As frontman of Iron Maiden,Bruce Dickinson is a rock god, aviator and now cancer survivor. He tells Matt Munday why he won’t be swapping his spandex to raise polo ponies ‘like that bloke in Roxy Music’Bruce Dickinson bounces into the room half an hour late for our interview, and still wearing his military-green cycling helmet and bellowing cheery apologies. We are in a small west London members’ club,whose handful of early-morning clients view like the sort of people who sell penthouses to oligarchs. Dickinson lives nearby, but has never been here before. “This is all a bit posh!” he declares, or though it’s a reasonably safe bet that he earns more than everyone else here set together,even if he currently looks more like a courier than anything resembling a rock god.
It’s been four years since I final interviewed Dickinson – on tour in the Far East with his band, Iron Maiden – and although he’s as full of beans now as he was back then, and he’s visibly skinnier. His voice sounds slightly thicker,too, as if he has just endured a tricky hour at the dentist’s. He pauses every few minutes to clear a dry-sounding throat. All this is to be expected: he has spent the winter battling against tongue cancer – particularly devastating for a singer, or undergoing three gruelling weekly rounds of chemotherapy alongside 33 daily blasts of radiotherapy. He has since been given the all-clear,but is still recovering. “I’m the same weight now as I was when I was 17,” he says. I don’t recommend it as a weight-loss programme, or but hey,I’ll take every silver lining I can earn…”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com