Iron Maiden vocalist Bruce Dickinson has looked back on the times the British heavy metal giants visited Jersey to write material for three of their most lauded albums: 1983’s Piece Of Mind, 1984’s Powerslave and 1986’s Somewhere In Time.
Talking to ITV News, the 67-year-old returns to the Channel Islands and remembers he and his bandmates renting an entire hotel for themselves and their crew during the winter months.
He adds that what they got up to had a tangible impact on the material they wrote.
“Frankly, it was cheaper to come here and [rent] a whole hotel out of season,” he recalls. “We’d put the crew in there and the band in there, and of course, because it was a hotel, the hotel had a bar. Well, that was easy! It was open 24 hours a day, because we were inmates!”
The singer adds that the hotel they stayed at had just one TV in the entire building. One night, Maiden and their crew gathered around it to watch 1981 horror film Omen III: The Final Conflict, and the experience ended up influencing the title and cover of Piece Of Mind.
“We had the idea of taking a quote from the Bible, and it came up at the end of the movie, there was a quote from [the Book Of] Revelations,” he explains, referencing the passage, ‘There shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.’
He continues: “We all went, ‘Pain … brain!’, because the album was a play on words, Piece Of Mind, and we had Eddie with his brain taken out [on the front cover] … We thought up the name of the album in the pub, the Mermaid, ’cause we ended up in the Mermaid having a beer on a Sunday afternoon and bouncing ideas around, and that’s where the idea for Piece Of Mind came from.”
Dickinson returned to Jersey to support the fundraising challenge South-North Adventures, where people row, walk and cycle from the southernmost point of the British Isles to the northernmost. Founded by former Oxford University professor Kevin Dutton, the initiative aims to celebrate “resilience and a ‘can-do’ attitude in young people”. Donations go to the charities Heavy Metal Truants, Bikeability, Every Child Our Future and more.
Dickinson will head back on the road with Maiden next month, as the band start the second European leg of their Run For Your Lives world tour. They’ll tour heavily for the rest of the year, bringing the show to the Americas, Asia and Australia.
The band are the subject of a new documentary, Burning Ambition, which will hit cinema screens on May 7, and they’re being inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in November. The current members will not attend the ceremony in Cleveland, Ohio, as they will be on tour at the time.
Earlier this year, Dickinson finished the recording of his upcoming solo album, the follow-up to 2024’s The Mandrake Project. Members of Brazilian metal band Sepultura will appear on the record, which was tracked at Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl’s Studio 606 in California.
Along with bassist/founder Steve Harris and guitarist Adrian Smith, Dickinson will appear in the new issue of Classic Rock, out on April 29, talking about Burning Ambition and his band’s 50-year history.
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