When Bruce Dickinson walked away from Iron Maiden in 1993, a lot of metalheads treated it like treason rather than a career move. Decades later, he’s still trying to wrap his head around how hard some fans took it – and what that says about the way heavy music builds identity around bands.
In a recent chat with Metal Hammer, the singer admitted that the backlash made more emotional sense to everyone else than it did to him. He says he simply doesn’t feel the same “tribal thing” many of us have with our favourite bands or with football clubs. For him, music is something you make and enjoy; for a lot of metal fans, it’s something you swear loyalty to.
He recalls his wife spelling out the problem in brutally simple terms: “My wife did tell me this afterwards: ‘You know the problem was, when you left, it didn’t matter if you’d made the best record in the world – nobody could listen to it,’” he said, looking back on the reception to his 1994 solo record Balls To Picasso.
From a fan’s point of view, that tracks. For many Maiden die-hards, any album that didn’t have the logo on the cover and the rest of the band behind him might as well not have existed.
Dickinson summed up that wall of resistance in one of the most telling quotes of the whole interview: “‘Nobody was gonna give it a shot because it was just so overwhelming that you weren’t there in Maiden anymore.’ And I was just like, ‘I don’t understand that.’ It’s the same reason why I don’t support a football club. I support the best football club; I don’t support a football club.”
“I don’t get that tribal thing. I understand that it’s why people love Maiden a lot, I understand that, but I find it hard to locate that inside me as a general way of going about my life,” Dickinson added.
Before he even quit, Bruce Dickinson had already tested the waters with his solo debut Tattooed Millionaire in 1990 – a swaggering hard rock record that hit number 14 in the UK and climbed even higher in Finland, going Silver in the UK within ten days.
Once he left, he doubled down: Balls To Picasso (1994), the more alternative-leaning Skunkworks (1996), then the molten one-two punch of Accident Of Birth (1997) and The Chemical Wedding (1998). On paper, that’s a killer solo run – melodic, heavy, and increasingly dark. But a chunk of the fanbase was still hung up on the idea that Bruce Dickinson “should” be in Maiden, full stop.
Meanwhile, Maiden carried on with Blaze Bayley at the mic, pushing into grimmer, more introspective territory on The X Factor (1995) and Virtual XI (1998). Those albums split opinion hard; to this day, they’re fighting for reassessment in metal circles. Between the fans who refused to accept the Blaze era and the ones who wouldn’t touch Bruce’s solo work, that “tribal thing” he’s talking about was fully on display.
When Bruce Dickinson and guitarist Adrian Smith re-entered the fold in 1999, the reunion lit a fuse under the band’s creativity. Dickinson said that coming back alongside Adrian Smith sparked a “creative explosion” as they began writing what became the 2000 album Brave New World.
“It really was a brave new world for us,” he explained. “Everything I’d learnt during that time away all went into the pot. If I just stayed where I was, I think Maiden would still be going – as long as Steve [Harris, bassist/founder] wants to tour, Maiden will still be going – but I’m not sure that it would be as big as we are now.”
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