What Does This Button Do?

by Bruce Dickinson

  I cracked a bottle of Fuller’s ESB and savoured the moment. There was Concorde; here was me. I was a pilot and a musician with a bottle of my favourite beer from a homeland far away. It doesn’t get better than this, I thought.

  Sadly, Skunkworks as a project petered out as the gulf between expectation and actuality became clear. An artistic crevasse had started to open as new material became available. Al Dickson, the guitarist, had a prodigious output. He was, and still is, one of the most talented musicians I have ever played with, bar none. Frankly, though, I was fed up of bouncing around from genre to genre, and visiting sub-genres. To make an analogy with a restaurant, at some point you need to have a style or signature dish. So far, I had managed a lot of starters, in a variety of styles, but that was no way to have people coming back for more. The band were going their own way, and I wasn’t going with them. I decided to end the project. In fact, I almost decided to throw in the towel and stack shelves, become a pilot, try a bit of acting – anything except music, which was a pain in the arse.

  Feeling sorry for myself is not my natural state, and I sat at home one night staring at the walls, pondering the life of a tube driver. The Metropolitan line seemed quite interesting: long trips, nice views, open countryside. The phone rang. It was 11.30 p.m.

  It was Roy Z: ‘Hi, dude. What are you up to? How’s it going?’

  ‘Oh, not much right now. I canned the whole Skunkworks thing.’

  It’s a shocking cliché, but people really do play music down a telephone and ask for an opinion.

  ‘Hey dude, listen to this,’ Roy said, and then he did exactly that.

  It was the opening riff to what would become ‘Accident of Birth’, the title track of my fourth solo album, and it was an epiphany. After about a minute I had scribbled down some words.

  Journey back to the dark side, back into the womb, back to where the spirits move like vapour from the tomb . . .

  ‘Roy, play it again.’

  Welcome home, it’s been too long, we’ve missed you. Welcome home, we’ve opened up the gates. Welcome home to an accident of birth.

  I breathed out a long sigh of relief. Roy was busy playing me another track, equally as good: ‘Roy, stop right there. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  I spent a week in Los Angeles, out in the Valley in Roy’s tiny demo studio at the back of his kitchen. I came back with over half an album almost completed, rough mixes, vocals and guitars over a drum machine, which was generic but very skilfully programmed by Roy.

  The record company were ecstatic. They thought it was the finished product. I patiently explained that the actual album would have real drums, not ones from Legoland.

  ‘What? They’re not real drums?’

  ‘No, and the rest of it is only knocked together. I’ve got to go out and finish it.’

  So finish it we did, in a tiny studio in Burbank, California, which from the front resembled an empty shop front. It was a bit like the Del Floria’s tailor shop, which was the secret entrance to the headquarters of U.N.C.L.E., or Maxwell Smart’s phone booth.

  In the alley round the back was the small office, stacks of books about aliens and Nikola Tesla, and a fish tank. The back door to the studio was always left ajar, and people just dropped by with presents of beer or Mexican food, and they all stayed to listen to what was going on. This was open house in Burbank.

  And then there was the return of Adrian Smith. I had phoned him and asked if he wanted in on the album. He could do what he liked – solos, some writing, whatever he felt comfortable with.

  In many respects Accident of Birth was the album Iron Maiden never made. The first song we did, called ‘Wicker Man’, was recorded as a B-side before it ever surfaced in Iron Maiden as a totally different song with the same name.

  Maiden, meanwhile, had recruited Blaze Bayley, a thoroughly decent chap with a career so far built around his success in a band called Wolfsbane.

  As I communed in the back of a converted shop, the full weight of the EMI and Maiden press machine commenced the carpet-bombing of the world’s media. Blaze gave a somewhat wry-sounding interview, and I felt a huge degree of sympathy when he said that he felt like ‘Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, trying to find a way home’.

  I knew that same feeling. Back in London I painted two house bricks yellow, gift-wrapped them and sent them to him, wishing him good luck. I’m not sure anyone quite understood the connection.

