For the uninitiated, Bruce Dickinson is the immensely talented singer of the legendary British metal band Iron Maiden. And having been active in Maiden since 1982 with no fewer than thirteen albums with the band, somehow, impossibly, he’s also taken the time to carve an impressive solo career. He’s released his seventh solo release The Mandrake Project and has done pairing it with a comic book loosely inspired by the album. It’s a wild ride, and any hard rock fans who love Iron Maiden will find a good listen in The Mandrake Project. We spoke with Dickinson remotely about the making of this album, his endless creative energy, and his favorite comic book characters.
Bruce Dickinson: I’m okay. Good. I’m dry. Which is cool. I’m in California so I’m under the atmospheric river at the moment.
mxdwn: It’s quite wet here in Southern California there’s a raging river outside my window.
Bruce Dickinson: That’s it. I’m in LA.
mxdwn: So we’re here to talk about your new solo album The Mandrake Project. Kind of where I wanted to start is, I know that at least one of these songs existed in some formulation back in The Book of Souls with Iron Maiden in a different version as “If Eternity Should Fail,” I’m curious how long have you been working on the material for this record?
Bruce Dickinson: Unconsciously, we’ve been working on it for 25 years, because the oldest song on the record is 25 years old. We didn’t know it was going to be on this record, we just had it sitting around gathering dust until we dug it out in 2014. We went, “Hey, we should investigate all this stuff. What do we got?” What do we got lying around on the cutting room floor as it were. That we haven’t used or haven’t looked at in a while. That’s the oldest song on the record. Another song on the record basically is the same era as the track “Tyranny of Souls” which is the title track of the last solo record. Again, that track which is “Shadow of the Gods” that track was written alongside “Tyranny of Souls” for another project that didn’t happen called The Three Tremors. Which was going to be three metal singers doing an album together and then going out on the road. That was going to be me, Rob Halford, Ronnie [James] Dio, and Ronnie got sick, that didn’t work. Then the idea was maybe we’d have Geoff Tate instead that didn’t work for various other reasons.
So in the end, I was left with these two songs sitting around that Roy and I had written potentially for an album that would use three singers in each song. So it’s quite an interesting project and it was quite difficult to do, to come up with a song, come up with songs that sounded good in their own right, but which also used the voices in appropriate ways. Anyway, so “Tyranny of Souls” is one of those songs, so I recorded that myself. And then “Shadow of the Gods” was sitting around at the same time. So that’s how that one ended up being reanimated on this album. So the last two songs on the record are actually the two oldest songs on the record.
mxdwn: And so which one was just for clarification purposes, which one is the one that’s kind of been worked on for about 20, 25 years?
Bruce Dickinson: That’s the last one, “Sonata.” And “Sonata” is, well, it kind of illustrates the… not the weird way in which we work, but the kind of slightly off the wall way in which we work sometimes, not always, sometimes. So Roy got to see Immortal Beloved, the movie about Beethoven with Gary Oldman as Beethoven, come home feeling inspired, decided to pull an all nighter, just put a drum machine down and a sample of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” a load of guitars and keyboards over it. Basically like 10 minutes, I think after 10 minutes, you sort of like ran out of patience and said, well, I’ll stop it now and go back to the beginning. So we had a 10 minute like bed of like almost like ambient music. And there was a sort of a structure, but it didn’t follow any, you know, particularly conventional song structure. There was no lyric, there was no melody, vocal or anything like that. So he played it to me and said, “What do you think to this? I don’t know what to do with it.” It’s like, yeah. And I was in the mood and it doesn’t happen very often. And I said, well, let me go into the studio and I’ll improvise something. So no words, no story, no tune. And I just closed my eyes and thought, “Where am I? Where do I think I am in this song? And I thought, I’m in a dark forest.” That’s what I sang. And the whole, well, not all of it, but 80% of that song and 80% of the tape that ended up on the record is the first tape and is all like stream of consciousness stuff. So I couldn’t quite believe what we’d done at the time. I thought I still don’t know what to do with it but it sounds cool. And then we just left it like that and didn’t touch it for 25 years. And then it reappeared and I was driving around LA because I needed to write some words for some of the other tunes. And quite often I drive around in a car with a thing playing and a pad by the side of the, you know, the driver’s seat, which is probably very hazardous, you know, but anyway. So, you know, I stop, I pull over when I really get inspired, you know, of course.
mxdwn: I’m sure.
