Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson has revealed that he tested positive for COVID-19. This comes days after the singer postponed the final dates of his spoken word tour after members of his immediate household tested positive for the virus.
Dickinson told Rolling Stone that he’d begun feeling symptoms not long after quarantining himself following his household member’s diagnosis. “I thought, ‘Oh well, shit,'” he said. “I was kind of sneezing a bit. For a couple of days, I felt a bit groggy, kind of like the flu, and that was it.” Dickinson is fully vaccinated, and speculated that the vaccine could have potentially seriously lessened the effects of the virus. “And I’m 63 years old,” he said, “I’ve pretty much got no doubt that had I not had the vaccine, I could be in serious trouble.”
Dickinson also spoke about his opinion on whether concert attendees should be required to be fully vaccinated. “The jury’s out,” he said. “Personally, I think people are just very badly advised if they don’t go and get themselves double jabbed as quickly as possible, not for the reasons of going into concerts, but for their own health.” He continued, “Having said that, even if you’ve had a double jab, you can still get Covid, and therefore you can spread it to other people who might not have been vaccinated and they might get very sick and die. Now you cannot legislate against mortality…So at some point, we have to just go, ‘We’re probably going to have to live with this. And if we’re going to live with it, then you have your vaccination.'”
The two postponed final dates of Dickinson’s spoken word tour, originally scheduled for August 9 and 10, have been rescheduled for October 16 at London’s O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire and October 17 at Birmingham’s “The Alexandria.”
Last month, Iron Maiden announced their 17th full-length studio album titled Senjutsu and released a new song called “The Writing On The Wall.” The album is due out this September.
Dickinson recently voiced displeasure over travel restrictions that have made it difficult for UK artists to tour. Dickinson notably voted for and voiced support for Brexit in 2016.