Event Pics - A Conversation With Bruce Dickinson - 27.2.19 Volkshaus Zürich

Bruce Dickinson is for sure a very peculiar personality and not just in the music business. Even for the mainstream average music listener he’s mostly known as singer of Iron Maiden, one of the most influential heavy metal band of all time.

But Mr. Dickinson is much more than this. He’s also a captain for commercial airlines and has also flown his own band around the world on board of Boings 745 and 747. He’s a book author, radio presenter with his own show on BBC, he was a talented fencer at international level and more recently a brewer, responsible for the production of the Trooper, Iron Maiden’s own beer! Well, now since his spoken words last Wednesday, we now that he’s also a fun and entertaining comedian.

Yes, because who expected the show for the presentation for his book at Volkshaus in Zürich to be a boring event with Bruce sitting down at a desk and just reading extracts of his biography, was very surprised, to say the least. Bruce showed to be a very dynamic and fun presenter with a great sense of humor.

But let’s start from the beginning. Bruce Dickinson enter a very sober stage, decorated with a standing chair (that he will never use!) and a huge screen on the background, and begins straight away to entertain a clapping and cheering crowd. With the help of the screen where he shows pictures of his past , he talks about his childhood and teenager times. He doesn’t lack of self-irony and tells fun episodes accured during his school time. It doesn’t matter if he talks about the way he was bullied at school, his experiences in the choir (where he was told by the teacher that he couldn’t sing. Go figure!), his first band where he played bongos thinking he was John Bonham or the episode that lead to his expulsion from school. Well, pissing in principal’s dinner didn’t help much to his career there, as much as delivering a couple tons of horse-shit on the door step of the same school. But young Bruce was somehow able to attend university and to graduatein modern history. His first experiences with weed, his time in Samson (the first professional band he played in) and the career with Maiden has been all described including fun episodes and facts. As a proof of the above mentioned self-irony, Bruce fools himself showing pictures of several tight pants he was used to wear on stage back in the 80ies together with tons of other anectdotes. The time is short and it’s difficult to insert in the show all the episodes described in the book and suddendly, about 2/3 into his presentation, Bruce begins to speed up, describing very quickly even important episodes like his exit from Iron Maiden back in 1993, the way he became a pilot and other events. At the end he takes some time again to describe the way he fought cancer some years ago.

After 20 minutes break we can take part to the Q&A. The crowd had the possibility to ask question to the singer through postcards distributed at the entrance and during the following hour Bruce took his time to answer to all the questions. Some dumb ones were answered shortly with humor („are you growing up your hair“?) and other lead to some more extremely fun stories (iE. when Nicko, at the time still without flight license, flew Bruce and a friend from France to Jersey in a small 4 seats plane).

All in all „A Conversation with Bruce Dickinson“ was a surprisingly nice and an extremely entertaining and fun evening. Don’t hesitate to attend it if you will ever have this occasion again.

Text & Smart Phone Pic: Andy Gaggioli