Bruce Dickinson
Pull a thread
Run to the Hills: How Iron Maiden Wrote the Old West Without Ever Seeing It
Steve Harris learned the frontier from paperback westerns, then flipped the camera on the people those books rooted for. Forty-four years later the song is still the loudest history lesson in metal.
Four Englishmen and a pile of Louis L’Amour novels
In early 1982, Iron Maiden had a new singer, a British tour already booked, and no album. What they did have was a bass player who read a lot of cowboy books.
The Two Songs Nicko McBrain Would Come Back For Are Both Adrian Smith's
Iron Maiden’s drummer says he’d record again, but only for “something more simple.” The two tracks he names are from Somewhere in Time*, released 29 September 1986, and both were written by the guy covering for a bandmate who had nothing left.*
The quote, and what everybody stopped reading after
In September 2026, Metal Hammer’s Matt Mills asked Nicko McBrain whether he’d ever record with Iron Maiden again. The answer ran in the magazine’s own site on 13 September, and the headline half of it travelled everywhere: “If Iron Maiden went into the studio, I’d be delighted to get back on with them. But it’d have to be something more simple really.”
Two Blank Credit Lines: Why Bruce Dickinson Wrote Nothing on Somewhere in Time
Iron Maiden’s sixth album turned 40 on 29 September 2026. The singer’s name appears on none of its eight songs, and the reason has nothing to do with the reason his name was missing four years earlier.
The album with a hole where the singer should be
Open the sleeve of Somewhere in Time and count the writing credits. Steve Harris takes four: “Caught Somewhere in Time”, “Heaven Can Wait”, “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” and “Alexander the Great”. Adrian Smith takes three, including the one everybody knows. Dave Murray and Harris share “Deja-Vu”. Bruce Dickinson takes none. That is the whole album: eight songs, and the man singing every word on it wrote none of them.
Steve Harris built a stage at Knebworth for the Iron Maiden history his own 50th-anniversary tour leaves out
On 10 July, Iron Maiden’s founder stood sidestage watching Blaze Bayley sing songs the two of them wrote together — songs the band’s 50-year setlist has no slot for. He booked the show himself.
Here’s the version of this story that went around in July: Steve Harris turned up to watch his old singer. Nice gesture. Classy guy. Moving on.
That’s not the story. The story is what Harris put on that stage, and what it says about the band’s own 50-year accounting of itself.
Fear of the Dark: How Iron Maiden's Audience Rewrote the Song
The most famous vocal hook in “Fear of the Dark” isn’t on the album. A crowd wrote it, and one crowd in particular, 250,000 strong in Rio, made it permanent.
Play the studio version. Something’s missing.
Put on the studio cut of “Fear of the Dark”, title track and closer of Iron Maiden’s ninth album, released May 11, 1992. Great song: moody intro, a gallop in the middle, that circling guitar melody. But if you’ve only ever heard it live, or watched any concert footage from the last three decades, you’ll notice a hole where something should be.