Bruce Dickinson released his epic seventh solo record The Mandrake Project on Friday. The legendary voice of Iron Maiden explores new sonic territory across the ten tracks, dishing up everything from the classic metal onslaught of The Afterglow of Ragnarok to the country-metal of Rain on the Graves to the sprawling ten-minute epic Sonata (Immortal Beloved).
Before the record dropped Maniacs caught up with the metal icon, pilot, historian, honorary doctor, actor, noted fencer and man after whom a species of lizard and spider are named, to explore The Mandrake Project. We also challenged him to a lightsaber fight.
Bruce, your seventh solo album The Mandrake Project is about to be released. This one has been in the works for quite some time, what can you tell us about the marathon process of making this record?
“It’s been seven years since Roy Z and I decided to get back together and say, let’s do another record. We made a really good star, and then I got throat cancer, and then I didn’t, which was great, but then I was playing catch-up with Maiden. Then COVID stopped everybody and we were all locked up for three years. So while people say it took us seven years to make this record, I would say it took us seven years to get back together to finish the record, that’s more correct.”
“But the gap since the previous records Tyranny of Souls and Chemical Wedding, those were the back end of the ‘90s and the early parts of this century, so there was a lot of unfinished business and a lot of places we thought that we could go. For a metal record, this one is emotionally quite diverse. The metal bits are super heavy, way heavier than we do in Iron Maiden. For example, in Iron Maiden, we do a lot of proggy stuff, which is cool, but this one has got some really heavy stuff like The Aftermath of Ragnarok the guitars on that are big, which is great because we’ve kind of moved on from what we did on Chemical Wedding which was kind of an influential record for many people in the ‘90s in terms of the sound of the guitars, so this album is very much about moving things along with the sound of the guitars. All the drums are 100% real, there are no samples. So it’s kind of a combination of old-school attitude and new technology that allows us to make this kind of sound.”
You can hear that determination to explore new territory, are there tracks in particular on the record that you feel are most representative of that sonic evolution?
“The last three tracks go off into uncharted territory for me. I mean the last one, Sonata (Immortal Beloved) is ten minutes long, but it’s not what you think, bits of it are ambient and you wonder “When is that gallop or the guitar solo going to happen?” and it doesn’t at least not in that way. Most people so far find the back end of the record quite moving. That is a rare thing because with a lot of records, you get excited and jump around, but how much do they move you? So I’m really proud of the record, in that sense.”
“It starts fantastically heavy, then we do go into kind of spaghetti western metal a little bit on a couple of tracks, which was a conscious decision. I went, 'Wouldn't it be cool if Quentin Tarantino wanted to make an intro to a metal record?' So there's a track called Resurrection Men, where we were just mucking around when I was playing the intro chords. And I said, 'We need to put something over that, so I hit the tremolo button on the guitar, and went, oh my god, there it is! If I were to use an analogy from painting, we were playing with a lot of colours that you don't normally get to play with on a metal record. We thought ‘Why the hell not?’ We do it because we can!”
You did it because you can still do it better than the vast majority of people on the planet and better than most if not all people of your vintage. I’m curious, what is it about your lifestyle or perhaps your biological makeup that makes you able to continue to create and perform music at such a high level?
“I fell out of my pram when I was a baby on my head. I put it down to something like that. Or maybe it’s the drugs that I don’t take? With the album, just because I’m not busy enough, I created a companion. The analogy I’ve used is that there are two trees in the forest, both freestanding, one is the album and the other is a twelve-episode comic that goes on for three years, and they’re both called The Mandrake Project. They’re both linked, but yet the album is not a concept album, they’re more linked at the roots. You have to dig deep down. So you can listen to the album and never read the comic, or you can read the comic and never listen to the album, but if you dip in and out of both, you’ll have a more fun experience.”
