Paul Di’Anno reckons he quit. The official Iron Maiden line is that he was sacked. Either way, the result was the same: a band on a steep upward trajectory had to find a new singer at a crucial juncture, as they looked to start work on their third album, following the runaway successes of their first two.
Although this was one hell of a risk, such was the wind in Maiden’s sails that even this potentially calamitous change of personnel proved to be nothing but an upgrade. And that was always the intention – to fix a squeaky wheel before it caused a real problem.
His name was Bruce Dickinson, an educated lad from Sheffield with a larynx like a foghorn, who had finished university and immediately put his talent to good use by, um, singing in NWOBHM outfit Samson. Where his Maiden predecessor had fronted the band as a gritty hard man, with a pugilistic vocal style to match, Bruce approached it with a more bombastic, theatrical zeal, the perfect match for the more involved, epic music the band were making. Still, he was in at the deep end: Maiden were already veterans of European tours, as well as having American and Japanese stamps in their passports. Not to mention they were also by many factors bigger than Samson, who had never performed outside the UK and had enjoyed a success that could politely be called ‘respectable’.
His first show with his new band was in Bologna, Italy, where he admits, “I didn’t open my eyes for the first four or five songs.”
“The road crew, who’d all been touring with Maiden for a while, were all looking at me and sizing me up,” he remembers. “Everyone was looking at me like I had two heads! But I knew that’d happen, and I knew I just had to get on with it. I knew people had seen the band with Paul, so there was some baggage. And we weren’t just introducing me – we were playing stuff from Number Of The Beast that nobody had heard yet, so it was very different to what they knew!”