Everybody knows, and noticed by recent Maiden’s albums, Bruce Dickinson has a thing for art rock. What everybody doesn’t know is that he had even thought of a partnership with Deep Purple’s keyboardist Jon Lord. Take a look:
“But we had all kinds of crazy plans, including me going out on tour with him, singing Deep Purple songs with an orchestra, which he was planning to do; that was one of the things we were planning to do.
“But it all got interrupted and canceled, and [it was] obviously very sad. He was a wonderful man.”
About orchestras and things like that, he said:
“It’s been tried a lot by all kinds of people, many of whom I respect, and, to be really honest with you, I don’t think it works. I think it might work for the odd specific song – for example, ‘Empire of the Clouds’, my thing, has kind of got orchestra all over it.
“But that’s just one song, and that was written specifically with that kind of thing in mind. And I can see that working under certain circumstances, but that’s only one song.
“The problem with orchestras is what do you do with them when they’re not in use? Which is actually quite a lot of songs, if they’re gonna be really proper rock and roll-type songs.”