“The first episode of the comic is released on January 17. It’s kind of a ‘Watchmen’ style, it’s not a comic like Iron Man or The Avengers, and it goes to pretty dark places. So the next three years will be developing that and the music will be bumbling along while I’m doing it. So coming back to how a 65-year-old guy comes up with all these weird ideas, I did fall out of my pram and that probably put a dent in my head or something, and I evolved because some of the comic is pretty trippy. People go have you ever taken a hallucinogenic drug?’ and I said ‘No, do you think I should start?’ and they said ‘Absolutely, definitely not, because the shit that comes out of your head already, you definitely should not start taking any type of drug. So I let my imagination run wild. At school I was always the kid staring out the window in the boring match class, thinking ‘I’m in my own world here and it’s much more interesting than yours’. Somehow I ended up making a living out of it, which is fantastic!”
I love that. Now you appeared at a comic book convention in Brazil recently, at which they played your video and you spoke about the comic series. Was that a new experience for you?
“Yes. I was blown away, there were 300’000 people!”
That’s a ‘Rock In Rio’ sized audience!
“Yeah, it was off the chart. The Sao Paulo Comic Con is reportedly the biggest in the world, followed by San Diego, that’s probably a quarter of a million people over a similar period. Comics are mainstream now. Where I live in France, there are large chunks of proper bookstores, full of adult comics. Depending on where you are, you can either view them as trash or literature, and I think we’ve moved on from comics being trash a long, long time ago. I worked with a fantastic team on the comic, they hooked me up with a writer called Tony Lee and an amazing artist Staz Johnson. We do the bulk of the script and everything together and the drawings and then the cover is done by a guy named Bill Sienkiewicz. In the comic world, Bill is the equivalent of being the lead singer of Iron Maiden. I was amazed that he wanted to work with me.”
“This is the first comic I've ever done. I've written books, I've written an autobiography and I've written screenplays. It’s a fascinating world of comics because you can do things in comics that you can't do in a conventional novel, and yet at the same time, you're not making a film, you're not writing a script, like a screenplay. I thought that was what I was going to be doing, but I realized that this was a world with all kinds of new possibilities, you know, it's really exciting creatively.”
It sounds it! I agree with the idea that comics are literature and not trash, so it’s nice to know that someone I’ve listened to for my entire life, agrees with me. I mean your voice was likely one of the first I ever heard outside of my mum and dad’s and here we are talking about comic books, life is wild!
“That’s scary. You’re born and then you’re like ‘wah’ and then ‘here’s Iron Maiden’ that’s child abuse man!”
Now as an Australian journalist, it’d be remiss of me not to ask about your upcoming Future Past tour with Iron Maiden, which will see you return to Australia for the first time in far too long. How’s that all shaping up?
“I completely agree with absolutely every word you said there about being far too long. I mean, I came to Oz with a spoken word tour, and I did five or six dates around Australia on the spoken word tour, and I was thinking, ‘You know, why don't we get down here?’ So finally, at last, we're bringing the tour down under and it's going to be great. I'm looking forward to it.”
“The next thing I'll be bashing, beating up the agent when we get done with the Australian Iron Maiden tour and get done with the South America and the North America and everything else. I’ll be asking ‘How about The Mandrake Project down in Australia? Come on, man, let's let's go!’ We're not going to be doing arenas, but hey, there's gotta be a couple of thousand people, metal heads lurking in Sydney and Melbourne who would kind of like to see me and Roy and the boys, cranking out ‘Accident at Birth’, ‘Chemical Wedding and stuff like that.”
Definitely. There’d be a lot of people who’d just appreciate the chance to be in a more intimate setting with your voice and experience more of its extremities up close.
“The other good thing about that is, it's like, you can smell people too. You know,? Audiences have a smell, so, unfortunately, do the bands, especially, depending on whether they wash their stage clothes often enough. You’ll get all types of extrasensory experiences in those venues.”
One thing that stood out to me about the record was what you mentioned earlier about the back half of the record, being quite an emotive experience. Was that informed in some way by the experiences you went through, over the last few years? Being sort of stuck inside with the COVID thing and having the cancer, did you channel that into these songs?
