Iron Maiden singer Bruce Dickinson recently gave an interview to Classic Rock where opened up about the struggles he and his bandmates had coping with fame in the ‘80s. Dickinson also recalled the major changes he made in his life as not to mimic several of the destructive clichés that were going on with many of the band’s peers in the music industry.
“All through the ’80s we were working so hard, like eight shows in ten days over the course of eight months,” Dickinson said. “And then at the end of one year of that, you get to do it all over again. And this goes on for five years. You’re under constant stress every night. You’re suffering from a lack of sleep and self-induced shit, whether it’s chasing after women, whether it’s drugs, whether it’s alcohol. And every day you just get up and do it all again.”
The singer continued: “You’re a bunch of lads together against the world. And nobody’s going to help you if you fall down, so you’re just going to crack on, crack on, crack on…You’re not part of normal society. PTSD, dislocation — that’s effectively what you’ve got. And depending on your personality type, you deal with it in different ways. Steve became a recluse. Adrian was drinking himself into an early grave. I was busy shagging everything that moved. And none of it was healthy.”
“I remember something that Pete Townshend once said about groupies. ‘The moment you realize that you can click your fingers and manipulate people into having sex with you, that’s the moment you’re going down the slippery slope.’ Up till that moment, it’s innocent. You can’t believe women are throwing themselves at you. You think, well, this is nice! And it is. It’s f*cking great!”
Dickinson went on to say that a real eye opener for himself was when the band toured with kings of excess, Mötley Crüe. “But there’s a dark side to this,” he said. ”Where do you stop? When does it become a prop, like alcohol or cocaine? When does this become your reality — when it’s not actually real? So that’s when I started doing extracurricular activities like fencing. I was thinking: I’ve got to do something to keep my brain clean. Because I was looking around at our contemporaries in the ’80s… We toured with Mötley Crüe. Complete f*cking casualties, much of it self-induced. And I was like, ‘Please tell me I’m not going to end up like that!'”
Dickinson revealed he almost quit the music business entirely following the band’s massive “World Slavery” tour in 1985. “I genuinely thought I should just pack it all in completely,” he said. “Not go solo. Not do anything. Just stop being part of music, because it’s just not worth it. It’s tanked any relationships I might have had, or wanted to keep.”
The Iron Maiden frontman also shared regrets he had from that period of his career. “There’s a lot of things I missed. My kids growing up. Yes, I saw them, but I didn’t see them to grow up in the way that normal people see their kids grow up. And all the failed relationships, because your mind is skewed. You don’t have a normal set of priorities.”
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