Hi Bruce! Nice Christmas tree behind you, all blue lights.
Hi! It’s Kryptonite!
[laughs] Ah, I love Superman.
Oh really? I never got Superman. He was too goody goody for me. I thought “Oh get on! For Goodness Sake! Go on Clark, rip her knickers off, you know you want to!” [laughs]
[laughs] Speaking of comics, you just got back from Comic Con in Brazil, where you premiered the video for “Afterglow Of Ragnarok”. How was it, and why Brazil?
It was a target of opportunity really. I had a comic and video I was going to be launching, and there was 300,000 people in an arena with a huge screen and a massive sound system that sounded amazing. I thought I should do it there. They already wanted me to go there and do a speech and be a guest. I said “Hold your horses, I’ve got a better idea!” and they were all over it. They loved it. It’s the biggest Comic Con in the world now.
300,000? That’s several arenas!
Over 4 days. It’s insanity. What a cool place. There are people walking around in costume and having fun. The hall is massive and there’s lots of props there from different productions. If you are even remotely into comics or movies it’s a very cool place.
“Ragnarok” is from Scandinavian mythology, and I imagine it will be particularly powerful when played here in Norway.
It’s obviously gone down well because the gig sold out 3 weeks ago! But where do we go from there? We’re stuck with it. Same in Finland. Finland sold out in 5 minutes.
And you have Sweden Rock Festival also…
We’re playing in Gröna Lund also, which is an amusement park. The guys in Ghost were saying it’s great. Basically, you buy a ticket to Gröna Lund and if you hang around there’s a show at the end of it. So we’ll be playing in the middle of the rides and scary ducks and whatever they have there.
I can imagine the aftershow there on all the rides…
The Aftershow of Ragnarock!
Do you have any strong memories of any your Norwegian gigs?
Getting lost in Bergen recently. We went on a hike, which we thought couldn’t be complicated because you get a funicular up the mountain, and it turned into a 22km hike and we got lost! There was still snow up there.
What is The Mandrake Project? Is it a concept album?
No it’s not. It’s a project that started around 100 years ago with the intention of capturing the human soul, preserving it, and putting it into something else. That’s the story of the comic. The album is called The Mandrake Project because it sounds cool and it makes you wonder what it’s all about. Everything down to the cover images is 100 per cent real. I’m so fed up with bad Photoshop. I want to know what’s going on in the pictures. It took me back to the first Black Sabbath album, with its classic cover. It’s an infrared picture of a woman standing by a lake and there’s a mill in the distance. I think she was the cleaning lady or the cook, and they just took a picture of her. It’s so mysterious. You wonder what’s going on. I wanted to get a little sense of that in the vinyl cover.
The covers that tell a story, or make you wonder what the story is, are the best.
Exactly. The album is a musical and emotional journey. If there’s any concept, then that’s it. Operation Mindcrime is kind of cool, but not all albums can be one of those. I’ve got a 12 episode comic, so if you want a comic, there it is. You don’t need the comic to enjoy the album, and you don’t need the album to enjoy the comic. But they do cross fertilise and inform each other.
So they are not exactly the same storyline?
What happened was that in 2014 we thought we’d have a go at making another record. I thought about basing it on a comic, and had a title track that ended up not being the title track. That was robbed from a Dr Strange episode “If Eternity Should Fail”. I thought that was a great title for an album, so I wrote the song. At that point I was considering a concept album, so I put a bit of narration in that sounded okay. I put a story together and generated characters who were bringing back a human soul and reinserting them into someone else. I wrote “Resurrection Men” and there’s a little Hawkwind vibe, great stuff to sing. But I hadn’t got into great detail into anything. So it was left half done, and I went back to Maiden, and then I got throat cancer, and then I went back to Maiden and we all got locked up for 3 years. So it was 7 years before I got back to it, and I had done a lot during lockdown, inventing a back story, a basis for the technology, and building a world. Going back to the album, I thought there was no point making it into a concept album because I already had that on the comic. Let’s make music our concept. I wanted to have a few mad Tarantino, Ennio Morricone moments and unexpected twists and turns, Jesus stoner madness, bongos. Every one of the songs on the record is a favourite. Every song has a different character.
“Resurrection Men” – does it relate to the latin inscription “Death is not a prison”. Does it relate to that song or the whole thing?
The whole thing. The medallion is in the video, and that inscription is on one side of it. You’ll discover in the comic that it’s a form of ID. It’s embossed on the album, it’s really cool.
Iron Maiden had a video game, “Legacy of the Beast”, that inspired a series of comics, but when did you first conceive of the idea of combining music with comics?