Bruce Dickinson: Absolutely. So, I’m driving around with my girlfriend in the car, now my wife, and I’m playing this stuff. And she’s like, “What’s that song?” I went, “Oh, that thing, that’s, we just call it ‘Sonata’. I mean, yeah, I don’t know what it is, really. It’s just something completely off the wall and very different.” I said, “Why?” She goes, “That’s beautiful. I mean, I’m almost crying.” I went, “Hmm. Yeah, well, I mean, I’m not sure if it would make the record or not.” She goes, “Oh, you’re kidding me. That’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard you sing.” I went, “Really? Oh, OK. Well, maybe I’ll take another look at it.” And we took another look at it. And we had to add a second verse because there wasn’t a second verse. And we had a couple of things where I had to add a couple of bits of spoken word. But 80% of that track is the first take literally as it happened. So we put real drums on it for the album. But we kept the drum machine because the sound of the drum machine is kind of integral to the feel of it. And because it’s a really shitty drum machine, it’s even better. You know, we’re not trying to pretend it’s real drums.
mxdwn: Right.
Bruce Dickinson: The drum machine. But the real drums go on top. Some more guitars, a few more. a few more keyboards. We had to be really careful that we didn’t overdo it and ruin the initial feel, you know, because there’s a, you know. So I was constantly questioning whether we were doing the right thing by changing almost anything, to be honest with you. Because it was so good to begin with, yeah.
mxdwn: I love hearing that story because, I mean, such a journey to bring this to fruition and to bring it to the public. And my experience listening to the album, as the times that I’ve had a chance to listen to the album, the further the record goes along, the more and more I like the songs. And that of course is the one that ends the album. And I can see why. Hearing you tell that story, how organically it came about.
Bruce Dickinson: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we had no idea that the album was going to be as much of a journey as it is. So not a literal, not a physical journey, but a musical journey that, you know, so you start off at the beginning with this really dense, heavy, modern sounding, B-tune, a Ragnarok rock thing. And most of the time, I think people would go, oh yeah, I know what this album is gonna sound like then. Cause most of it would sound like that, right? Well, no. And then you come in with this like, almost like classic rock, scorpions type riff, and you’ve got this big catchy chorus and everything. But with a little bit of weirdness on the vocal in the verse, because that’s, somebody turned around and said, “That sounds a bit almost like David Bowie-ish.” I went, “Well, I didn’t think that, but okay, all right.” But anyway, it’s different. So, and then you get “Rain on the Graves,” which is just a riot. I mean, it’s just, you know, Screaming Lord Sutch meets, you know, like the bastard son of Johnny Cash in the graveyard, you know.
mxdwn: I love that. I love that.
Bruce Dickinson: You know, I mean, it’s so and then you go, OK, so you think you’ve got a handle on the record and all of a sudden you end up at the beginning of a Quentin Tarantino movie and you’re going, “What the hell is going on here?” And then it turns into Hawkwind and then it goes to the heaviest Geezer Butler bass thing you’ve ever heard. “OK, what’s next?” And and so we there’s a lot of it. I mean, but lot of the changes were not planned. They were just organic in that we just said, “Okay, what does this song need to be different?” And we just do that for that song. And then we’d move on to the next song.
mxdwn: How did you know? So I guess this is kind of a two-part question in that. How did you know when the album was ready? You hadn’t the right material for it. And after this long journey with some of the material, when did you like roughly, when did it get finished?
Bruce Dickinson: Oh, it’s finished a year ago. And so 2014 was the first time we got back together, with Roy and myself, because I had some songs I’d written, half a dozen of them, basically. So “Rain on the Graves,” “Resurrection Man, “If Eternity Should Fail,” what’s become “Mistress of Mercy,” although at the time it was just, it was very, very basic. That one took shape later on. “Face in the Mirror,” and “Fingers in the Wounds.” So those are six tracks that I turned up with. And we kind of, we knew we had “Sonata,” we knew we had “Shadow of the Gods.” “Shadow of the Gods” was almost 100% complete. So I thought, “Well, that’s going to go on the record.” We didn’t know if what other songs would go on the record. And then it was seven years after that before I got back together, because after 2014, I did the Maiden album, then I got throat cancer. That was a year. Then I was touring with Maiden for almost two years and then COVID happened.
