During a recent appearance on the latest episode of the “Talk Is Jericho” podcast, hosted by FOZZY frontman and wrestling superstar Chris Jericho, IRON MAIDEN singer Bruce Dickinson confirmed that the band is planning to stage a tour where it will perform its new album, Senjutsu, in its entirety.
Bruce said: “The plan we’ve got — it’s not really a secret; I think everybody else has chatted about it — we will, I hope, we’ve talked about doing the entire [Senjutsu] album start to finish, but not this time around. And we all appreciate that that is something that really diehard fans will probably love and other people will go, ‘Hmmm, I’m not gonna go see that.’ So the answer is you play smaller venues so that they sell out with just your diehard fans. ‘Cause it’s a musical thing to do — it’s a musical thing.”
He went on to clarify that the 2022 leg of MAIDEN‘s “Legacy Of The Beast” tour, which is scheduled to kick off in late May in Zagreb, Croatia, will once again focus primarily on a decades-spanning setlist of fan favorites.
“The ‘Legacy Of The Beast’ tour, people have all paid their money to see the ‘Legacy Of The Beast’ show, with Spitfires and flamethrowers and Icarus and everything that goes with,” Bruce said. “So they’re gonna get all that. But the first three tracks are probably gonna be the first three tracks on the [Senjutsu] album. ‘The Writing On The Wall’ they already know, so everybody should know the first three tracks. And I just think [the] ‘Senjutsu’ [title track] is just such a great opening song — so dramatic. And then once you’ve done that — and we’ll have a stage set to go with it — once you’ve done that, you’re back to the kind of ‘Legacy’ world at that point. But I think ‘The Writing On The Wall’ is gonna be a great song — I mean, a crowd singalong song. You can imagine that. It’ll be fantastic.”
Speaking about the fact that MAIDEN infuriated some fans by forcing them to sit through the band’s then-new, 75-minute A Matter Of Life And Death album on tour in 2006, denying the crowd the greatest hits they’d come for, Bruce said: “Nobody has to buy a ticket. If you don’t wanna go [see us play an entire new album live], you don’t buy a ticket. It’s gonna be plain as the nose on your face. This is gonna be what they’re gonna do. So given that, don’t complain that they did what they said they were gonna do.”
