What Does This Button Do?

by Bruce Dickinson

  On the bus, the subject of the white suit was broached. Rod was a little uncomfortable at not being the centre of attention for all the wrong reasons. I did, I confess, try to take the mickey.

  Rod had the unpleasant habit of striking people across the top of their head with his knuckles if he disapproved of the conversation. Record company execs lived in fear, but back in the Macho Man culture of the time it was tolerated, the same way females were ogled and touched up and accepted it by gritting their teeth and mentally kicking the offender in the nuts.

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ Rod said, and reached out his fist to rap me across the top of the head.

  I grabbed his wrist; we locked arms. This was getting interesting. Finally we wrestled ourselves onto the floor of the coach with Rod muttering, ‘Bloody hell, you’re quite strong for a little bloke.’

  After our undignified rutting, the white suit was white no more. Covered in dirt and dishevelled, it was never seen again.

  The Poles were sensational. For me, it also represented the first country that had never seen the band with the old singer, so everything was new to all of us.

  The shows went off, predictably, with barely a hitch. Such was the enthusiasm of the fans, and such was the palpable feeling of liberation in the air, that we could have stood on stage in our underwear waving white flags and the reaction would have been the same.

  As we travelled through Poland it was like reliving the past 40 years of history, from the horrors of Auschwitz to the grim and obvious failure of communism, and the slow but growing sense of a new future, somewhere groping in the distance.

  We had been given the services of a very bouncy young chap, Josef, who was to be our security guard for the duration of the tour. Josef spoke very little English and had been trained to kill people in imaginative and unexpected ways by the Soviet military. He was a member of Spetsnaz, or special forces, as we would call them. Luckily for us, Josef was not inclined to execute or assassinate us, which might of course have changed if we suddenly went to war.

  Josef was on permanent furlough after his parachute failed to open properly when he jumped out of an aircraft at 300 feet. The injury to his back meant he was now put out to pasture, guarding decadent Western rock stars.

  After a couple of days we turned him, and he defected to our way of looking at the world. Initially, Josef’s reaction to the glorious disorder whenever we arrived at a hotel was to kill them all. He carried a gun, not that he needed it, because, as he demonstrated one evening when turning out the light, his feet never ran out of bullets. Instead of using his hands, he kicked forward and backwards at head height, and finally, with astonishing deftness, he flicked off the light switch with his foot.

  We explained to Josef that the audience were actually our friends, and that we really shouldn’t try to kill them, because they were only trying to be nice. He seemed to take this on board, and over the next few days his English improved noticeably, even if his topic of conversation was more illuminating than we had bargained for.

  Some of the crew had found some dope, and we persuaded Josef to try some. The results were immediate and, I fear, long lasting. Josef stood on the bed, in very good spirits, and signalled for silence.

  ‘This is good woman,’ he said, squatted down on a virtual penis with two virtual willies in either hand, and with his remaining orifice stuck his tongue into the side of his mouth and sang ‘The Blue Danube’ while moving up and down and side to side in admirably persistent rhythm.

  ‘Very good, Josef.’ Clearly there was a bit of work to do, but we were making progress.

  As we drove through the Polish countryside to the venues, he would point out landmarks: ‘There is secret military base.’

  ‘MiG?’ I enquired.

  ‘YES! MiG 21.’

  I liked Josef. Actually, I liked all the Poles we met.

  The towns were, in general, quite depressing. We stayed in the upmarket hotel in Warsaw, but one drunken evening I woke up in a Warsaw apartment, I know not where, with people I didn’t know who spoke no English. It was my fault for drinking with Howard Johnson, a journo who was out to cover the show. We had ended up in a car, been stopped by the police, and our chaperones had told the police we were Polish and thus we ended up sleeping off our hangover and listening to their cassette tapes compiled from the radio.

  The bright sunshine was painful. We had a few zlotys, the country’s currency, and we stepped outside to find ourselves in the middle of a high-rise housing estate. The buildings were drab and in poor condition, the queues for the tram or bus were building, and there were a few vendors with a horse and cart, which had vegetables for sale.

