What Does This Button Do?

by Bruce Dickinson

  I’m not sure how the name ‘Guru’ came about for Richard, but it’s probably banter from one of the late evenings with too many Negro Modelos crippling our livers. Guru he became, though, complete with leather trench coat and Easy Rider-style sunglasses.

  Guru had his fair share of misfortune. A dog had recently eaten his car, and his Japanese girlfriend had deserted him with the words, ‘Your existence bother me.’

  In the case of the car, the dog in question was a Molossus, a gigantic, dangerous dog that Guru had agreed to look after while a friend was away. The dog took a liking to his car, specifically the interior, which he destroyed and ate.

  In the case of the girlfriend, Guru explained that he had rolled her up in a carpet. We sat around as he recounted the tale, staring into our beers.

  ‘Why? Was it a sort of Genghis Khan-fetish thing?’

  I never found out, but Guru settled down and we re-invaded Scandinavia and had a rather splendid time.

  The Chemical Wedding album and tour cemented the pathway created by Accident of Birth, and suddenly I really did have a purpose, a meaning and a real career as a solo artist. I was aware that over in Maidenworld things were not quite so chirpy.

  It was hard for the band to adjust to their dwindling audience, particularly in the USA. It was not as if I was benefiting from their discomfort, though; my fate was now securely in my own hands.

  Bob Dylan knew which way the wind blew. There were only a few options open to Maiden, and one of them was to ask me to rejoin.

  There was a part of me that was reluctant to throw in the towel on my solo career. I had come so far, and in the company of fine musicians and really decent human beings. I had learnt so much: about music, about songwriting, about singing and my voice itself. I would have learnt none of this had I stayed in the Maiden fold and ploughed a similar furrow with a trusty old tractor.

  When the phone call eventually came, I watched with wry amusement the diplomatic tap dance go on behind the scenes before the big meeting between me and Steve Harris. This was all done with the customary paranoia about the media and the stipulation that we should not be seen speaking before the press release was drafted.

  Before the meeting, indeed after the first phone call, I called in Roy and the band.

  ‘They’ve asked me to rejoin Maiden. What do you think?’ I asked.

  ‘Dude, that’s really cool. You have to do it.’

  I was astonished. They were signing off, back to their day jobs, in effect – apart from perhaps Roy.

  ‘Realistically I can’t support a proper solo career and be in Maiden. I know the demands that will be made on my time. We will have to go our separate ways,’ I said.

  People who don’t understand Iron Maiden won’t comprehend the impact it has had on so many people’s lives. Maiden has represented a personal affirmation of self-worth for millions of people down the years. Above and beyond pop music, fashion and the detritus and useless decadence of ‘reality’ celebrity, Maiden was hard work and tangible, substantive and complex, but also visceral and aggressive.

  I watched the faces of my bandmates in the room. I think it was Eddie Casillas who spoke. Eddie was the carpenter who never formed a gang. Eddie had the safe house where no gang members fought. Eddie was a rock, and played bass like one.

  ‘Dude, you have to go back. The world needs Iron Maiden.’

  I would never have given myself the title of ‘pocket Pied Piper’, but it seemed that I was expected to lead a new Iron Maiden tribe into the next millennium.

  I had some ideas stored up to throw into the mix. Not concrete plans, but, better than that, visions brought on by the last few years in the wilderness.

  There is nothing like adversity to bring out the best in an individual, and I had gone through my own rebirth. Rejoining Maiden would be restarting the music of the spheres. If the universe had been frozen for a few years, I felt we could walk through the walls of ice and into a world of fire and passion.

  I met Steve in a bar in Brighton, some anonymous location near a marina. The sort of place that neither of us would be seen dead in normally. Rod tiptoed around, waiting for any fireworks, and I found the whole process faintly amusing. Behind the sight of two blokes in their late forties chatting in a deserted bar lay the hopes of millions of fans.

  Steve asked me why I wanted to come back. I said because I think that together we could do great things again.

  ‘Fair enough,’ he replied.

