In a new interview with Radioacktiva, the Colombian radio station broadcasting from Bogotá, IRON MAIDEN singer Bruce Dickinson was asked about his recording and touring activities for the next two years, including plans for MAIDEN as well as those involving his solo band. He said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “The new solo album, frankly, is up there with the best stuff that I’ve ever done. I mean, it’s a whole level above [2024’s] ‘The Mandrake Project’, and it’s absolutely amazing. You have to wait till next year to hear it, although there will be something out very soon, a first track. And the videos, we shot five videos for it now. The whole thing fits together as a story. So, it’s really exciting, that world.
As to how it fits with IRON MAIDEN, it fits very easily because everybody in the band — Steve [Harris, MAIDEN bassist] loves the new [solo] material that I’ve done. So, we have a few surprises up our sleeve with IRON MAIDEN, which I can’t tell you about. But, obviously, I’ll be touring next year with my solo record. I’ll be promoting it. But all of that we’ll get around to telling people when the time is right. And that time will be quite soon. But people will be, I think, pretty excited.”
Bruce also talked about MAIDEN‘s ongoing “Run For Your Lives” tour, which touched down in North America earlier this summer/fall. The trek marks 50 years of IRON MAIDEN, with a setlist pulled from the band’s first nine albums. Following the band’s North American dates, IRON MAIDEN will head to Latin America and Oceania, before wrapping the tour in Japan.
“Even though we’re doing a set, which, obviously, is looking from the beginning of the band right up until kind of ‘No Prayer For The Dying’, so about halfway through our albums, even though that set is obviously songs which come from the past, we’re always looking at ways of improving the storytelling, improving the drama, whether it’s through the costumes or whether it’s through the screens now,” Dickinson said. “The amazing 3D video screens we’ve got. And it’s an incredible show. It really is. And we’ve still got pyros, and we’ve still got the walk-on Eddies and stuff like that. And the band, we just play. We actually almost semi ignore the show because we’re still basically just a band playing in a club in London. It’s just that there’s 40,000 people in our club.”
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