  We waited for an hour or so before we found a taxi, and although we had no money it was obvious we were foreign, and despite our long hair we wanted to go to Hotel el Posh. Just as well because the band was missing a lead singer for the show that night.

  The rest of the cities we visited were similar. We were taken shopping in a department store. There was precious little to buy. The building was little-changed from its former occupation as the headquarters of the Gestapo. Some of the venues were sports halls and, in a fabulous folly, the Spodek was built to resemble a gigantic flying saucer.

  In Wroclaw we played the Centennial Hall, which was a chilling experience.

  In the vast hall, a red velvet curtain hung to cover the centre of the dome. The reason became evident. A gigantic stone Iron Cross formed a central plug, which effectively kept the roof from collapsing.

  Backstage, there were spyholes built in the walls so that the Gestapo could observe the audience, and presumably measure their individual enthusiasm for the Nazi floorshow. It was rumoured that the tunnels beneath the building extended down almost 17 storeys.

  The relics of Nazi Europe seemed to follow us around. We had been in Jersey, itself occupied and fortified. Much of the concrete was still there, and the workers who died, some of them Poles, were reputed to have been buried in the walls where they fell.

  By far the most sobering and depressing manifestation of the ghosts of Europe’s past was our visit to Auschwitz, where death was planned, orderly and brutally, clinically inevitable.

  Genocide has lost its power to shock in our visually overloaded world. The Khmer Rouge, Stalin’s purges – they all seem to blur into one. Genocide is going on right now somewhere in the world, but it is the innocent plight of a child about to die that cuts to the very soul, unless, of course, you have given up on that idea, exchanged it for ‘just obeying orders’.

  No birds fly over Auschwitz. It is as if the very soil contaminates the air with the stench of death and the evil of those who walked upon it and planned the horror. It is the banality of industrial-execution planning contrasted with the screams of the gas chambers that is the true measure of the terror. That terror, I believe, is the secret fear that we may all be such monsters deep down. It makes me shudder even to think it.

  I cried a lot after the visit. I was angry and silent. Not until I drove into Sarajevo 10 years later, during the siege, would I feel that same intensity.

  Snow, Leather and Bondage

  We left Poland with a documentary made, a Polish wedding attended and a drunken version of ‘Smoke on the Water’, along with a new-found respect for vodka.

  Onwards, then, as the trucks rolled into the rest of Europe. Of course, we were all busted for drugs in Germany. Actually, we weren’t. It was the great Iron Maiden drugs bust that wasn’t.

  Asleep in my bed, there was a knock at my hotel door.

  ‘No maid service,’ I groaned.

  ‘This is the police.’

  I opened the door. A very polite young chap in plain clothes showed me his ID.

  ‘We are looking for drugs. Do you have any?’

  ‘Er, no.’

  ‘Do you mind if I take a look?’

  ‘No, no. Go ahead.’

  He very politely poked around my bags and said, ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Excuse me, but what’s going
on?’

  ‘One of your truck drivers has been smuggling them in,’ he said. ‘We have two kilos of heroin, plus weed. When we found him, he was so out of his brain he could not even stand up.’

  Well, that was a big ‘wow’ moment. I phoned the tour manager’s room and looked down the corridor to see a bleary-eyed assistant tour manager being led away. I believe there was a half-smoked joint by his bedside. Never mind the drugs – that’s a serious fire risk.

  I got dressed and went to the restaurant. Sitting in one corner, on the naughty step, were half the road crew, all paying small fines for possession of minimal amounts of dope. On the roof were police with binoculars. It was all serious stuff, until it wasn’t.

  Whoever had alerted the police to the contents of the truck driver’s cab had jumped to a few conclusions, and the police in turn jumped to a few of their own, all involving following the crew buses to their destination, which also happened to be our hotel.

  The truck driver had been driving all night and had the next day off, so to relax he drank a fair amount of his minibar as a homemade sedative before going to sleep.