“Possibly. Weirdly, the back end of the record crept up on us. The final track is probably twenty-five years old. So that was well before anyone thought about COVID or any of the other stuff. The song that runs into it Shadow of the Gods, which was done at the time we did Tyranny of Souls, came about because there was an idea for a project that was going to be me, Rob Halford and Ronnie James Dio together. We would do an album, as the three of us and then go out on tour, and everybody was freaking out about that. It didn’t work out for various reasons and unfortunately, Ronnie got sick. Then it got dug up again, so we thought ‘Why don’t we do it with Geoff Tate from Queensryche?’ then that didn’t work out either.”
“Along the way Roy and I were writing songs for three vocalists, and we realized that was a lot harder than you’d expect. But we did two of them. One of them became the title track to Tyranny of Souls and it is designed for three singers, so I just sang all three parts myself. The second song we had was called Shadow of the Gods. There is a really heavy bit in it towards the back of the song that has a real Judas Priest vibe. Guess who was supposed to sing that? It was meant to be Rob, so again the genesis of the song predates COVID and everything. The last track Sonata (Immortal Beloved), Roy went to see the movie Immortal Beloved which is about Beethoven. He saw the movie, was blown away, came home and did what he does naturally, just plugged in his guitars and keyboards and made a kind of demo. He got a drum machine and put a little sample of Moonlight Sonata underneath and just riffed over that for ten minutes, with no real ending to it, that was it. One night he said ‘I’ve got this thing that I’ve mucked around with, what do you think?’ I said I thought it was cool, but I don’t know what we’d do with it, I didn’t have any words or anything.”
“Then I said ‘I’ll tell you what, let’s go completely off-script here. I’ll just go in front of the mic and ad-lib, free-associate. The first thing that comes into my head might be rubbish, it might be bird noises, who knows?’. So I went in, closed my eyes and thought ‘Where am I in this world?’ Where am I?’ ‘I’m in a dark forest. And the story unfolded in my head as it came out of my mouth. Then the chorus happened and I thought ‘holy crap, that sounded like it might be quite good’, then all of a sudden I was in the second verse and I realized that I was suddenly so impressed with myself that I'd forgotten to sing a second verse. By the time the second chorus came along, I had constructed a story, like a twisted version of Sleeping Beauty.”
“I was always referring to a track called Taking The Queen from Accident of Birth, about the death of a Queen and how when she dies, life rather changes, all the bad things, and karma come back to get her. So then that rapidly turned into a bit of spoken word and mumbling, I was just in this world. 80% of the vocal on that track, is the original vocal that I did that night, which is one take and made up on the spot, and we buried that track and forgot about it for twenty-five years. And it ended up on a CD when I got back together with Roy, he put a CD together with all the various ideas that we had. I was playing it in the car and my then-girlfriend now my wife Leanna was listening to it. And she was like I saw makes me want to cry is so so emotional. I mean Oh, I wasn't sure whether it’s going to be on the record and she goes “Oh my god, are you kidding? You know, it's got to go on the record!” Well, it's on the record, and it's kind of an interesting way to end the record. It does move people it's quite sad. Well, it is emotional to people, I won't prejudge what emotions people have about it.”
How different is the process of writing for your solo records with Roy and writing for Iron Maiden? Are they distinctly different tasks?
“It is. We can be a bit more eccentric with what we do with the solo records. We have a bit of a broader palette to pick from in terms of the colours we can put on the record. Because Maiden quite rightly, have a very strong individual sound, so whatever you do with Maiden is going to acquire that sound. One track on the record, ‘Eternity Has Failed’ opens the Maiden album ‘The Book of Souls’. It was written for this project back in 2014. It’s pulled from an episode of a Doctor Strange comic called ‘If Eternity Should Fail’, so I was already thinking comic world back then, but I was thinking of doing one comic that would be a very basic story, and the album would follow the story and make it a kind of a traditional concept album. Seven years on from that, there is no concept album, it looks like it should be one, but it isn’t.”