When I got some comics that were produced and Maiden management showed them to me. Some of them were beautifully drawn but what I always felt was lacking was a coherent story. We were doing comics for the Legacy of the Beast game, which were beautifully drawn with super bright colours. We had a great female character but there was no story. That’s going to get people to stick with it. Stories do that. Luckily, when I got involved with doing a comic, I ended up in the same place as the Maiden “Piece of Mind” comic. I shared this idea with them, and now we have A listers involved. Tony Lee is doing the script with me. I’ll wait and see how Episode 1 goes down, and we’ll release more Episodes every 3 months.
You mentioned the new Iron Maiden graphic novel celebrating 40 years of “Piece of Mind” (published 15 November 2023). Will you be doing a similar book for the 40th anniversary of “Powerslave” in 2024, and the amazing album “Somewhere in Time” in 2026?
Personally I thought the book was very cool. I did Revelations on it with Tony Lee as a bit of a dummy run, working together. It was a good practice before the main event. I love to be involved in all that stuff. The big daddy of all of it is “Seventh Son of a Seventh Son”. I would love to pull all that together as one story. Whether or not there’s an appetite for it is a different case. “Seventh Son of a Seventh Son” in particular could be super cool.
On the album, you have Roy Z (guitar and bass), Mistheria (keyboard maestro) and drummer Dave Moreno, who also appeared on your previous solo album, «Tyranny Of Souls», in 2005. Why did you choose each of them to be in the band?
I’ve worked with Roy on 5 out of 7 albums and go back a long way. “Accident of Birth” – reinvented me as a metal artist. “Chemical Wedding” – we knocked it out of the park as no one had really heard metal done in that way. Then I rejoined Maiden and did “Tyranny of Souls” which has some beautiful stuff on it. “Navigate the Seas of the Sun” is one of my all time favourites of that record. I was touring with Maiden, so Chemical Wedding was released into a sort of vacuum. Then it was 10 years or something daft before we got together in 2014, and then another 7 before we actually got together and finished it. By this time, we had lots of extra material, most of which we didn’t use because we already had 8 of the 10 songs. We thought it would be heavy and a bit out of the box, and look, he’s even got a bit of Cookie Monster vocal at the end!
As a fellow Irish woman, I was delighted to see that Tanya O’Callaghan will be playing bass on your 2024 tour. How did that come about?
She’s great. I saw pictures of her playing bass for David Coverdale, and she ended up with me on an orchestral tour of Eastern Europe and South America. The conductor was Paul Mann, the musical executive of Jon’s estate and asked me to do the singing. We did a concerto and Deep Purple songs, and Tears of a Dragon and my version of Jerusalem with a full orchestra. Tanja was the bass player and I was very impressed. She said she thought David was having a break the following year so I asked her if she fancied coming out on the road with a bunch of 50 and 60 year olds! She already knew Roy and Dave, the drummer, as they had jammed together on some open mic sessions when she first came to LA and they had played some Jimi Hendrix covers. She knew everybody.
If you had to pick just one song or album from your entire solo and Maiden career that you are most proud of, what would it be, and why?
I would have said Chemical Wedding for my solo work, but that was before this record. This record genuinely moves the goal posts for where we can go next. There will be a next, but we don’t know where that is yet. That’s part of the fun. If was going to be bold, I would say the last track on this record, Sonata. It is different to other tracks, and the way it was recorded, it’s the most emotional thing that’s been put on record for me. There’s no galloping bit in the middle. For Maiden, all of those first albums up to and including “Seventh Son of a Seventh Son” were amazing. “Seventh Son of a Seventh Son” is probably my favourite but “Powerslave” is a pretty close second. When I rejoined, “Brave New World” was a great record. Since then, “A Matter of Life and Death” has some great stuff on it. Live, the recent one, “Senjutsu” works really well.
You come to Norway on 9 June. Can we expect to see “Sonata” on the setlist?
No, I don’t want to disappoint people. I want them to absorb the album before I dump a 10 minute track on them! I’ve got plenty of other baggage I need to unload. There will be 3-4 songs, maybe more, off the new record. Bear in mind this is a first effort in terms of going out with this band and going out on tour. We have plenty of material. If we end up coming around Europe again, then we can put a show together in a bigger venue that would really showcase a track like “Sonata” live, where you are in heavy metal Pink Floyd territory.
I hope you’ll do “Resurrection Men” live.
We might have to, which means I’ll have to pick up a guitar – Oh My God! I played the Dick Dale surf guitar bit on it and the bongos.
Ah, I played the bongos at the jazz club in school years ago!
It’s great, I love bongos!
Do you have a preference for a particular guitar?
No, anything that stays in tune and preferably plays itself that I don’t have to play! [laughs]
Text and photography: Anne-Marie Forker
Originally published in Norway Rock Magazine # 1/2024