Some might forget that Bruce Dickinson wasn’t always the lead singer of Iron Maiden. The singer for their first two albums was Paul Di’Anno. In a recent interview with Record Collector Magazine, Bruce talked about the early days for the band and the time he saw them live.

Famously, Iron Maiden shared the stage with Bruce’s former band, Samson on a tour. So he got the experience of seeing them live and hanging out with them before he joined up in 1982 before The Number Of The Beast album. Here’s what he had to say:

“The first time I saw Maiden was at what was then the Music Machine in Camden. Samson were headlining because our management had bankrolled the gig and said, ‘We want the top slot,’ although we didn’t really deserve it. That became obvious when Maiden came on, because the whole place was rammed. I’d heard rumors about how good they were, and I thought I’d better see them. When they came out, I thought, ‘I’ve never seen Deep Purple, but this is what it must have felt like to see Deep Purple in their prime, rocking up a storm.'”

That’s not all he had to say though, he had some choice words for Paul Di’Anno and his singing style.

“He was okay, but he didn’t have a lot of flex to his voice. I thought his voice had come as far as it was going to get. I saw what the rest of the band were capable of straight away, and I remember thinking, ‘Good God, I’d love to front that band.’ And as soon as they finished playing, everybody in the venue left and we were headlining to about three people.”

Finally, Bruce went on to talk about his own voice and how he thinks he sounds even better today than in the past.

“The tone of my voice has changed a little bit, and in many ways I like it more now than I did when I was 23. 23, I was like shiny and squeaky. Your voice becomes more lived in. You can express more emotion, you can carry more emotion. So, for example, there’s a song on [Bruce’s latest solo] album [‘The Mandrake Project’] called ‘Rain On The Graves’. I couldn’t have sung that song when I was 22 years old in the same way.

So it’s interesting to see how the kind of emotional life of the voice develops over the years. So that’s kind of the realm that I’m trying. I’m trying to extend the range, the emotional range of my voice, as much as preserve the physical range at the same time.”

Have you listened to The Mandrake Project?

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