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Performance Review: Getting personal with the Ironman of heavy metal
Eric Maganga
September 10th, 2018
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This article is more than 6 years old.
★★★★★☆
Bruce held the pilot’s controls before he held the stage (official press photo)
Bruce Dickinson is a superstar, and for many just seeing the Iron Maiden frontman in all his glory onstage would have sufficed.
When you dig deeper, you find that his tremendous sense of humour facilitates the telling of an epic story. This man has an enormous heart and fighting spirit.
That is why his spoken word show is so outstanding.
Vulnerable superstar
Dickinson spent ten years working as a full-time pilot for Astraeus Airlines.
There is an often wrongly told story of him flying soldiers home from Afghanistan. While airlines aren’t allowed in the country for safety reasons, he did fly soldiers home from the Middle East after a stopover.
He remembers how seeing the reunited families, with waiting children holding “my dad is a hero” posters, brought tears to his eyes.
A true survivor
Another story demonstrates how heroic Dickinson is in his own right.
He spoke inspirationally about how he wasn’t just going to roll over and die when he was diagnosed with cancer.
If you’ve read his book, you undoubtedly would have come across a hilarious story about how he solved an issue with constipation (no spoilers).
Sex, drugs and honey
Just to show and poke fun at the sex, drugs and rock n’ roll stereotype, Bruce amused the audience with the story of how he accidentally ate half a space cake while living above a whorehouse in Amsterdam.
He started seeing things and was only saved from tripping out even further by a drug-savvy ex-girlfriend who told him to eat half a jar of honey because the drugs were messing with his blood sugar.
All in all, it was a real feel-good night and as Dickinson says: “If you dream it, it can happen, but if you don’t dream it, it will never happen”.
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