“I’M not sure whether I believe in an afterlife,” muses Bruce Dickinson.
“I’ve not been there yet. This life might be the only one I’ve got so I’ve always grabbed it with both hands.”
Heavy metal god, entrepreneur, airline pilot, champion fencer, cancer survivor, force of nature — all these descriptions apply to the 65-year-old Iron Maiden singer.
“Life can be annoying and frustrating at times but it’s better than the other option,” he decides. “So live it, squeeze it, have fun with it.”
Dickinson is back with his first solo LP in 19 years, the wildly ambitious, mostly hard rock but genre-blurring The Mandrake Project.
Informed by his own brush with the Grim Reaper, ruminations on mortality play a big part in it, hence his comments.
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Ten years in the making, the hour-long album forms part of a Bruce Dickinson grand design.
It appears in tandem with a 12-part graphic novel inspired by his fevered imagination and featuring his scientific mastermind creations Dr Necropolis and Professor Lazarus.
These days, the frontman of Britain’s biggest metal exports divides most of his time between Paris and London, where he lives with third wife Leana, the French fitness instructor he married last year.
Throat cancer
But today, he is talking to me via video call from his other main base, Los Angeles, where it’s just after 8am.
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With a grey beanie covering his shoulder-length grey locks and his remarkably unlined face filling most of my screen, Dickinson begins this particular day full-tilt.
Apologising for being a few minutes late for our scheduled hook-up, he exclaims: “How weird is the body clock?
“I had woken up at 3.30 and it was chucking it down. So I pottered around, checked my emails and an hour later, I thought, ‘I’ll go back to bed, I’ve got this interview at 8’.
“So I went back to bed and of course I wake up and it is bang on 8 o’clock.”
To explain the genesis of The Mandrake Project, Dickinson casts his mind back to 2014 when he did sessions with go-to collaborator for his solo works, American guitarist/producer Roy Z.
We did the nation a service by keeping Sir Cliff off the airwaves for at least one Christmas
He intended one of his songs, If Eternity Should Fail, to be the title track but it was hijacked by his other musical outlet.
Dickinson says: “I played it to Maiden bass player Steve Harris and he went, ‘Oh, I’d really love the band to have it’. I went, ‘Yeah, OK’.
“This has happened to me before. I did Bring Your Daughter . . . To The Slaughter as a very tongue-in-cheek song for a slasher movie and it ended up being a No1 for Iron Maiden over Christmas in 1990.
“We did the nation a service by keeping Sir Cliff off the airwaves for at least one Christmas.” If Eternity Should Fail appeared as the opening track on Iron Maiden’s 2015 album The Book Of Souls while Dickinson’s solo opus would have to wait until 2024 to see the light of day.
At the end of 2014, another factor had conspired against his plans. He received the devastating news that he had throat cancer.
“I had a golf-ball sized tumour at the base of my tongue,” he says. “It was stage three.”
Dickinson recalls initial disbelief, thinking he knew his body quite well “because of all the things I’d done to it over the years”.
Having checked “Mr Google”, however, he realised he was in trouble. “I thought, ‘No, it can’t be, don’t be ridiculous’, but sure enough it was.
“So, in January 2015, I started treatment. I had 33 radiation sessions plus nine weeks of chemo, which knocks the hell out of you . . . but it worked.
“By May, the tumour had gone. I got the all-clear and then it was all about recovery from the treatment.”
Six months later, Dickinson was able to sing again and, in early 2016, as holder of an airline pilot’s licence, he started flying a 747 around the world on a two-year Iron Maiden catch-up tour — as only he could.
Today, he is happy to report that he’s had “no relapses” in the intervening years.
“My doctor has been very clear. He said the chances of me having a recurrence are close to zero.”
There was a time when he “made light” of his life-threatening experience but now he accepts that it has “affected the way I view my life quite profoundly”.
So it comes as no surprise that it has had a big impact on his new album.
“Of course I’m influenced by it,” he says. “It can’t be any other way, unless you’re a robot. Your subconscious churns away.”
‘Bit of a nomad’
Returning to The Mandrake Project’s prolonged timeline, Dickinson describes one further setback.
“I had throat cancer, then I worked like crazy with Iron Maiden and, just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, we got the pandemic.
“And during the pandemic, I was locked down in Paris.”
Since his relationship with Leana took off, the French capital has been his main home but he admits, “I’m actually a bit of a nomad. When I eventually stop moving around, I will alight like some butterfly back on the shores of Blighty because it’s where I belong.”
While stuck in Paris during Covid, Dickinson had the misfortune to “discover a guy was learning the saxophone in the apartment below”.
“It was just awful, like nails on a blackboard version of The Final Countdown and I was being tortured by it at 5 o’clock every day on the dot.”
We got addicted to a soap opera about a Hell’s Angels gang, Sons Of Anarchy, which has some incredible writing
They were strange times for this restless soul who, bad sax aside, began “enjoying the guilty pleasure of not doing anything much”.
“I could learn to cook because I only had one person to poison, my future wife,” he smiles.
“And we started binge watching all the TV shows I’d missed because I was always on tour.
“We got addicted to a soap opera about a Hell’s Angels gang, Sons Of Anarchy, which has some incredible writing.”