So by the time I’d got back to Roy, I was like, “Okay, let me think. Where were we exactly?” You know? And the first thing we did was write two new songs, which are the first two songs on the record. So that gave us a chance to recalibrate how we looked at the other songs. Because, you know, okay, you know, these songs were written seven or eight years ago. The world’s moved on, sounds have moved on. You know, these are sounds we’re using now. Let’s view these other songs, starting with, you know, “Afterglow of Ragnarok,” which is fairly dense. But of course, we thought of writing more tunes. I said, “Well, hang on a minute, you know, we’ve got pretty much an hour of music here. Let’s work on what we’ve got and make it good and if we think any particular song that we’ve got that doesn’t hold water, we’ll write something else.” So that’s effectively what we did. And we worked on it on and off. I mean, we had demos of, most of the tracks had demo drum machine drums on. But this was a decent drum machine that masqueraded it actually as a drum kit, but still a drum machine.
mxdwn: Sure.
Bruce Dickinson: So we have Dave Moreno, the drummer, we did a lot of the tracking and a lot of the vocals in his studio, which is it’s like he’s got a permanent little drum kit set up there, mic’d up with the Pro Tools rig. And literally the places, I mean, it’s tiny, it’s the size of a double garage. The whole thing. So you have the choice of you do the vocal next to the drum kit, or you can do the vocal in the toilet. There was a mic in there. Or in my case, there was a guitar cupboard where there was guitars hanging up. And I did mine there. And I was, you know, six feet away from Roy, who was sat at the desk on headphones. So I just left the door open and I could talk to him straight. No glass in between you, none of this stuff, you know, and you just sing and it’s immediate, you know. So lots of intimate stuff going on. But what Dave did with the drums, is he, first of all, he replaced all the drum machine drums with real drums. Then he tweaked his performance on the real drums so that it would insert better drum fills and things like that and get the right feel. And at this point the album is sounding pretty decent. But then we went into, I forget the name of the studio, near San Diego anyway, big room, big drum kit, and he replaced every note that he played on the real drum kit with another real drum kit and copied himself with a bigger drum sound, which is just a pretty amazing bit of drumming, frankly. So as a result of that, there are no drum samples or triggers on the record.
mxdwn: So by this point, you and Roy are feeling it’s getting pretty dialed in. It’s pretty close.
Bruce Dickinson: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I was blown away by the sounds that we’re getting that, you know, the rhythm section and everything. We got the keyboards being sent over by Mysterio [Maestro Mistheria] as well. The way we work with that is, I mean, he’s in Rome and we just send him over the basic the basic backtracks or whatever we got. You know, if there’s a vocal, then he gets that too. And he comes up with whatever he wants. And usually there’s about 16 tracks of keyboards for every song with everything you can possibly imagine on it. You know, I mean, there’s Hammond’s, there’s church organs, there’s choirs, there’s ethereal, there’s like glockenspiels. Christ knows what. And he’s not precious about any of it. He’s going to just use what you want. And so if there’s a particular bit that we really love, we might go back to them and say, listen, mate, we love the Hammond you’re doing. We love that. He gave us a track with a bit more Hammond on it or something like that. And so or church organ, I think one particular track, I said, church organ, need a church organ. So that’s how the keyboard thing worked. And again, you’ve got some happy accidents as well.
So “Rain on the Grave,” there’s a moment where there’s this insane keyboard {imitates keyboard melody} like that. That just, you know, like, takes the top of your head off. And I was like, that is so catchy. That’s so like almost like late ’50s horror show, you know, the Cryptic of Five, you know, and Nervous Norvous and all the rest of it. That it’s that sort of like type organ, but heavy. I said, oh, let’s when that kicks in the mix, you know, that’s a hook in and of itself, just that keyboard stab, you know. So the album’s full of little moments like that, you know, where we’re putting a hook within a hook within a hook, you know.
mxdwn: Now, unless I have it misunderstood, and you correct me if I’m wrong here, I mean, coming on that stuff that you’ve been up to with Iron Maiden and the Legacy of the Beast world tour or the Future Past world tour, you’ve had two albums with them, two massive tours with them. I saw you with Iron Maiden at the Power Trip Festival back in October. The question that I have for you is I know that you’re going out of the road with this solo album. I know that you’re going to be hitting about four months of dates coming up. What I’m curious about, why not take a break? You seem like you’ve been wall to wall busy for about six years straight.
