed to "The Prisoner", "Children of the Damned" and "Run to the Hills". In the documentary 12 Wasted Years, manager Rod Smallwood refers to "The Prisoner" as being co-written by Dickinson and Adrian Smith. The album was a major success, topping the British charts, and earning platinum status in the UK and the US. Following the release, the band embarked on a supporting tour around the globe.
On the following albums, 1983's Piece of Mind and 1984's Powerslave, Steve Harris's song-writing monopoly was pushed aside in favour of other members' ideas, with Dickinson contributing to a number of tracks, including the singles "Flight of Icarus" and "2 Minutes to Midnight". Throughout the World Slavery Tour, as part of the new theatrical elements incorporated into the band's stage-show, Dickinson wore a feathered mask during "Powerslave". This was the band's longest tour to date, during which Dickinson considered going home mid-tour, due to the high number of shows. Iron Maiden's management were continually adding dates, until Dickinson demanded that they stop or he would leave the group.
After a six-month break, which Dickinson mostly spent practising fencing, Iron Maiden began writing their next album, Somewhere in Time. Dickinson was disappointed with the effort as he felt that the band needed a more dramatic stylistic departure from past records to remain relevant, despite its introduction of synthesised bass and guitars. He has no writing credits on the release, as his material, based on his own suggestion that the album should be more acoustic-focused, was rejected by the rest of the band. Steve Harris, on the other hand, stated that his material was rejected because it was not good enough, and that Dickinson "was probably more burnt out than anyone at the end of the last tour". After a subsequent tour, Iron Maiden started working on their next studio effort, Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, which featured more progressive rock elements than the band's previous records. Although it became their second release to top the British charts, it was also Dickinson's first album with the band that did not achieve platinum status in the US. Unlike Somewhere in Time, Dickinson was much more enthusiastic about this album due to its concept and has several song-writing credits. After the following tour in 1988, the band decided to take a year off.
