Henrik: I noticed that "Jerusalem" is not on the album, still you played it... Was it something you saved for, like, extra tracks on Japanese editions or such?
Bruce: Nope.

Henrik: No? Then why did you choose to omit it?
Bruce: Cause it wouldn't fit on the CD.

Henrik: In terms of...
Bruce: ...length, in minutes. It's 71 minutes at the moment.

Henrik: So that's why you scrapped "Tattooed millionaire" as well?
Bruce: Yes. Well, we could have done two CDs but then we'd end up having to charge a lot more money and there'd only be an extra ten minutes of music. At one point we were thinking of doing a CD-ROM, but we ran into production problems. It was gonna take so long and a lot of the people that would have been working on it would have been in England and I'm over here touring, and everything. I would really like to been in when we were editing the video footage, you see. So for the sake of the cost in getting the record out, I thought, "Well, you know, it's a great record, a great live album, it doesn't really need all this extra shit, let's just go with it the way it is".

Henrik: But I think I've seen somewhere that the Japanese edition will have extra tracks. Is this just rubbish?
Bruce: No it's rubbish, unless they wanna pay for an extra CD. For one song...

Henrik: So there won't be any singles or anything like that?
Bruce: No.

Henrik: Will it be released world-wide, I mean, what label are you using in the US now?
Bruce: Airraid.

Henrik: So you have a global distribution coverage now?
Bruce: That's right, this will be the first release on Airraid in the states and we'll see how it does. We're working up towards the point where, next year all the Samson stuff will be coming out. This year, quite possibly, we may have "Metal for Muthas" coming out, you know, the original compilation album that started the new wave of British heavy metal. It's never been issued on CD, you know.

Henrik: At least not on a proper CD...
Bruce: Yeah, exactly. Next year also, I'm gonna be releasing an album and I'm gonna call it "Catacombs". It will have loads of stuff, some of it released, a lot of it unreleased.

Henrik: So you will be digging into the "Keith Olsen" archives...
Bruce: I'm gonna be digging out some Keith Olsen tracks that people have never heard, I'm gonna be going into all the "Chemical wedding" and "Accident of Birth" extra tracks...

Henrik: Like, Japanese extra tracks...
Bruce: Yeah, all those extra tracks I'm gonna put on my record so everyone can get hold of them. Plus there's a whole bunch of unreleased stuff that we recorded, me and Roy, during "Accident of Birth" and "The Chemical Wedding" that we finished mixing them and stuff last time. This track "Wicker man" that we did for "Accident of Birth" that we never had chance to finish, for example... Those tracks will go on it as well, I may even put the original version of "Bring your daughter to the slaughter" on it too, so it'll be an interesting record, you know.

Henrik: Are we talking one or two CDs? I mean, it's a lot of stuff...
Bruce: Yeah, it's a lot of stuff. What I may do is I put it out as just one CD and we'll see what the reaction is because there's enough material for two CDs. If the reaction is really good and people like it then there may be "Catacombs II". You now... Deeper in the crypt... That'll be something for next year cause I'm not gonna be doing any writing fort my solo-stuff. Everything I'm writing at the moment is going straight into Maiden.

Henrik: How do you approach the writing, then? Do you, like, scrap ideas because they sound too much like "The Chemical Wedding" or?
Bruce: Oh no no no no, not at all, I mean, any ideas I get I just present to Maiden. If they like them, "great" if they don't, well, "great", you know. But I don't hold anything back.

Henrik: So we won't se a brand new Bruce Dickinson CD coming out within the next years?
Bruce: No. It'll be about a year and a half, I think, at least, before I start even recording one. It's eighteen months before I even stop touring because we go straight into recording the new Maiden album, and then it's promoting it and then we start touring next May. And that's gonna be till X-mass, maybe even a little bit of the year after. It'll be a long tour, probably like ten or twelve months and at the end of that I may take some time off. But I would like to have an album out, you know, but again I don't want to rush it because it may well be a different kind of an album. Perhaps it might be time to do something a little strange. (Laughter)

Henrik: Yeah, but you tried doing something strange back with the Keith Olsen project but you got tired of it before you even released it...
Bruce: Yes, but I think I've got a real legitimate audience. Cause a lot of people have got "The Chemical Wedding" and it's even starting to become "politically correct" to like "Skunkworks". I've noticed a lot of people coming up saying you know, "I really liked that album". I'm so proud of that record. And it wouldn't even be beyond the bounds of possibilities to start coming up with some pretty strange ideas. Me and Roy have talked about it. We can get really weird when we want to be.

Henrik: So you are planning to use the Tribe of gypsies in future projects as well?
Bruce: Well, certainly me and Roy, we have a great relationship. I love Dave as a drummer as well, he's a great drummer, he's got incredible feel and I love working with him and it's down to the other guys if they want to come along really. Certainly it also depends if it's going to be a big touring thing or not. I'm not sure that going out on the road for four or five months touring clubs is necessarily what I'm going to want to do after having been on the road for twelve months with Iron Maiden. It might be a bit too much.