Bruce Dickinson: Yeah, I have. Yeah. It’s been great. {all laughs} I mean, if your if your destiny is to create things I’m in the right place, you know, and so far, touch wood, what I’m doing, I’m pretty happy with, you know? Musically and, you know, other areas of creativity as well, like the comic, you know, the comic book and things like that. They all kind of fit together because my world as a singer is very visual. And so to be able to actually put visuals to a story as well as have a musical story as well in a different environment, you know, with the album, is really satisfying. So to take it out on the road and give it the air that it needs to really breathe with an audience, is gonna be great. I’m very excited by that.
mxdwn: You know, it’s amazing to me at the amount that you’ve been doing, that you still have the energy or like, I need to be on the road for four months. I mean, you hear about a lot of bands, they’re out, they do their thing. And then they’re like, I want to be nowhere for a year and a half. So I mean, that after all of this, the last six years, you’re like, I’m good. I’m ready. Let’s rock. I wonder, is that a wellspring of energy in you? Do you just have that kind of thing going on?
Bruce Dickinson: I think if you’re doing good stuff and you’re enjoying it and people are digging it. I mean, why would you want to stop? You know, I mean, it’s because this is not work. It’s not, you know? I mean, work is something you do that you hate, right? You know?
mxdwn: Oh, yeah, I know. I know what you mean.
Bruce Dickinson: You know, and so, yeah, this is not that. And so I love it because not only are we taking the story to this audience and me actually getting to quantify exactly where is my audience? Because, you know, I was I was having my own audience with Accident of Birth, in particular, Chemical Wedding. I thought, “Hey, you know what, I’ve actually got people that like my music, not just my music, because I happen to be the guy in Iron Maiden,” you know? And then, of course, I rejoined Maiden and they had Tyranny of Souls. And fifteen something years later, I’m getting a lot of positive vibes from people. They go, “Hey, new solo act!” I go, “Yeah, yeah!” Because, you know, “We’ve listened to all that stuff now and it’s really, really cool.” I mean, the intervening years, I think, have been have been very kind to people’s perspective of my back catalog, the six albums that I’ve done previously.
mxdwn: Right
Bruce Dickinson: Even a record like which is my most, it’s certainly as far as the metal community–whatever that is–is concerned. I mean, my most difficult though is certainly Skunkworks. But even that record, I think people have finally come around and gone, “I think maybe we should just get over ourselves and just look at it as a piece of music?” Not as like a fashion statement, you know. So, I can pop my hand up and go, you know what? I think I’m pretty proud of everything I did. Some bits could have been improved, some bits if I had the choice, I would maybe have done things slightly different on one or two records. But in general, I think it holds up quite well.
mxdwn: You know, and I’m going to date myself a bit, cement myself in a portion of time. So I came to your solo work before I came to Iron Maiden because it was when Balls to Picasso came out. And it was it was when MTV and Headbangers Ball was playing in “Tears of the Dragon” a lot. And it wasn’t until a couple of years later where some friends of mine were into Iron Maiden, and then they were like, you’ve got to listen to Iron Maiden, right? So I was a big fan of “Tears of the Dragon” the moment that came out. And just speaking to your point, and you know, that was a different time in music, right? Things were done very differently in those days, both recording, marketing, packaging, releasing, monetizing, the whole thing. For fans of yours, because like you say, fans have come with you on this journey as you’ve done these different solo records over time and you’ve done different things with them, depending on where you were in your world. For someone who’s been with you all the way from Balls to Picasso, I have some sense, I’ve heard the album, but for those that might not have yet that have been with you from all your different solo records, how has what you’re doing changed over this time? What is different about how you look at it now when you’re creating the solo work as opposed to back then when Balls to Picasso was made?
Bruce Dickinson: Well, I think… I’m a bit more relaxed about it now, not artistically, but just like socially. Because you know, Balls to Picasso, I’d left Maiden and Skunkworks and Accident of Birth and The Chemical Wedding. And yeah, on the one hand, they’re records, but also for me, it was also survival. You know? I mean, that was my bread and butter. That was my day job. That’s what fed my family those records. And I don’t think the records suffered because of it, but I did. {laughs} Because, you know, the levels of anxiety and things like that about, “Oh my God, you know, what happens this or that, or people don’t like it?” And then you don’t change what you do in order for that. But it’s certainly in the back of your mind. And now with this one, we were able to just take our time and go, no, this is not that we would not have been more pure about it anyway, but it just removes some of the, the element of, “We have to do this otherwise we’re doomed.” None of that. We have to do this because we have to do it. That’s it. End of story.
mxdwn: Right. That must be freeing in a large respect because it just, I don’t know, I’ve never felt like the creative process benefits from that feeling of doom and anxiety, you know?