Inspired, Dickinson wrote a treatment for an Iron Maiden video, The Writing On The Wall, lead single on their 2021 album Senjutsu.
He replaced the four horsemen of the apocalypse with four demonic biker versions of Maiden’s enduring, devil-eyed monster mascot Eddie.
He says: “I thought, ‘How cool is that?’. They’re like the Nazgul in The Lord Of The Rings, mythical rider creatures and each one an Eddie.”
His flight of fantasy got Dickinson’s creative juices flowing again and he decided to revive the story of Dr Necropolis and Professor Lazarus.
Conceived in 2014 during his initial solo sessions, these characters were playing God, attempting to capture the souls of people as they die.
And to cut a long story short, esteemed Sons Of Anarchy writer Kurt Sutter, who turned out to be a friend of an old friend, loved the idea and suggested Dickinson devise a comic book series.
“My first reaction was, ‘How do I begin?’. I’m not even L.S. Lowry with his little matchstick men in terms of artistic ability,” he says.
Hallucinogenic plant
So he decided to approach Z2 Comics, who were already working with Iron Maiden, and they helped him assemble an ace team.
They are author Tony Lee (Dr Who), artist Staz Johnson (2000AD) and legendary cover artist Bill Sienkiewicz — all three noted for their work with DC and Marvel.
Suddenly, as the lockdowns eased, it was full steam ahead for the two-pronged Mandrake Project, which its creator likens to “two freestanding trees in a forest, one the album, one the comic”.
“They don’t depend on each other,” he adds. “If one falls over, the other stands up.”
So where did the title The Mandrake Project come from, I ask Dickinson.
Before he answers, I wonder if you remember the grotesque, squirming mandrake plants in Harry Potter?
They had roots resembling gnarly little creatures who made deafening screams when pulled out of their pots?
It was also said that mandrakes grew under the gibbets of gallows and that somehow dead people nourished them
Now let’s hear what Dickinson has to say: “The mandrake is a sacred, hallucinogenic plant that goes all the way back to The Bible.
“There is all kinds of lore around them and, obviously, Harry Potter. Legend has it that the mandrake’s scream could kill any human being.
“In the Middle Ages, occultists provided detailed instructions for getting a mandrake out of the ground. These involved tying a dog by the tail to the plant while wearing ear plugs and then giving the dog a kick.
“As the mandrake came out of the ground screaming, the dog would die and you would have it. All a bit of nonsense!
“It was also said that mandrakes grew under the gibbets of gallows and that somehow dead people nourished them.”
It’s clear Dickinson loves a bit of mystery and mythology. No wonder he thinks he’s hit on the perfect title.
As for his solo music, he says it’s very different from Iron Maiden, even if his bandmates appear on the album.
“With Maiden, we’ve got our own musical style. We’re rather uniquely brilliant or uniquely crap.
“We make that noise collectively but when you do something solo, you can step outside the bounds.
“There’s even surf guitar and bongos on one song and the final track, Sonata (Immortal Beloved), is ten minutes of who knows what.”
The epic ending comes over as a disturbing Dickinson fever dream. “I went into this weird trance.” he says. “I’m literally describing the scene in my head as I look around a dark forest.
“One of the reasons the vocal has a strange plaintive quality is because I didn’t know what I was going to sing next.”
The album’s first two songs, lead single Afterglow Of Ragnarok and the unflinching Many Doors To Hell, were among the last to be written.
Deal with devil
Ragnarok comes from Norse mythology and means destruction of the world but with the promise of rebirth and renewal.
Dickinson says: “I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’ve just done a song with the word Ragnarok in it’.
“It really works but it is bloody Vikings so I avoided long ships, and people with horns drinking mead and wearing furry jackets.”
Other songs of note are Resurrection Men, which features Dickinson’s Necropolis and Lazarus characters, and an update on If Eternity Should Fail called Eternity Has Failed.
I’m fascinated by graveyards and being in the presence of all those people who lived but are not here any more
Then there’s the raw Face In The Mirror which deals with the painful subject of alcoholism.
Dickinson says: “I wrote that about people who are quite close to me and have a problem. I looked at myself in the mirror and thought, ‘Could I go the same way?’.”
Finally, we talk about The Mandrake Project’s second single Rain On The Graves, inspired by a visit to poet William Wordsworth’s grave at Grasmere on a typically wet Lake District day.
The song returns to the theme of mortality and evokes the spirit of blues pioneer Robert Johnson who legend has it did a deal with the devil at a crossroads in exchange for mastery of the guitar. Dickinson does his deal in the grounds of an English church.
“I’m fascinated by graveyards and being in the presence of all those people who lived but are not here any more,” he says. “But I don’t hang around them all the time.”
No, Bruce Dickinson is far too busy living life to the full, “grabbing it with both hands”. The afterlife can wait.
BRUCE DICKINSON
The Mandrake Project
★★★★☆
1. Afterglow Of Ragnarok
2. Many Doors To Hell
3. Rain On The Graves
4. Resurrection Men
5. Fingers In The Wound
6. Eternity Has Failed
7. Mistress Of Mercy
8. Face In The Mirror
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9. Shadow Of The Gods
10. Sonata (Immortal Beloved)