  There was also the question about how to handle Adrian’s rejoining, to which Steve replied, without hesitation, ‘I always wanted three guitarists anyway.’

  I knew that we could be so much more now than we could ever have been before. We’d stared into oblivion and one way or another determined that it was better to burn out and quit than fade away.

  Rejoining Maiden lit the blue touch paper for an incendiary future, and I relished the challenge.

  Feet Wet in the Goose

  Rejoining Iron Maiden meant that any chance of an airline job was fading rapidly. There would, however, be a financial windfall from my return. So I decided to buy an aircraft. What was the point of having a wallet full of professional pilot licences on two continents if I was stuck on the ground?

  Next door to the flight school at Justice Aviation in Santa Monica was a guy called Ken Krueger, who sold aircraft. I had my mind set on something with two engines and six seats, very similar to the aircraft I had flown in Europe during my flight training.

  Sitting out on the ramp was a selection of Ken’s aircraft for sale. One of them caught my eye. It was pretty big and looked very impressive – a Cessna 421 Golden Eagle. I had heard that their engines were a handful to operate and their reliability was questionable. In earshot was Duke Morton, an ex-Air America pilot, who had flown the plane.

  ‘Nothing wrong with that aircraft. I flew her for years. Never crashed. She’s a good ship.’

  ‘What about the engines?’

  ‘The rumours are a load of garbage. You just have to handle them correctly.’

  The plane had belonged to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s lawyer. He was selling it because he had purchased a King Air turboprop. I went to take a look. She was pressurised and went to 30,000 feet if you had the courage and didn’t mind a nosebleed. Club seating and a toilet (well, a bucket) and she carried six people in the back and two upfront.

  As with all things aviation, it was a learning curve. Figuring out how to handle the 421 with its relatively complex systems was stage one. Fortunately, I borrowed Joe Justice, head of the flight school, to babysit me on my first few flights, and then launched around the USA on an Iron Maiden tour.

  Musically, without trying to sound blasé, rejoining Maiden was like slipping on your favourite pair of hiking boots. The groove was still there, worn in place by the years past. What was different, though, was the renewed sparkle and energy. The confidence I had as a result of my solo work and the growth in emotional range in my voice just added more firepower.

  I fired up the aircraft, nicknamed the ‘Bruce Goose’. The plan was to fly direct from California to Bangor, Maine, and pick up survival suits and life rafts, then up to Goose Bay, in Canada, before refuelling in Narsarsuaq, Greenland, and thence to Iceland, where we would have a snooze. Iron Maiden’s security guy, Jim Silvia, was to be my companion on the flight. Jim was quite a character, having been a New York detective and having worked for the DEA and FBI. He was also a private pilot and quite fancied an adventure.

  After Iceland, we’d fly to the tip of Scotland at Wick, then Luton, and on to Paris–Le Bourget, ready for tea and medals plus the continuation of the Iron Maiden tour. The maintenance, predictably, was late and overran by a week.

  ‘She needs a flight test,’ stated the engineer.

  ‘Well, I’ll fly to Bangor, and if I have to come back she’s failed.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Oh, and the autopilot doesn’t work.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yeah, sorr
y. The new radios don’t work with it, and it seems that the whole unit is not working at all now.’

  ‘Oh well, I’ll just take her as is and fix it in Europe.’

  Bangor had 600 metres visibility in fog. The weather was on the deck. I flew the approach, landed manually, picked up the life rafts and we took off for Goose.

  ‘Well, I guess the new nav kit works okay,’ I commented as we topped the cloud layer into a glorious dawn up in northern Canada.

  Some time around 10.30 a.m. we landed, refuelled, topped up with coffee and launched towards Greenland.

  Hand-flying the aircraft across the Atlantic sounds daunting, but actually she was very stable and the handling was such that long stretches with no autopilot were not onerous.

  Narsarsuaq is a notorious and historic airfield. At one end is a glacier surrounded by jagged mountains. During the Second World War and the Cold War it was a very important US base, known as Bluie West 1, and many a pilot lost his life on the terrain or ran out of fuel searching for the runway in low cloud or fog.