  Blind drunk, he was dragged from his deep sleep and was thus unable to explain that he was diabetic and he liked to bake his own bread. Two kilos of self-raising is not to be sniffed at.

  Autumn turned into winter, and Europe turned into North America.

  We made landfall on the east coast of Canada, in Halifax. Interesting place, Halifax. We stayed for several days, preparing the show, and I ended up advising a budding dominatrix on the building of her dungeon. By day she was all crimplene slacks and a very professional radio-promotions girl, and by night it was ball gags, rubber and whips.

  Not that I indulged. I was merely shown the catalogue after our vanilla amorous encounter.

  ‘What do you think about the stocks?’ she asked.

  ‘Very nice. Is there any other choice of colours?’

  I asked her how she had become so enamoured of S&M to want to build her own dungeon.

  ‘Travelling salesmen,’ she replied. It turned out that Canada was awash with S&M travelling salesmen, all carrying their kit in a little briefcase like freemasons.

  I suppose all those dark winter nights have an effect on the soul. As the Icelanders say, ‘What do you do in summer?’

  ‘We like to fish and we like to fuck.’

  ‘What do you do in winter?’

  ‘In winter, fishing’s not so good.’

  I took the train to Quebec City, which took a bloody long time. I discovered that there are only two types of tree in Canada: those standing up, and logs. That’s all there is to see apart from snow.

  We were heading west in winter, and the further we went, the colder and colder it got. Toronto was almost tropical by comparison, and this, my friends, was where I met the mighty Johnny Cash. We were doing our soundcheck at Maple Leaf Gardens, and I noticed five guys sitting among the empty chairs at the back of the hall.

  ‘Who are those guys?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s Johnny Cash’s band.’

  I wandered backstage after we finished. The area was strewn with ice hockey detritus and rubber floor tiles. Standing above it all was a leather-greatcoat clad giant, with thigh-high leather riding boots. He extended his hand and shook mine.

  ‘Hi, my name’s Johnny Cash,’ he said. ‘I wondered if you could sign something for my daughter. She’s a fan.’

  His voice rumbled and resonated, but not in a loud and brash way. He was a terribly humble soul, and the sheer size of the man made him more impressive because of it. All I could think was: I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.

  ‘Yes of course,’ I said instead. ‘Very fine boots.’

  ‘Yes, had ’em made in Texas.’

  I signed a photo and he passed me a promo photo of himself, playing pool, entitled ‘The Baron’.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ he said, and then he was gone.

  I too was gone, and nearly out for the count in Winnipeg. Outside the hotel it was minus 25 Celsius. I decided to go for a walk to see what would happen. Halfway around the small square in front of the hotel my eyes and nostrils had frozen – I could barely breathe, let alone see – and I just made it back to the lobby. Do not fuck with Canada.

  We were fully in the grip of a continental winter. It took 36 hours to get over the Rockies to Vancouver, with snow chains and escorts, crawling at four or five miles an hour. I had never seen weather on such a big scale so close up. When people say ‘bad weather’ in Britain it usually means it’s wet. In North America ‘bad weather’ means you might die.

  Christmas was brief and shell-shocked. We finished at the Rosemont Horizon near Chicago, and stir-crazy did not begin to describe the atmosphere. We were so desperate to return home we paid to go on Concorde.

  There was a super-early flight on a 747 from Chicago to New York that meant we could catch the 9 a.m. Concorde, to arrive that evening in London. Before leaving we partied like it was 1999, and I dressed up as Sherlock Holmes and wandered the hotel with a walking stick, beating up light bulbs.

  After a brief period of unconsciousness (as opposed to sleep), I somehow ended up in first class at 7 a.m. in the pitch dark of a Chicago winter morning. The cabin crew came round and asked for drinks orders. I wanted a glass of water. The businessman behind me grunted loudly.

  ‘I think I’ll have a Bloody Mary,’ he said. ‘Guess it’s gonna be one of those days . . .’

  Drunk as I still was, it already was one of those days.