Bruce Dickinson: No, not at all. Probably your subconscious will munch on it and it’ll come out as something bitter and twisted in the lyric years later. Bitter and twisted doesn’t really do it. Doesn’t really do it for me in lyrics unless they’re very, very well done, you know? “I saw your dreams, they were clouds in my coffee. You’re so vain, I bet you think his song is about you.” That’s bitter and twisted done beautifully.
mxdwn: Right. Now, just to kind of end off here, I think we’re about out of time. I wanted to talk just a smidge, and we’ll just kind of end off here on the comic book and the comic book portion of the release. And, you know, my understanding is, of course, in the portion of the creative process is coming together to put this together, there was an idea of maybe this could be a graphic story, and then you wrote a story for it. I wanted to just start by asking, have you always been a fan of comic books? Is that a part of your backstory of being a comic book fan?
Bruce Dickinson: No, I dipped in, dipped in and dipped out. So I mean, when I was, when I was up till, up till age 17, 18, I was a fan of a lot of English comics and other like puppet TV series, like Thunderbirds and stuff like that, lots of sci-fi stuff. And we had our own English, like sci-fi comics, like the Eagle and things like that. But then American comics, I loved the Silver Surfer and I loved Doctor Strange. Not a particular fan of Superman. He just seemed to be a little bit like a blue painted version of Dudley Do-Right the Mountie. You know what I mean? He’s doing his thing, you know? I never got that at all. I quite liked the Human Torch. He was cool, you know? He’d set fire to himself and fly. Yeah, that’s all right. Yeah. I’ve been trying to do the same thing for years. It doesn’t work for me, but you never know. So then I, you know, joined, you know, rock and roll bands and Iron Maiden and suddenly I’m in a comic. I’m in a living cartoon, you know, with Eddie and everything. And then I kind of started going back into comics when I was doing some screenwriting for a film called The Chemical Wedding and the director gave me a script for Watchmen, which was the script, not the script they actually made, it was the script that Terry Gilliam was going to direct but they didn’t have Terry direct it. Julian Doyle, who was the director of the movie Chemical Wedding, he was Terry’s film editor on Brazil and Time Bandits and Life of Brian and all the [Monty] Python stuff basically. So he did my movie, but along the way when he gave me the script, he said, yeah, read this. He said, but here’s the book you have to read along with it because that book Watchmen, he goes that book and V for Vendetta and all the rest of it. That’s the future of screenwriting. And I was like, “Oh, really? OK.” So anyway, so I read Watchmen and I’ve now read Watchmen for about the sixth or seventh time. And every time I read it, I’m like, oh, I didn’t notice that before. That’s amazing. You know, it really is an astonishing piece of writing.
mxdwn: Masterpiece for sure.
Bruce Dickinson: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, it’s like. I aspire to that with my comic book as I aspire towards, you know, a bit of Ennio Morricone on the beginning of one or two songs, you know? I wouldn’t dare to compare myself in either way but you can always like dream.
mxdwn: And so just to end off on this simple question, just to let you go, and I’m sure you’ve got a lot else to do in your very busy day. And as people are going through the album and as the comic books come out for this, is it more apt to think of it as the themes of the songs are gonna be a part of the themes of the story or the songs kind of match to each issue as what’s going through the story? I’ve only seen the first issue of the comic myself so far.
Bruce Dickinson: No, there’s no direct connection between any of the songs on the album and the story of the comic. However, the analogy I’d use is, you know, it’s like you’re wandering through the forest and you see two big trees, neither of them leaning on each other. One’s called the comic, one’s called the album. And, but at the same time, where are they connected? Why, they sure are. You can’t see it, but they’re connected at the roots. You know, the roots are all gnarly and talking to each other. So I can now pull, well, I’ve already done it on a couple of occasions in future scripts where I’ve pulled lyrics off of Accident of Birth or Chemical Wedding and I’ve just dropped them in just little two or three words in a little Easter egg in one of the comic things. So people who are a fan would go, “Oh, that’s off that album.” If you’re not a fan, it doesn’t matter. It’s just dialogue that works in its own right. Having said that, I’ve taken some of the elements of the comic and dropped it back into the album lyrics in places. So, “Shadow of the Gods” has a little bit that relates to a bit of the technology in the comic. “Resurrection Men” is specifically about stuff in the comic, because the resurrection men are the two characters, Dr. Necropolis and Professor Lazarus, because they basically, their technology captures the human soul at the point of death, stores it, and then puts it back into something else.
mxdwn: Amazing. Well, sir, I greatly appreciate your time today. I know you got to run. So thank you again, Mr. Dickinson, for speaking with us. And we look forward to hearing more from the album and hopefully seeing you when you get on the road.
Bruce Dickinson: Yeah, me too, mate. All right.
Photo Credit: Boston Lynn Schulz
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