Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson says he’d have been “comfortable” if his cancer treatment irreversibly changed his voice.
In an extensive new interview with The Charismatic Voice, the singer looks back on the chemotherapy and radiotherapy he went through to treat a cancerous tumour at the back of his tongue, which was first noticed by doctors in 2015.
There was a risk that his powerful vocals, which earned him the nickname ‘the Air-Raid Siren’, would have been altered by the radiation, potentially forcing him to give up singing or sing in a different way. However, Dickinson says that he would have adapted to whatever vocal style best suited his new voice.
“I had to consider the possibility that I wouldn’t be able to sing again, in the way that I do,” he tells host Elizabeth Zharoff. “I was comfortable with that. I was resigned with that.”
When Zharoff asks Dickinson if he would have been OK with the idea of never singing again, he answers, “Yeah, because there was some physical reason why I couldn’t sing the way I do normally. There’s nothing you can do about that. If things had been changed irreversibly, you have to learn to do something differently; you have to sing a different way.”
Dickinson goes on to admits that the thought gave him something of an existential crisis: “That’s when the thought formed, ‘What do I actually do with my life?’ Am I just a human noise generator? Or am I actually telling stories?”
He decided, “No matter what happens, I can still tell stories.”
Ultimately, Dickinson was given the all-clear from doctors in May 2015, and he was able to return to Maiden. The band put out their 16th album The Book Of Souls, recorded before the singer’s cancer diagnosis, the following September and started touring to promote the release in February 2016.
During the summer, Maiden played the first leg of their Run For Your Lives 50th-anniversary world tour in venues across Europe. It’s been announced that the tour will continue into 2026, though no additional dates have been announced as of yet.
In July, Dickinson remixed and reissued his 1994 solo album, Balls To Picasso, under the title More Balls To Picasso. The singer talks about the album, as well as the start of his solo career in the late 1980s, during a new video interview with Metal Hammer. The conversation can be watched now via our YouTube channel.
See Dickinson’s full, two-hour discussion with The Charismatic Voice below.
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