Robbi Millar
Sounds
Reading '81 review
September 12, 1981
Bruce Dickinson, the fountainhead of Iron Maiden, remembers his early and often hilarious days as leadsinger with the band still led by guitarist and singer Paul Samson.
Interview made by Chris Welch, October 5th, 1989
Bruce, how did you get to meet Paul and end up working with him?
BRUCE: "It was in a pub called the Prince of Wales in Gravesend, Kent. I was playing with a band called Shots and we'd been doing pubs for a while and we were doing a mixture of own stuff and covers like old Montrose covers, and also some material that was in that sort of vein. The Prince of Wales is a really bizarre place. There was no stage at all. They just moved some tables and chairs out of the way by the toilets and we played bang next door to the ladies and gents toilets so halfway through the show some bloke would just walk straight in front of you and go to the loo or just walk behind the drumkit. We were just playing away and I had this act which was derives from very primitive ideas about rock theatricals which was like street theatre in a way and the idea was that you just grabbed people out and made fun out of them and picked on people and did this huge rep thing which made people so scared that they were going to get accostet if they went to the toilet during the set in case you grabbed hold of them, stuck a mike in their face and interviewed them on stage!
The legendary Thunderstick turned up at this pub with Paul. He was the mad drummer, the man with the bag over his head who later became known as the man with the rapists mask which in fact wasn't a rapists mask, it wasn't supposed to be that at all, but unfortunately some silly sod started going around assaulting women wearing a balaclava and all of a sudden the press picked up on it. That's how all that happened. What with one thing and another people thought "oh, that's a good idea". It was cheap publicity and ultimately it was bad publicity.
He was there in his every day guise and he tried to walk across the stage. He looked a bit weird so I did a spiel on it and the next thing was I got a telephone call a couple of weeks later from Paul, completely out of the blue, saying was I interested in joining this band Samson, which had a record deal, management, was going places and was playing all these big gigs in London. I said well yes. They didn't have a singer, they were a three piece. So he'd seen me with Thunderstick. The next stage was that I went along to see them. I said, well look, the only problem I have with that is that I'm taking my degree examinations. I was at college at the time doing History - and I said can you wait for three weeks whilst I do these exams? They said yeah, that's alright so I finished my finals in the morning and in the afternoon I was down to the Wood Wharf Studios in Greenwich rehearsing with the three of them and we wrote almost immediately a pile of songs and that turned out to be the album called 'Head on'. I think we wrote it in about a week or something 'cos I had loads of stuff kicking around and they had loads of bits so we just glued it all together and said "right, that's it"! So, off we went on tour after that promoting the previous album called 'Survivors'."
Did you see yourself as a Heavy Metal singer at the time? Was that scene really booming?
BRUCE: "No it wasn't booming. I wasn't really interested. And I always thought that I would never play punk stuff because to me it was like an out of tune horrible noise, most of it. The bands I liked in this era were the Stranglers who were, to me, like a great rock band and so I had a band before Shots which was called Speed. The main thing was that we played things very fast, sort of 10 years before speed metal came out and we used to do something that sounded halfway between Judas Priest and The Stranglers - squeaky organ and everything. Lots of Deep Purple influences because I was maniacally into Purple and Ian Gillan and everything. Of course, getting into Samson, the first thing we did was go off on tour with Ian Gillan. That was my first introduction really to touring, third on the bill with Randy California and Ian Gillan at Carlisle Town Hall.
Was that the first gig?
BRUCE: "No I think the first gig I ever did was the Music Machine which is now the Camden Palace which in those days was like a late night den of iniquity. It was open 'till about 2 in the morning and there was a thing going called the Heavy Metal Crusade which was Neal Kaye who was the DJ at the time and he would, like, trundle round with it and it was a rotating bill, basically of Angel Witch, Samson, Iron Maiden, Saxon, maybe Def Leppard."
So how highly were Samson rated compared to the other groups?
BRUCE: "At first it was basically Samson, Saxon, Iron Maiden and Def Leppard. Those were the four. We rapidly lost ground. I think because we had a lot of business problems. Maiden quickly really pulled ahead with a strong image. We were a complete mess. I mean, you had a drummer pouring beer over his head whilst wearing a mask and not uttering human sounds in public, which kind a made ordering drinks at the bar difficult. He did actually chat up some bird once and get her into bed by just grunting all evening. Literally. It was remarkable. I watched and it was incredible. Strange woman. It was in a dodgy hotel in Portsmouth, I think he set fire to her dress later on and she jumped out of the window."
So did you manage to communicate with Thunderstick yourself while on a stage gig?
BRUCE: "Sort of, he'd just grunt at you. He was that guy that wanted a cage bout round him on stage. We actually had this cage built and in the true Spinal Tap fashion we couldn't get into any of the gigs. The only place we could use it was the Reading Festival where he insisted on it. It was like a budgie's cage actually. He insisted on it being covered with a cloth so people wouldn't know what it was".
Bruce's last gig with Samson was also at Reading Festival in 1981.
BRUCE: "We went down really well and Steve Harris and Rod Smallwood were in the audience to check out the singer with this band called Samson. So it was a quite eventful day."
A commemorative Samson picture disc has been compiled by Repertoire Records to be released in summer '90 and the first track is "Riding with the angels".
BRUCE: "That was a cover song. It was a Russ Ballard B-side dug up by the producer Tony Platt and actually a good song. It was off the "Shock tactics" album I did with them and in many ways the best. It had a clear direction but it wasn't a direction Paul was happy with. He wanted it to be more bluesy guitar orientated. But it was the first time I discovered a voice that was really my own."
Other tracks include "Vice versa", "Gravy train" (previously unreleased and a song stemming from the days when Bruce was homeless in London), and "Little big man" (which is about Red indians).
"Listening to some of these old tracks they stand up really well" says BRUCE. "Certainly all the stuff on 'Shock tactics' does. When you hear the Reading Live album, which I was really surprised at, the band was really cooking. And the songs don't sound dated at all."
Bruce was snaffled away from Samson to join Maiden and says BRUCE:
"When I first heard Maiden I got the same buzz of them I did when I heard 'Deep Purple in rock'. It was like a steam train coming at you and none of the other bands did that anymore. I really wanted to be the in their band. When I did the 'Number of the beast' we went in with all guns blazing. The rest is... newspaper clippings. Paul wasn't surprised when I left and it was a relief to him because he wanted to be more in control."