When Iron Maiden singer Bruce Dickinson started work on the songs that would make up his most recent release, “The Mandrake Project,” the goal was to release his first new solo album in nearly 20 years.
But Dickinson isn’t one for taking the easy path when a more interesting one lies just around the bend.
So by the time “The Mandrake Project” arrived in March 2024, it was an album of terrific heavy metal rock and roll. But it arrived accompanied by a comic book that portrayed the world Dickinson imagined in the songs he wrote, a kind of Gothic horror story involving characters with names such as Dr. Necropolis and Professor Lazarus, and a plot that traversed the boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead.
While he has plans for 12 comic books to be published and collected into a 500-page graphic novel, the first four issues are currently available in a single volume, including one version printed with ink made with soil from the grave of the English poet, painter and visionary, William Blake.
“It’s a world,” Dickinson says, though that’s surely an understatement of the universe he’s imagined.
Eleven days after Iron Maiden wrapped up its summer tour with a stadium show in Warsaw, Poland, Dickinson met us in a small recording studio in Granada Hills where he and his band were working on songs for his next solo album.
Soon they’ll be kicking off Dickinson’s first full solo tour of North America, which begins with a show at the House of Blues on Friday, Aug. 22 and wraps up at the Wiltern in Los Angeles on Oct. 5.
But for now the 67-year-old polymath – singer, songwriter, pilot, novelist, screenwriter, fencer, comic book creator, and God knows what he’s up to next week – was happy to talk about the world of The Mandrake Project, why he wanted to reimagine and re-release his solo album “Balls To Picasso” more than three decades after its initial release, and how William Blake, dead 198 years now, became his muse.
Battle for a soul
“It actually goes back to something that Maiden did in the early days,” Dickinson says when asked where the initial inspiration to create a comic book to accompany an album arose. “They actually started to produce a comic with Eddie.” [Eddie is the heavy metal band’s horror creature mascot, of course.]
The artwork looked great, Dickinson remembered. The story, not so much.
“I’m thinking, ‘Where’s the story,’ right?” he says. “I thought, listen, this is great, comics. This is like a natural fit with this kind of music. Maybe I could do something. But I wanted to go beyond that if we were going to do a comic for my solo stuff.”
In 2014, Dickinson took his first crack at a comic companion piece, adapting a storyline from an earlier solo song for the 2015 Iron Maiden track “If Eternity Should Fail.” That song’s lyrics revolve around two characters, Dr. Necropolis and Professor Lazarus, working to recover a lost soul from the netherworld and bring it back to the world of the living.
“Dr. Necropolis and Lazarus have been working together on a way to reimagine the human soul and bring it back,” Dickinson says. “One of them, of course, wants to do nice things with it [that would be Professor Lazarus], the other one wants to do bad things [this would be Dr. Necropolis].
“That never happened, though,” Dickinson says.
His plans for a new solo album and the semi-dormant comic book were delayed once by Dickinson’s diagnosis with throat cancer in 2015.
And then, he says, “Fast forward to lockdown.”
‘Anarchy’ on Zoom
The pandemic slowed everything down, though Dickinson’s work on designing the music video for Iron Maiden’s 2021 single “The Writing on the Wall” would accidentally restart the graphic novel project.
“I was storyboarding the video, and it was a cartoon,” he says. “And one of the inspirations for the Four Eddie Bikers of the Apocalypse was the Kurt Sutter-written series “Sons of Anarchy,” which I binge-watched during lockdown.”
Talking on Zoom one night with screenwriter Sacha Gervasi, a friend since Dickinson’s pre-Maiden days in the hard rock band Samson, Dickinson mentioned how much he was enjoying “Sons of Anarchy.”
“He goes, ‘Hey, Kurt’s my buddy, do you want to get him on a Zoom?’” Dickinson says. “I went, ‘Holy crap, yeah!’”
Not long after, the three men were talking about stories and ideas and Dickinson mentioned his old comic book idea, which by now had expanded into the bigger form it would eventually take.
“I gave Kurt the pitch of the idea and he went, ‘Yeah, that’s pretty good,’” Dickinson says. “I go, ‘Really? You’re not just saying that?’ He said, ‘No, no, no, that’s got legs. You go with that.’”
Dickinson suggested it might make a Netflix series. Sutter waved that idea off.
“He said, ‘No, no, no, everybody wants to do that. They’ll just tell you do (bleep) off,’” Dickinson says. “He goes, ‘Do a graphic novel; do a comic.’ I said, ‘OK, how’d you do that?’”
Sutter, who’d done comic books before, sent him copies of the first few issues along with his treatment, scripts and pitch document, Dickinson says.
“So I took that, studied it, and then just got down and I wrote two or three episodes,” he says. “Then I wrote a detailed backstory for every character, what their life history was and how they came to be where they came to be.”
He sent his work to the publisher Z2, whom Iron Maiden were already talking to about doing comics based on the band’s 1983 album “Piece of Mind.” The publisher loved the project. The comic book accompaniment for “The Mandrake Project” was a go.
Pumped-up ‘Picasso’
“The Mandrake Project” songs and comic books stand on their own, Dickinson notes, but when paired together, they complement and enhance each other. But that’s not even his newest release.
“More Balls to Picasso,” which arrived earlier this year, is a “reimagined” version of 1994’s “Balls to Picasso,” a record that Dickinson never felt packed the punch it should have.