  I made a point of not listening to the Maiden albums with Blaze. For one thing, it wasn’t my band anymore, and for another it only begged the question, ‘What do you think of Blaze?’ which was a pointless exercise.

  Accident of Birth was shaping up well. We had enough metal fans through the studio doors to know that we were heading in exactly the right direction.

  With Adrian on board, I decided to go for broke and see if Derek Riggs, the original Maiden cover artist, was available. I always had a good relationship with Derek, even though his personality was somewhat mercurial and had caused the falling-out with Rod.

  With memories of being skewered on a stick and spit-roasted at my Iron Maiden exit, I decided to have a bit of fun and create a character of my own. I had met some of the puppeteers from the TV show Spitting Image, and I would create a character, get Derek to do the artwork and then Spitting Image could build me a puppet that I could use on stage or in videos. Thus was born the spawn of Mr Punch, ‘Edison’.

  In line with the album title, Edison is bursting, Alien-style, out of the stomach of a suitably unimpressed gentleman. Mr Punch was updated for the nu-metal century. Metal teeth, bloodshot eyes and broken light bulbs instead of bells on his cap, because, well, who invented light bulbs? His traditional swizzle stick now looked like a baseball bat embedded with spikes.

  I have always fancied a metal Punch and Judy show – as if I would ever have time.

  The album went down well. The critics loved it, having been impressed with the integrity, if not necessarily the content of Skunkworks. It was as if I had done my penance in the wilderness, and my star was rising again.

  Rod Smallwood was furious.

  ‘It’s fucking Eddie’s son,’ he frothed. ‘It’s taking the piss.’

  ‘No, it’s not!’ I protested. ‘Edison, he invented the light bulb. It’s just a bright idea.’

  I took the bright idea out on tour, this time with the Tribe of Gypsies as the band, plus Adrian Smith on guitar, minus the Latin percussion section.

  We toured the US, Europe and Latin America. The latter was its usual frantic self, and we recorded a live album, despite some spectacular cock-ups. Our engineer, the wonderfully dry Stan Katayama, had carefully advanced all the equipment requirements and, being a devotee of detail, was satisfied.

  When we got to Brazil, we discovered all was not as it should be.

  ‘Ah, this is a different desk,’ he noted.

  ‘Yes. It is a better one. Brand-new Yamaha Digital,’ said the smiling Brazilian.

  ‘But I wanted the analogue desk.’

  ‘Yes, but we changed it. This one is new!’

  ‘Ah . . .’

  The manual for programming the desk was extensive, and Stan had four hours to figure out how it worked. He did it. We soundchecked and did the show. It was a great show. Stan came backstage, looking crestfallen.

  ‘There was a problem . . .’ he began.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘With the microphone inputs . . .’

  ‘Oh, which one?’

  ‘All of them.’

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘Except bass drum. We have bass drum for the first five songs.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  Stan nodded gravely. I had the distinct impression he might commit hara-kiri with a mic stand. He explained, ‘Everything was okay before dinner. Then it happened. No sound. I cannot explain it.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I was very angry. But I knew not to shout at Brazilians. I have been told that if you do, they walk away. So I
asked nicely.’

  Admirable self-control, I thought. Luckily, we had another night to save our live recording.

  In America I went to Addison, Texas, and rented a small Piper Seminole to keep my flying skills bubbling. I flew up to Minneapolis then down through Ohio, and finished in Raleigh, North Carolina, doing gigs as I went. Most of it was solo instrument flying, and the night approach to Raleigh–Durham, was the first time I was on my own in weather that was genuinely ‘on the deck’ heavy fog.

  I had taken off after finishing the previous show. I had towelled down, taken a big mug of coffee and packed the post-gig spare ribs in tin foil for a bite to eat when I arrived in Raleigh, three hours away.