Henrik: Yeah, but you're the notorious workaholic...
Bruce: Yes, but I am also trying to enjoy life and I enjoy making records and I do enjoy singing and playing live. I'm not sure whether or not I want to go down the route necessarily of having the band thing and the road-crew thing. It may be that there's another way of visiting countries and playing music, you know. Perhaps, as the internet develops, it may very well be possible to do a couple of shows and have people download them. I could almost stay at home, you now, play some concerts with some friends and then people can download them subsequently, and just do some shows... A couple of weeks or something, I don't know. It rather depends on what kind of an album it is. If it's a very strange album we could end up doing a very strange show. (laughter)

Henrik: But it must be good to have the ability to step down from the Maiden thing play your own solo-songs in a much more intimate environment.
Bruce: Oh, yes, I love the intimacy but what you find with clubs and things like that is that quite often there can be a fair amount of pressure. What some people expect, after you come back from Maiden, is a little miniature Iron Maiden. So that's why I say it might be a really good idea to do something a little different. Perhaps we end up doing a film soundtrack or something very strange, I don't know. There's a lot of interesting possibilities and I'm not trying to make up my mind, at the moment, what to do. I've got enough material to keep archivists busy for a couple of years. Looking back it's incredible how much stuff I've done over that last six or seven years and there's also the whole issue of videos.

Henrik: You recorded the Brazil gig on video...
Bruce: What happened was, they had some video-cameras that were shooting in the hall for side-screens and things like that and it's OK for bootleg-style stuff and literally that's all it is. It's just a videocameraman doing his thing. If we did a CD-ROM we were planning to edit maybe two or three tracks. We would compile the best shots from about an hour and a half of footage and put that on the CD-ROM to give people a clue what the whole thing looked like. We really don't have time to do that. Everybody's tied up with the Maiden-thing at the moment and when we looked at the cost of it and the delays it wasn't worth it. But we have that stuff available and we actually have another couple of concerts from Brazil available as well. We've also got an entire Skunkworks live video that we shot on film that was only released in Japan. Plus we've got "Tattooed millionaire" live video and all of the promovideos which have never been released. So actually there's an awful lot of videostuff. But I don't want to release a video until enough people have got DVDs. I would like to wait until we can release a DVD because I'm very impressed with DVD. Especially for something like music where you get really good soundquality. I would like to do a nice DVD at some point but all of these things really are dealing with stuff that I've already done.

Henrik: But isn't there a slight problem here because you don't actually own the rights for three of your albums?
Bruce: Oh, well, precisely, however, we can get around that. I mean, I've got the rights for "Balls to Picasso" and "Tattooed millionarie" and I do own the rights to the Skunkworks live situation.

Henrik: I even believe Castle Communication reissued "Skunkworks" and "Accident of Birth" recently.
Bruce: That wouldn't surprise me at all, I think they'd be very stupid not to. (laughter)

Henrik: But that's something that you actually don't have control over...
Bruce: No, not as such, no. We wanted to get the records back off them and they wanted some stupid amount of money, but there will come a point when we can do some kind of deal. I'm selling a lot more records of my records and they would actually make more money if they let me have the records back and I sold them (laughter). Because I do better job than they do.

Henrik: And this brings me to the Samson reissues. This is actually the first time you will be releasing them and get royalties for them as well, isn't it? Because there were some really weird deals back when the albums originally came out.
Bruce: Yea, well, I'm still not sure whether I actually end up getting royalties as an artist. The record-company should make some out of that old deal. I mean, I have the same deal as the other four guys in Samson in terms of royalties and things like that. There's still quite a bit of money ending up to get paid off because we invested quite heavily in the records to buy them off of the record-company which was going bankrupt. But it's all quite straight forward now. So that's what Airraid is gonna be up to. And we're looking for some bands at the moment, bands to sign, cause we now have a global set-up, we proved we can sell records and I'm interested in signing some bands. I'm looking at a couple of things at the moment...

Henrik: Any particular direction?
Bruce: Oh, pretty solid metal stuff and actually more towards the traditional kind of metal. I understand singers who sing, you know, the shouting and grunting kind of style of singing, but I'm not sure I'm over qualified to judge whether that's any good or not. I don't know how you can tell (laughter). What I would love to find is a band with a singer who can sing but, instrumentally, can embrace all the new technology and all the variety of sounds that you can get in metal now. Pretty much somebody that would be making a record that sounds like "Chemical wedding" (laughter). Or whatever the next move is from "Chemical wedding", you know.