“About three years after, when we started doing ‘Accident of Birth’ and ‘The Chemical Wedding,’ I was just like, ‘It’s so disappointing,’” he says of the lighter, thinner sound of “Balls to Picasso” compared to the those albums that followed. “When you listen to a track like ‘Cyclops,’ you go, ‘Geez, that should be so much heavier.’
“We just kind of chickened out,” Dickinson says. “Having just left Maiden, I was in a kind of creative no-man’s land.”
Most of “More Balls to Picasso” uses the original tracks – Dickinson’s vocals and all of the guitar solos are from the original sessions – but the mix is now heavier, more powerful. New accents have been added to some tracks. Brazilian composer Antonio Teoli added indigenous Amazonian instruments to “Gods of War.” A horn section was added to “Shoot All the Clowns.” Additional guitars were mixed into other tracks.
“But the good thing is, it gave us the opportunity to launch it again now at a time when a lot of Maiden fans who have come to Maiden since then probably wouldn’t have ever been exposed to that record,” he says.
The solo tour will mix music from almost all of Dickinson’s solo catalog together with one or two Iron Maiden songs, he says.
“I am going to be playing one Iron Maiden song which has never been played ever in the history of Iron Maiden,” he teases. “It’s one I wrote, so people can go, ‘Which one’s that going to be?”
“I’m not one for punishing the audience with songs they don’t deserve,” Dickinson says when asked if the setlist focuses on the newest album. “The idea of a great live show, it’s not a lecture. It’s not the teacher wagging his finger, saying, ‘You should have bought this album and damn it, you’re gonna listen to it, like it or not.’
“To me, it’s a journey,” he adds. “It’s a story, a narrative. Not with characters and things, but a musical narrative. So you start feeling a certain way, and then you start to feel another way. You get to paint with colors.
William Blake, burning bright
The music videos for “Mandrake Project” songs “Afterglow of Ragnarok” and “Rain on the Graves” both open with a few lines from the early Romantic poet William Blake. Then there’s the graphic novel ink with dirt from Blake’s grave mixed into it.
We need to talk about this.
“Ah, William,” Dickinson says with a smile. Then he explains how he’s loved Blake since he was a schoolboy in short pants.
“The stuff you got when you were a kid in school, like ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ or ‘Tyger, Tyger, burning bright’ [from “The Tyger”], you won’t get the depth of what he was going on about in that because it’s just a fragment of his universe,” Dickinson says. “What I love about Blake is that he creates these universes that only really make sense to him. They’re deep and they’re very, very dark on occasions, but they’re very, very uplifting on other occasions.
“It’s basically like having the most psychedelic psychoanalysis of himself, of his subconscious, and exploding it into poetry and images,” he says. So to get your head around that, you just have to abandon logic and reason and just let it wash into your brain, and go with it.”
As a boy, Dickinson says he got the album “Death Walks Behind You” by the English rock band Atomic Rooster in part because the cover art fascinated him.
“It was Blake’s painting of Nebuchadnezzar where he’s turning into a beast, and it was a haunting picture,” he says. “I didn’t know it was Blake. I was just like, ‘Oh my God, that is so cool. Who drew this? Was it Roger Dean? [Dean was a prolific album cover artist, best known for his work with the band Yes.] No, no, no, mate, he was 300 years old, this guy.”
Years later, working on his 1998 album, “The Chemical Wedding,” Dickinson set himself the goal of pushing beyond the more traditional hard rock storytelling of his earlier work.
“I thought, ‘What would William have done?’” he says. “So I used his songs as an exploration of things and feelings, and expressed them through his poetry and his lyrics. And I’ve just been on a trip with William Blake since.”
In 2018, the Blake Society invited Dickinson to perform during the rededication of Blake’s grave after his actual burial site had been revealed by ground-penetrating radar. [For nearly 200 years, a marker in London’s Bunhill Fields graveyard said his remains lay nearby.]
“There were about 400 people, all the most eccentric people on the planet, there,” Dickinson says. But all of them were fans of William.
“They asked me to sing a song for William. I’m standing on a tree stump, singing ‘Jerusalem,’” he says of his hard-rock version of Blake’s original poem. “My version, not the big jingoistic hymn. The lyrics to ‘Jerusalem’ are so far away from what people think they’re about, so I sang my kind of pagan version.”
His version of Blake shows up in the first issue of the comic book, which depicts the cemetery and adjacent Artillery Arms pub. In the video for “Rain on the Graves,” Dickinson is running from Satan through a different graveyard when he trips and falls.
“I fall flat on my face, and I’m wiping the leaves away, and – ‘Oh my God, it’s William Blake’s grave!’” he says, laughing.
The fourth issue of the comic book has Blake himself in it. “I’ve got the chat show in the Underworld and it’s William Blake as the chat show host interviewing [prominent Austrian psychoanalyst] Wilhelm Reich,” he says.
As for the dirt in the ink, which conjures up images of Dickinson with a trowel in the graveyard at night, lightning cracking overhead as rain pours down? Alas, the reality is much more mundane.
“It wasn’t me,” Dickinson says. “In actual fact, it wasn’t even my idea. It was one of the guys from management who’s really into poetry and went along there with a trowel and they took a little.
“There’s a little bit of dirt going in there, but not much. But it’s true.”