Semi-retired Iron Maiden drummer Nicko McBrain wants to record with the band again, despite stepping down from their live lineup in December 2024.
The 74-year-old, who joined Maiden in 1982, retired from the UK heavy metal legends’ touring cycle at the last show of their 18-month-long Future Past run, after suffering a transient ischaemic attack (TIA, or mini-stroke) in January 2023 which continues to limit his movement.
Even though McBrain’s been replaced onstage by Simon Dawson, he’s still officially Maiden’s drummer. Talking exclusively to Metal Hammer, he confirms that, should the band enter the studio to make another album after 2021’s Senjutsu, he’d be “delighted” to contribute. However, the effects of his mini-stroke mean the songs would have to be easier to play.
“If Iron Maiden went into the studio, I’d be delighted to get back on with them,” he tells us. “But it’d have to be something more simple really.”
He then names the anthemic singles Stranger In A Strange Land and Wasted Years, both from 1986’s Somewhere In Time: “That kind of song. I’d love to do something like that.”
Elsewhere in the interview, McBrain reveals that he was due to undergo cataract surgery on the day he suffered his mini-stroke. “The miracle was that I had the stroke in the morning, rather than while I was under the twilight anaesthetic,” he recalls.
He adds that he could only feel “70 percent” of his hand during the Future Past shows: “It was incredible to get any use back out of it at all … Like, I couldn’t do the drum fill in the intro of [1983 single] The Trooper, so I had to adapt it. Steve [Harris, bassist/bandleader] and the band were so supportive, but my body just wasn’t bouncing back.”
Talking to Loudwire in 2024, Maiden singer Bruce Dickinson called McBrain his “hero” for touring despite his condition.
“He was paralysed in his left side entirely,” Dickinson said. “In May [2023], we’re supposed to be rehearsing for this big tour, and he’s not even sure if he can play drums. He couldn’t hold a fork. Three months after that, he’s on tour … Can you imagine how hard that is for a drummer of Nick’s calibre, in front of 10,000 people?”
McBrain will release his autobiography, Hello Boys And Girls, on October 22 via Harper NonFiction. The publisher calls it “a thrilling, hilarious and deeply personal autobiography” that “takes readers behind the scenes of one of Britain’s biggest-ever bands”. He’s currently touring the US with his Maiden cover band Titanium Tart.
Maiden are also in the States, continuing their 50th-anniversary Run For Your Lives world tour. The setlist features songs from their first nine albums, 1980’s Iron Maiden up to 1992’s UK chart-topping Fear Of The Dark. They’re reissuing the same albums in a vinyl box set on December 11.
