BD: These were the people that already had the backing tracks for "Dracula." So I walked in and I mentioned Arthur Brown was one of my favorite performers. And they said, "We love Arthur Brown! That was what we loved about your voice, it had this Arthur Brown vibe about it." So we went into the studio, and I've never been in a studio before, so I was like, wow! So I recorded the song and double-tracked it and put harmonies on it. They said, "We have to form a band!" It was a bass player, a drummer and myself. So we found this guitar player who was like 33, I was like 19, so he seemed really old. And he was a professional guitar player in Australia. That was a band called Shots (?). We did some gigs and made a couple of demo tapes, including a record from a band called Xero. When this Australian guitar player left, we briefly had a fabulous guitar player, a guy named Bill Liesegang, who wrote a load of stuff for Nina Hagan. We did this one demo together, and subsequently, years later when "Run to the Hills" became a big hit, all of the sudden Xero releases an EP with this song featuring Bruce Dickinson on the B-side, it's quite a rare record which is now worth a few bucks. Anyway, this band Shots got me noticed by the guys in Samson. They were at the pub at our show and came up to me afterwards and said I was just the singer they were looking for. They told me they had a record deal and management and their own truck, so I thought cool! I had some final exams that next week so I asked if I could call them after I completed them. So, that's how I joined Samson.
FH: Tell us a little bit about your early career with Samson...
BD: Samson was an incredibly eccentric band! It was a miracle how it all held together. That band was largely fueled by various chemicals floating around, and everybody had their own separate chemical of choice. Paul (Samson, guitarist) was always completely surrounded in clouds of ganja smoke, the bass player (Chris Aylmer) would do a discrete line of speed every now and then, and the drummer, Thunderstick, who wore the black mask - his favorite bands were KISS and The Residents - he was very fond of dropping downers every now and again. And I was usually down at the pub. So, in rehearsal you would have somebody who's stoned, somebody who's drunk, somebody on downers and the other half of the rhythm section on speed! (Laughs) My first rehearsal with the band, I swear to God, I saw all this stuff was going on so I went out to have a few beers so I can deal with it, and when I came back, Thunderstick was banging away and he passed out while he was playing his drums! (Laughs) He didn't fall down, he was unconscious yet he was still playing! And most of the next two years were spent in various states of insanity and madness. We made almost every mistake you can possibly make in the music business, in a concentrated period of time - we were sued by our manager, we sued them, our record company went bust, we were arrested, our tour manager was arrested, we were driving around in stolen cars...The Samson stories just go on and on! It would be quite comical if it wasn't for the fact that there was actually a serious possibility at one point that the band might possibly do something. But the whole thing was strangled by the record company going belly-up. And then we tried to get rid of our management and they sued us and said that we owed them a half-million dollars. We thought, "how is this possible?" But, they one that case, so we did in fact owe them a half-million dollars, which was great, because none of us had any money at all. When I joined Iron Maiden, I think we paid them $50,000 which paid for everybody in Samson to be free, so they could do other records and such. Samson made three studio albums, one of which I was not involved in at all, the first album, entitled "Survivors." They recorded that album, and then subsequently I joined the band. The album hadn't been released at this point so I went out try to get a 20 date together for the band, and suddenly the record company said, "now is the time to release this record." The only problem was, the band on the record was a three-piece, and now the band is a four-piece with a singer. So they quickly stuck a picture of me on the back and put "Bruce Bruce - Harmonica & Vocals." And the vocals were not me, it was Paul Samson singing. So we went on tour promoting this album playing mainly song from what was going to be our next album, "Head On," since we had already written the songs for that album. So, we went in the studio to record that record for Jem Records, which was the label that ended going belly-up a year and a half later. That album ended up in the top 30 UK album charts.
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