FH: So the character's name is "Bruce Dickinson"?

BD: Well it's not really a character. It's actually a chunk of me. Not all of it, I'd say. If it was, I'd be arrested every time I walk down the street. It's a piece of your personality, which exists, and which you can "inflate" to gigantic size, via the music. It will only exist at that size if the band is there, the crowd, the music...the event. Outside of that, it'll shrink back. All of us were also the awkward kids, sitting on the side of the school disco, we'd never get up to dance. Never in a million years I'd do that, and I still can't do it! Put me in front of 250,000 people playing Iron Maiden music or Deep Purple and I'll dance like a lunatic and I'll do all kinds of crazy stuff! Put me in a room with a bunch of girls, or even worse; a bunch of guys - and you wouldn't get me up for a million bucks...well, maybe for a million, actually! (Laughs)

FH: I've followed your career for over twenty years, looking back, I always wanted to ask you if you actually wanted to break out from Maiden back in '86-'87...due to possible burn-out from the extremely successful "World Slavery tour"?

BD: Yeah, I thought about it. After the "World Slavery tour" I contemplated actually giving up music all together. I was really fed up with it...not so much the music, but with this endless touring. It had just worn everybody out, and at the end we were feeling like we were going through the motions every night, which wasn't very satisfactory since none of us are people who like "going through the motions" or "faking it". And I did wonder whether or not...just for the sake of my mental health...to go off and do something else. Very ordinary things were really attractive at that particular moment in time. In fact, what everyone needed was just a bloody good rest, away from it all. We didn't get that much of a rest, we went straight on to the next tour. I was in a very strange place, if I was going to go off on the "treadmill" again, I wanted to do something different - something to freak people out. If you're feeling bad about something, it must be somebody's fault, so you look for scapegoats, somebody to blame. And in part, at least some of it is your own fault, for doing it in the first place. But that never occurs to you, does it?

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