IRON MAIDEN’s BRUCE DICKINSON Says He Doesn’t ‘Get’ DRAKE’s Music

Bruce Dickinson Drake

In a new interview with Yahoo! Life, IRON MAIDEN frontman Bruce Dickinson said that he doesn’t “really get” Drake‘s music.

Less than four months, IRON MAIDEN were narrowly beaten to the No. 1 spot on the U.K. album chart by the Grammy-winning rapper.

Even though IRON MAIDEN‘s well-received Senjutsu was ahead for much of the release week, Drake‘s digital-only Certified Lover Boy landed at the top of the chart on 45,651 chart sales (43,623 from streams). Senjutsu ended with a total of 44,473 (including 39,032 physical copies). “Senjutsu” also made No. 1 on the vinyl albums chart.

Bruce said: “We went head to head with Drake the week the album was released. I don’t really get what he does, though a lot of people do, but going head to head with him felt like, ‘No this is real music played by a bunch of old geezers who make no concessions to the times in which we live.’

“People say, ‘You’re dinosaurs.’ And we go, ‘Yeah and there aren’t too many of those left.’ This is who we are, it’s what we do.”

Dickinson went on to say that he is pleased MAIDEN hasn’t relied on social media to grow its fanbase: “By and large our audience as moved on with us. MAIDEN‘s audience is like a table made of plywood; every year you just add a new layer and the table gets bigger and bigger. We’ve grown organically — not through social media or any of that stuff. We’ve grown by going out and doing it in front of people.”

For Senjutsu — loosely translated as ‘tactics & strategy’, the band once again enlisted the services of Mark Wilkinson to create the spectacular Samurai themed cover artwork, based on an idea by Steve Harris. And with a running time of a little under 82 minutes, Senjutsu, like their previous record The Book Of Souls, will be a double CD album/triple vinyl album.

Senjutsu bowed at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 chart, charting higher than even the band’s early classics like Powerslave and The Number Of The Beast. Nearly 90 percent of the LP’s 64,000 equivalent album units earned came from pure album sales. The critically acclaimed double album debuted one place higher than 2015’s The Book Of Souls and 2010’s The Final Frontier, which both peaked at No. 4.