  It was a beautiful still night. The twin propellers hummed away outside my headset and the aircraft, which had no autopilot, was stable, enabling me to gaze at the stars and the crescent moon. The weather forecast was clear, but in the valleys as I approached the East Coast, I noticed white patches of ground mist and fog. In flying, anticipation is almost everything. I asked for an update on the airport. It was looking worse by the minute, with visibility dropping and cloud lowering. Out came the map and a torch, then a few bits of arithmetic to calculate where I would go if I didn’t make it in at Raleigh, and then more checking up, to see if the weather was suitable at any of my alternatives. The fog wasn’t forecast, which locals will tell you is common at certain times of the year.

  In fact, Raleigh seemed to have its own weather system dumped on top of the airport. All around was gin clear, and I noted two small airports that were options if I couldn’t see the runway at 200 feet above the ground.

  I descended into the milky soup. The air was warm and moist, the props sounded muffled, the red flashing beacons on my tail diffracted and pulsed in the mist, pumping red light into the cockpit in a seductive lightshow. I felt as though I was back in the womb, and even the throbbing harmonic of the twin propellers sounded like a heartbeat.

  This, I thought, is how people die.

  The distractions were overwhelming, and all my concentration had to focus on the six instruments on the panel in front of me. They were reality and they were the only things keeping me alive as I tracked the instrument landing system, hand-flying the aircraft, my scan increasing in speed and intensity as the ground approached invisibly. Altitude, airspeed, vertical speed, left or right connection, altitude . . . airspeed, altitude . . . power . . . checklist . . .

  Out of nowhere, I realised how tired I was. I pushed on through that barrier; I could not afford to be tired. I looked out the windscreen and back to the instruments: approaching 200 feet . . . and suddenly a faint, white glow and then the blinding brutality of the strobing approach lights. The slate-grey runway, wet rubber – and I was down.

  I sat for a few moments after exiting the runway and tried to figure out where I was on the airport. Taxiing to the small ramp, the airport was still quiet at 2.30 a.m. The lineman called a yellow cab for me as I took my spare ribs off to a motel. Locking up the aircraft, I heard the rumble of a big jet approaching. I was still close to the runway so I waited. The rumble turned into a roar, and I heard the beast go around and vanish into the fog. I figured I might actually be turning into a real pilot.

  Brain Swap

  Being a pilot was one thing, but writing and producing a movie was more problematical. Julian Doyle and I had been spending some quality drinking time together. After nearly 10 years of frustration, we decided to have a crack at raising some money and doing the Crowley film ourselves, which meant low budget, no frills. The early Python movies were done in exactly that way, and Julian was responsible for much of the filmmaking prowess that gave them a look that punched way above their financial weight.

  The problem with a biography of Crowley was that he had no particular centre. Although a fascinating eccentric and narcissistic visionary, his life was a series of episodes. One of the biggest issues was his death, in 1947.

  ‘We can’t afford period,’ Julian declared.

  ‘Well, he did die in 1947. It’s a bit difficult to avoid.’

  ‘Well, we can’t afford it.’

  My two-fingered typing skills had produced by now over 800 pages of rewrites. I sighed.

  We sat in silence and the light bulb switched on in my brain: ‘Unless . . . we bring him back?’

  ‘Interesting.’

  ‘Yep. Let’s bring Crowley back into the present day and see what he makes of it all.’

  ‘How do we do that?’

  I thought back to a classic sci-fi B movie called Donovan’s Brain.

  ‘Brain-swap machine,’ I declared.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Well, a device, a mechanism. Maybe a ceremony? Someone, somehow, thinks they have become Aleister Crowley.’

  ‘Like a kind of alchemy?’

  ‘A chemical wedding, as in Christian Rosenkreuz.’

  Now we were both excited. Julian recommended that I watch a film by Jacques Tourneur starring Dana Andrews, Night of the Demon. It had a thinly veiled Aleister Crowley as the sinister magician.

  My 800 pages went into the metaphorical dustbin and I started again. I only kept the first five pages, which took place close to the summit of K2. We had attracted quite a few potential investors with the opening scene of the movie.

  ‘The mountain scene is great, but we can’t afford locations,’ Julian stated cheerfully.

  I groaned inwardly, but somehow I had always known this would end up getting the chop.

