Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden is rocking strong as of late. The band underwent the massively successful The Future Past World Tour in 2023 and 2024. They’re kicking off the Run For Your Lives World Tour later this year. Bruce is undergoing his first solo tour of North America in over 20 years, but 10 years ago could have seen a very different outcome for the heavy metal singer. In a new interview with Classic Rock, he spoke about his cancer diagnosis and the recovery from that. Iron Maiden all realize that they want to go out on top, they don’t want to become a sad parody of a rock band. Bruce Dickinson believes this more than anyone in the band.
“I felt good. I believed I was going to come through fairly strongly. It was going to be a hard ten months, but at the end of that, I thought – I hoped – I should be able to do what I’d done before. But if not, I was quite prepared to leave – because if you can’t sing like you should be able to sing, that’s it.”
He also spoke about how he would even help them find a replacement singer for him.
“I would have wanted the band to carry on properly. But I would have offered to help them find another singer, because there are other people out there. I could suggest this bloke, or this bloke, or this bloke – he could probably do a pretty good version of me.”
“I had the conversation with the guys [in the band]. I said, ‘I do not want to go out and be a sad parody of myself.’ And the band don’t deserve it either. So I’m thinking: if I lost that voice, I could figure out something else to do. I don’t know what, but I’d have to take a positive spin on it.”
Read More: Bruce Dickinson Talks Solo Tour And The Mandrake Project Comic Book
Luckily for all of us, Bruce conquered cancer and has gone on to a massively successful ten-year period for Iron Maiden and himself.
“But there’s no way I would persist in saying, ‘Oh, no, I can do it’, when manifestly I couldn’t. That would not be fair to anybody. I’m not just a singer. I’m a storyteller. I finally figured out finally what I do in life – I tell stories, and I just happen to do it with my voice in Maiden, but that’s basically what I do.”
“And because you lose a particular type of voice doesn’t mean you can’t use another voice. But not within a band like Iron Maiden.”
“I got lucky. I got through it all, and although my cancer was in that general area, my vocal cords were not affected. So we didn’t have to make that decision, because it all worked out.”
Bruce Dickinson recently released The Mandrake Project, his latest solo album and a comic-book series to accompany the record.
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Source: Classic Rock
