Iron Maiden singer Bruce Dickinson is one of heavy metal’s most iconic frontmen. Despite briefly leaving the group for a period in the ‘90s, since his return for the band’s “Ed Hunter” tour and “Brave New World” album in 1999, it’s hard to imagine the group without him.
However, a throat cancer scare in 2015 left the singer pondering his own mortality. “When I had throat cancer the last thing on my mind was, would I ever sing again?” Dickinson told the Rich Roll podcast. “The first thing on my mind is, am I gonna get through this and be alive? And the last thing on my mind was would I ever sing again? And I thought, ‘Well, we’ll get to that stage when I’m done and we start trying to sing.’”
Dickinson said he was not only ready for a future without Maiden, but he was also thinking about how he could help the band continue without him. “I was quite prepared to accept that I might not be able to sing with Iron Maiden again,” he said. “I might be able to sing, I might be able to vocalize, I might be able to sing in a different way, but if I couldn’t sing the way I have to sing with Iron Maiden, I’ll help them find a great replacement. Because the music is sacrosanct.”
Thankfully, that wasn’t the case.
“We are outsiders in terms of the music industry in a lot of senses,” Dickinson explained of Maiden’s enduring appeal. “There are bands, and there are bands, and there are bands, and they’re just bands. I mean, you might like them, you might not like them, they might be successful or not successful. But Maiden is somehow more than that. Maiden is part of the core existence for a massive number of people, an unlikely number of people from all kinds of walks of life and avenues, from CEOs to special needs people — I mean, the whole gamut — and everybody seems to get something out of the band. And I don’t analyze it or question it. It just is. And it’s a product of who we are when we get together.”
Dickinson’s full interview can be viewed below.