Henrik: But do the Tribe of gypsies have a global record-deal?
Bruce: No, they don't. The thing with the tribe is, they're new record is a very long way away from metal. I think it's a really nice record but our distributors with Airraid are all glued in with the fact that Airraid is basically a rock/metal label and therefore it's probably not a smart thing to sign a band and then give it to the distributors and they say "well, what do we do with this?". It's not fair, above all, to the Tribe of gypsies, because it stops them going somewhere else and it could be potentially wasting everybody's time. I would quite happily sell their records on a website and say "here, link to the Tribe of gypsies, go buy some Tribe of gypsies records", you now, I'd do that for nothing and they can have all the money, I don't care. They do that at the moment at their own website and they have the Japanese deal as well, which is doing quite well at the moment.

Henrik: But will you personally be doing other projects and stuff during this time with Maiden? There was this movie you were supposed to be in?
Bruce: Yeah, the movie kept getting put back, as movies do, so that's something I'll look at next year if there's any time. The Maiden-thing takes priority as it should do, really, because Maiden is gonna be the biggest Metal band in the world next year. The reaction in Europe is astounding me, but the reaction in America is stupendous! So it's no question in my mind that Maiden is going to be the biggest band in the world next year, in terms of metal.

Henrik: And what about this "Ayreon" project? Will you be doing that?
Bruce: "Ayreon", yeah, it's possible.

Henrik: So there's nothing recorded or set?
Bruce: Oh no, not at all. Anything I do like this is very very loose and subject completely to availability and things like that.

Henrik: Well, we'll see what happens, but let's get back to the tour; I believe you were not playing "Stranger in a strange land".
Bruce: That's right.

Henrik: But you did play it in the US?
Bruce: Only for some... Only for the first three or four shows.

Henrik: It didn't really work or?
Bruce: It just seemed to be a little bit of a dead spot.

Henrik: But I would have liked to have heard that song... What about "Tailgunner" and "Be quick or be dead"... They haven't been played anytime on the tour yet, right?
Bruce: No that's right, and they won't be.

Henrik: Why is that?
Bruce: Cause the set works just great the way it is...

Henrik: So you haven't even rehearsed the songs?
Bruce: No, we never bothered even rehearsing them?

Henrik: It's a pity because it would have been nice to get some more music at the show...
Bruce: Yeah, well, the set works just great, so...

Henrik: You are flying the band around on this tour...
Bruce: Yes, I am, yes.

Henrik: ...and you had some incident where you had to land on Iceland with only one engine...
Bruce: No it wasn't Iceland it was in Greenland. Well, there's actually nothing wrong with the aeroplane, or with the engine. What happened was a malfunction in the fire detection system in the engine. We got a light in the cockpit indicating that we had an engine-fire on the left engine, which is an emergency. So I shut down the engine, the "fire" went out and we landed in Greenland on the right engine. And then we went out and inspected everything and went, "OK, there's obviously no fire". But you can't take any chances whatsoever with this kind of aeroplane... And having a fire in the engine at 23.000 feet in the middle of the Atlantic...

Henrik: ...is not a very good idea...
Bruce: It's not a very good idea because what happens if you get a fire is not very pretty. But that's the training, you know, if you have an "engine-fire" light, then you switch off the engine, you switch off the fuel to that engine and the fire goes out. And what happened in fact was that it was one loose wire that caused the false indication and we found it as soon as we took the engine apart to inspect it. So we continued on to Iceland and I had to take scheduled flight to Paris, because we'd lost some time, and I had press all day, the following day. So whilst it was in Iceland, the engineers there gave it a thorough inspection and said everything was fine. So I flew it down to Scotland and then on to Luton the next day and then to Rotterdam and then flew it to Hamburg the day before yesterday, and then up here to Stockholm and everything's fine.

Henrik: Well, I've kind of reached the end of my session here but I have this bonus question I thought I'd ask you if there was time and obviously there is. We've been having a discussion on this message-board a couple of months back about your lyrics and we found a thing with the song on "Skunkworks", the song "Octavia". We never really managed to figure out why it was titled "Octavia"...
Bruce: Octavia... That was one of Alex's titles... He has some great titles and they just relate to, you know, anything... Sometimes it's just something mad he saw on TV or, you know... I think "Octavia" might be something to do with the chord-structure or something...

Henrik: Or some guitar-effect...
Bruce: Yeah, it could very well be some guitar-effect he was using when he wrote it. But I liked "Octavia" so that's why it's called "Octavia".

Henrik: Yeah, we had various suggestions on as to it was references to old Roman empresses or things like that...
Bruce: Oh yeah, fantastic, no, it just happened to be. Like most mysterious things it's just something that happened.

Henrik: OK, good, well, that's about it actually. Thanks for taking your time to talk to me and we'll see you.
Bruce: Yeah, bye.

Special thanks to Suzan Kverh at Playground music for making this interview happen.