  Concorde was small, the seats were cramped and the menu was amazing. There was lobster and champagne, and . . .

  I woke up in London. I had passed out and slept through the entire experience. Not a single morsel of food had passed my lips. Seeing as it was Concorde, though, they gave me a bottle of champagne to take home as a consolation. So out of my brain I don’t remember Concorde. That’s almost rock ’n’ roll.

  The Boys from Brazil

  Rumours were afoot of a dramatic and exotic development – an undiscovered continent. Iron Maiden world was about to go Brazil nuts. We were headed south, to Rio de Janeiro. I had never heard of Varig Airlines or held a Brazilian banknote. I had no idea where Copacabana Beach was or the Corcovado or Sugarloaf Mountain. I had never met the Girl from Ipanema and never tasted a caipirinha. Brahma was an Indian monk, not a beer, and I had no idea that wiggling your bottom could be a national sport. I also had no idea who Frank Sinatra’s lawyer was.

  Rock in Rio, the first one ever, was a 10 – on any scale of 1 to 10. I suppose I could get picky about the band, or my performance, but actually that isn’t the point. It was a show that broke Iron Maiden in an entire continent overnight.

  Initially, we turned it down. In the throes of selling out American shows back to back, a two-week break in Brazil seemed like madness. Yet the Rock in Rio offer seemed too good to be true. At every turn their lawyer just said yes.

  ‘We want you for two shows in two weeks.’

  ‘We only do one.’

  ‘Yes.’

  And so it went on. First-class travel, a massive fee, merchandising equivalent to a week of sold-out US shows, personal spending money, luxury hotels, guaranteed air freight for 30 tons of equipment – the answer was always, ‘Yes. Anything else?’

  On arrival in Rio, our clothes were almost torn from us by screaming fans, many of them extraordinarily good-looking females. We were pursued to our hotel on Copacabana Beach, which itself was surrounded 24 hours a day by hundreds of fans.

  For the next week we would be prisoners in the hotel, along with several other artists, until the moment we were released to go to the festival, and what an incredible enterprise the whole thing was.

  Three full stages had been created with a railway track laid down to rotate them before a specially designed and constructed festival set-up with a capacity of 300,000 people.

  The biggest stars from the international music world, plus all the biggest local talent, were playing i
n a non-stop orgy of entertainment for two weeks. The TV rights alone were worth a fortune. Cynics might say the whole operation was a huge money-laundering operation. One thing was for sure: there was certainly a lot of it washing around.

  We just enjoyed the ride, quite literally. The last time I had been in a helicopter was when I was chucked out of the side of a Westland Wessex in a tick-infested forest in Thetford. Today was somewhat more luxurious as we climbed aboard for the 10-minute ride to the festival site.

  We were not yet headliners; that honour belonged to Queen, who were on stage after us. Even so, it was clear that there was massive expectation for Maiden.

  The festival site itself was a chaotic blur. Tempers and tension were running high backstage. There was a barely visible sense of order, and a sense that disorder might break out at any time.

  Two rival security firms were at each other’s throats. Both had dogs and both had guns. They were involved in a standoff outside our dressing room. Leashed, fanged beasts with spiked collars were being held at bay at opposite ends of the corridor.

  We waited in our dressing room for the signal that the stage was ready, oblivious to the commotion. In the hallway outside, guns were brandished and there was much trading of insults, and presumably aspersions cast about family members in Brazilian Portuguese. Once it all cooled off and the guns were holstered, we got the green light.

  Rio was the biggest crowd I have ever played, and probably ever will. It seemed to disappear beyond the horizon, past the hazy floodlit pools of colour and into the blackness.

  The surge of adrenalin as we ran out was immense, like a dozen Olympic 100-metre starts rolled into one. All these people, all that emotion, and . . . the sound was awful. We had brought our own monitors, but some of the gear was local, and the monitor engineer was a stranger. I waved my arms, trapped between a rock and a hard place. You can’t stop in front of 300,000 people and do a soundcheck.