  ‘Why don’t we flip the movie on its head? Let’s start with Crowley’s death,’ I suggested.

  So the new shape of the film slowly started to emerge. Before going anywhere near making it, I stole the rather excellent name of it for my new album. It was The Chemical Wedding.

  Merck Mercuriadis, my day-to-day manager, gave me his thoughts on the next album: Accident of Birth had got me back on track; now it was time to go places.

  Accident, though, was still rooted deeply in the traditional mould of metal. Metal itself had moved on, and I wanted to embrace it while still being true to my own direction and integrity. The Chemical Wedding, I thought, needed a theme as epic as some of the riffs flowing from the frets of Roy Z and Adrian Smith’s guitars. Enter the artwork and poetic world of William Blake.

  I started to read the excellent biography of Blake by Peter Ackroyd. I think it is one of the best of his books, the other being London: The Biography. I got the feeling that Ackroyd was almost channelling the spirit of Blake to rise from the pages and speak directly to the reader. I certainly went to bed with the strangest dreams, and I started to wonder if I had in some way fallen under the spell of the difficult, curmudgeonly but otherworldly Blake. Now was the time to hurl myself into the cauldron of creation that was The Chemical Wedding.

  Most of the album was heavily influenced by Blake – not just in a literal sense, but in a spiritual one. Blake was almost certainly an alchemist or member of a group relating to the occult or magical philosophy. At the same time, I was struck by his two characters ‘Los’ and ‘Urizen’. Los (or Sol backwards) was creative and doomed forever to have his head buried in a bucket of fire, symbolising the torture of the endlessly creative soul. Urizen was the cold repository of logic, chained to a rock, dismal and brooding.

  To me they seemed like characters in Blake’s subconscious, acting out the drama in his soul, expressed as art and poetry. I had some inkling of what it felt like to love the creativity but be held back by the grim realities of the commercial and the fear of change. I could relate to Blake.

  I rented a small apartment in Santa Monica and filled the walls with Blake prints. I thought I might drive myself slightly mad with designing the words to the album. I was stepping in and out of a drug-free dream state.

  Back in the studio, Roy was busy brushing up on his mandolin playing. I had decided to rewrite Blake’s poem ‘Jerusalem’ more as the pagan-alchemical verse I thought represented its true meaning, rather than the hymn. Blake, I think, would have been ho
rrified at the jingoistic interpretation put on his anti-materialistic message.

  I had already used tarot-card imagery in Maiden songs – in particular ‘Revelations’, with the Hanged Man – but working with Blake meant that the Fool, the Tower and the Lovers could all make appearances on The Chemical Wedding.

  The cover art was a Blake painting, The Ghost of a Flea. The Blake Society gave permission for its use, and by the time the album was released the University of East Anglia’s English department invited me to give a seminar about William Blake. Go figure.

  I was delighted to accept, although I think the lecturer in charge thought I was slightly mad.

  When the time came to take The Chemical Wedding on tour, I had a problem. Roy Z was not available. His health was sometimes fragile on tour; not only that, but the success of the record and its fantastic critical reception meant that his star as a record producer was on the rise.

  There were not too many players around who would fit the bill as his replacement. We hatched a plan. Roy would find a friend and teach him how to play the tunes. So enter the slightly bizarre world of the ‘Guru’.

  Adrian’s guitar contribution was his own unique style, but I needed a foil to his looping, shifting solos. In short, I needed Roy Z’s identical twin guitar brother, but they were in short supply.

  Roy’s suggestion was to train someone and that someone was going to be a local LA musician called Richard Carrete.

  At first I didn’t think it would work. The first couple of rehearsals didn’t click right off the bat, and I had the awful sinking feeling that my lifeboat didn’t have any oars or a sail, for that matter. Panic is rarely a solution to anything, so quiet relaxation and patience were the key. Richard was probably so nervous it was a wonder he could function at all. Like many Americans he had never left the country; now he was being offered the chance to go on tour in Europe with one of his childhood idols.