  I was lucky, for the skies were clear and blue, and I climbed to 21,000 feet for the crossing, trimmed the aircraft so she was flying almost hands-free and marvelled at the miracle of GPS. I had a precise position, a moving map, an exact ground speed and estimated time of arrival at my fingertips.

  Second World War aircraft would have been unpressurised and freezing cold, with a navigator hunched over his plotting charts, giving his best guess as to where they might just have been, and therefore where they might end up hours later.

  The art of navigation inspired the Maiden song ‘Ghost of the Navigator’ on Brave New World.

  We were just over halfway to Greenland when Jim returned to the cockpit.

  ‘What’s that red light?’ he asked.

  Most aircraft have a fire light in clear view, and a loud bell to draw your attention to it should you not notice burning-red coals assaulting your eyeballs. Because the Cessna was designed to a less rigorous standard, the engine fire light had no audible warning, and the previous owner had moved it to below the instrument panel by the pilot’s right foot.

  ‘Shit, how long has that been on?’ I wondered aloud.

  I looked at the left engine out of the window. There was no sign of fire, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t one under the cowling. The Cessna 421 had a history of turbo-charger exhaust fires and, in certain circumstances, it was possible for an uncontained fire to melt the fuel feed lines behind the engine firewall. This would lead to the burning fuel being ducted into the spar, which held the wings on, and the sight of a wing falling off a burning aircraft was not a pleasant movie playing in my head.

  I checked the gauges, fuel flow and exhaust gas temperature – all normal.

  ‘Jim, go down the back and see what’s coming out of the back of the engine.’

  Jim peered out through the passenger window: ‘There’s a load of black shit coming out.’

  I shut the engine down.

  The engine fire light stayed cherry red after the propeller stopped turning. The prop was feathered-edge on to the airstream to reduce drag. In the back of my mind was always the possibility that this was a spurious warning, especially after the aircraft was fresh out of the hands of the mechanics.

  But there was still that light on, and I only had one fire extinguisher.

  ‘Never a better time to fire this bottle, Jim.’

  I slowed the aircraft up to increase the effectiveness of the extinguisher, and pressed the button to release the fire-suppressant.

  The fire light went out.

  Now I was really baffled. Maybe there really had been a fire? I waited for the wing to fall off. It didn’t.

  With only one engine, we slowly lost altitude for the next couple of hours, before stabilising at 7,000 feet. I put out a Mayday distress call, which was picked up by a kindly Aer Lingus pilot high above us, and relayed to the authorities. I never got to say thank you in person, so this small dedication will have to do.

  The vast expanse of ocean suddenly became very vast indeed. Jim pointed at a fleet of ships in the distance.

  ‘Ships,’ Jim observed. ‘We could always ditch next to a ship.’

  Half an hour later, we realised that the ships were in fact icebergs.

  The GPS guided us to the runway and, low on fuel, we landed in Greenland. Just as I was about to touch down, I noticed the engine fire light flicker momentarily. As I’d half-suspected, this was probably a spurious warning.

  I shut down in the still, sunny chill of a Greenland early evening, and then decowled the left engine. Clearly there had not been a fire.

  In the morning, frosty and bright, blue-purple-tinged mountains greeted me as I took a stroll. The beauty was marred by the sadness of the place. Up in the foothills were the remains of a US Military psychiatric hospital – just the foundations of the huts that comprised a substantial complex during the Cold War. It was a holding pool for soldiers who had cracked up under combat stress. They were hidden from view, in a way that we would now regard as shameful. They were deemed to be a threat to national morale, and so were hidden away in Greenland. Also hidden was an enormous munitions storage facility burrowed into the mountain that ran alongside the runway. The tiny private museum on site was, unfortunately, shut.

  My own problems were partially solved by a grinning Greenland Air engineer.

  ‘Ho, ho, ho . . . FIRE. Ho, ho, ho . . . FIRE.’

  He fiddled under the engine cowl and the fire light lit up on his command.

  ‘Very funny,’ I grumbled ‘What was it?’

  ‘Loose wire.’ He grinned. ‘It’s not loose anymore.’