“So at the time of writing it, I told Steve, later on, that I’d repossess the track, when I eventually made the record, I was thinking it would be a year and a half and then it turned out being seven. During that time we moved on to a twelve-episode comic. The story is long gone, changed and developed. So that’s why I kind of like did an exorcism on the track, I repossessed it and I thought ‘Well, I'm gonna change the title because that actually reflects some stuff, the story in the comic, I'm gonna say Eternity HAS failed. Steve wanted an extra verse on the song, he didn’t think it was long enough, so this time I pulled out the extra verse and gave ‘Z’ more time to shred.”
“There's a lot of great guitar playing on the record, but on the first track ‘The Aftermath of Ragnarok’, we kept the guitar solo, deliberately, minimalist. I mean, it's like four bars or something, you know? Because we wanted to differentiate it from just endless, endless guitar soloing, you know? Because there's plenty of scope for that on the record. On ‘Eternity Has Failed’ that was one where I said, ‘Okay, unleash yourself, unleash your inner shred, shred, maniac’. We've got a great keyboard player, Mistheria, who we featured a lot more prominently on this record. He has played keyboards on all my records, but on this one, as he's going to be in the band, I said, you'd better be way, up there in the mix with the mic. So I've used a keyboard, you know, he has the ability as an amazing pianist and Hammond player as well. He did the orchestral stuff as well. So, yeah, he's on the record, we're gonna have a blast live.”
We asked Dave Murray this when we spoke to him about Senjutsu, but I’ll put a little twist on the question for you. As a vocalist what is your favourite song that you’ve written and performed, both in your solo work and in your time in Iron Maiden?
“There's two songs that I've written for Maiden that I really love. One of them is ‘Revelations’. The other one is ‘Powerslave. I did those two tracks, oh and by the way Rhyme Of The Ancient Mariner, which I did not write, but nevertheless I love.”
“As for my solo stuff, the title track of ‘Chemical Wedding’ is really cool, there’s a track on there called ‘The Alchemist’ as well that reprises that and obviously ‘Tears of the Dragon’ from ‘Balls to Picasso’ that just keeps doing it for people. I recently did an orchestral show with Paul Mann and Jon Lord’s Concerto Orchestra. We covered a Deep Purple track and we also covered ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘Tears of the Dragon’ with a full orchestra behind it as well, and honestly I was like ‘Wow, these tracks really rock, you know?’. So those are the ones.”
Awesome answers. Before I forget to tell you, I caught an Iron Maiden-branded tram today! Did you know about this?
“Really? Well, that’s when you know you’ve made it! We’ve had a bridge and a train, but having a tram named after you, that’s cool! The Swedish did it with a train. The whole train was wrapped in Iron Maiden and it delivered all these fans. That was amazing. But never a tram. That is something.”
That's great. All right, well, you get aboard the plane, you pilot it. You bring Iron Maiden down to Australia, we’ll be waiting with open arms and then when you eventually leave, come back and do it all over again with The Mandrake Project?
“That will be a blast, but I’ve got 40 solo shows before July 21, then lay down in a darkened room for three weeks and wake up in Australia, that’s going to be great!”
If I ever see you in person, I’m going to bring myself a lightsaber, and I’m going to bring you a lightsaber and I’m going to challenge you to a duel, let’s get our fence on!
“You’re on, I’m gonna kick your ass though!”
That’d be the first time I’ve ever been beaten in a sporting contest by a Brit!
“The challenge is on dude”.
The Mandrake Project is out now
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Iron Maiden
The Future Past Australian Tour 2024
Sunday 1 September: Perth, RAC Arena
Wednesday 4 September: Adelaide, Adelaide Entertainment Centre
Friday 6 September: Melbourne, Rod Laver Arena
Saturday 7 September: Melbourne, Rod Laver Arena
Tuesday 10 September: Brisbane, Brisbane Entertainment Centre
Thursday 12 September: Sydney, Qudos Bank Arena
Head to www.ironmaiden.com or www.tegdainty.com for all ticketing and tour information
