During a recent interview with Rock Hard Greece, IRON MAIDEN frontman Bruce Dickinson, who is gearing up to release his new solo album, The Mandrake Project, was asked whether he would be playing any guitar live during his solo shows.
He responded (as transcribed by Ultimate Guitar): “I hope not, because at this point, as soon as I put a guitar on, I’m suddenly going to be completely focused not on the audience, not on the band — I’m just going to be looking at my fingers going, ‘Oh, please, God, I hope they go in the right place.’ So I think it would probably make me too nervous to be reliable”, noting that he similarly wanted Roy Z to play some guitar parts he had written on the record.
Bruce mentions that he encountered a comparable scenario while recording IRON MAIDEN‘s 18-minute epic “Empire of the Clouds” featured in The Book of Souls album from 2015.
“You know, it’s the same thing with ‘Empire of the Clouds’. I can’t play piano. I mean, when I wrote the song on piano, you’ve never seen so many post-it notes stuck on a piano in all your life — ‘Play this one next’, ‘Oh, this is it’. It was pathetic. And then when we got to record it, I said, ‘Well, maybe we could get a piano player to play the piano.'”
“And Steve [Harris] was like, ‘No, no, no, we don’t get anybody in from outside the band’, and I said, ‘Well, who’s gonna play the f**king piano? I can’t play the piano.’ So in the end, we had to use a MIDI piano. And that way, I could kind of play the piano. But to me, it sounds robotic. A real piano player would put more color, more flourish in it.”
Dickinson will release his new solo album, The Mandrake Project, on March 1 via BMG. Alongside the album, Bruce also announced an exciting collaboration with Z2 for an upcoming comic series. To the delight of the international comic community, 2,000 exclusive versions of the comic were unveiled at CCXP, adding to the excitement surrounding this extraordinary project.
With ten captivating and innovative tracks, The Mandrake Project promises to be a definitive rock album of 2024, showcasing Bruce Dickinson’s exceptional vocal prowess and his long-standing partnership with co-writer and producer Roy “Z” Ramirez.