  Story of my life, I thought as I took off and pointed the plane at Paris. All of this transportation, of course, was in support of my comeback tour, a brisk reintroduction of yours truly to a delighted fanbase. The main event to come was the new album, which I suggested might be called Brave New World, after the Aldous Huxley novel. Steve had a house in Faro, Portugal, and we all decamped to holiday villas and apartments in a tourist colony to live together and write.

  Faro in summer is lovely, but in winter it’s damp and miserable. Janick and I shivered under piles of overcoats at night.

  Golf was on the agenda, mainly because it was almost free, and also because other than drinking in the deserted local pub, life outside of songwriting was desperately boring.

  Nicko is very good at golf. Nick Faldo took drumming lessons from him in the hope of winning the Ryder Cup (he lost). At the nearby driving range and putting green, I tried. Left-handed, right-handed, this iron, that iron – golf does not cause my pulse to race. I’m with Mark Twain on this one, a good walk spoilt. I did try, though, and I accept it is a very challenging and skilful sport. I used to caddy for my father when he played in Sheffield. Near-vertical slopes and gale-force winds, plus none of that namby-pamby electric invalid-carriage nonsense meant that being a caddy at least meant real pain and suffering. I only did it because I had wet dreams about the buck-toothed clubhouse barmaid until I got up close and realised that she really ought to take a lawnmower to her forearms.

  Nicko was good enough to play on exalted turf, with exalted people. Martin Birch, for example, is, I believe, a fine golfer. The course at Wentworth has a hidden horror thanks to the pair of them. Nicko often had a trouser problem on some courses, with his choice of decorative leg-covering frowned upon by the relevant committee. Usually trousers were available on loan for just such crises. I am not sure whether on this occasion Nicko was wearing his own or someone else’s trousers, but his underpants were definitely his own.

  Martin was addressing the ball, which is not to say he was writing a letter to it. Addressing the ball is a roundabout way of saying: ‘I am looking at that blasted ball, and I am wondering how I am going to hit the wretched thing and not make a fool of myself.’

  Martin raised his club to strike the ball, at which point Nicko broke wind with such violence and flapping of trouser material that it c
aused Mr Birch to send the ball to the wrong address.

  In the middle of Wentworth’s hallowed green, Nicko McBrain had pooed his pants.

  ‘Fuck me, Mart. I think I’ve followed through.’

  ‘Bury it,’ Martin suggested.

  ‘Let that be a lesson to you, Goldfinger,’ as Sean Connery might have said. ‘I can see why they call your manservant Odd Jobby.’

  To Fly, To Swerve

  We were energised as a band. I stuck my neck out with some comments about Metallica in the press. Lots of controversy resulted. Frankly, we needed to be outsiders again. Maiden had to be not just the comeback kid, but the unapologetic version. A touch of arrogance? Well, yes, actually. But I’ll take a little bit of Muhammad Ali over sitting there like a happy dumpling any day of the week. It also meant that when you stood up and said ‘I am the greatest’ you had better deliver on the promise.

  The return to Rock in Rio gave us that moment, and this time we were headlining.

  I don’t suppose you could describe 250,000 people as being more intimate than the 300,000-plus we played to in 1984, but it was certainly more organised.

  The build-up was pressure, more pressure and expectation. There was a massive live TV audience and a one-chance live-recording opportunity. I had locked myself in my hotel room for two days in the dark, just resting and rehearsing in my mind.

  When we hit the stage I felt like a greyhound being released from its trap. The heat and humidity were exhausting, but the adrenalin surge just kept coming – to the point that I thought either my heart would burst or my legs would fold under me. I ran and jumped and sang, and jumped again until nausea started to seize the pit of my stomach and then – it was over. Cold beers had no effect, I was so wired. It took four hours to begin to calm down.

  Maiden had nailed it. Brave New World was not just an album title, it was now our very existence. ‘The Wicker Man’ had, of course, been the first single, but not the ‘The Wicker Man’ of my solo album. The stage set featured a replica of the burning Man from The Wicker Man movie.