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Iron Maiden Bruce Dickinson: heavy metal bands are bourgeois

Ahead of his first solo album in 19 years, the frontman talks public school, his time as an airline pilot, and being accused of Satanism

At Paris’s Gare du Nord station, I see him ambling towards me with an outstretched palm and wide grin; his long grey hair bundled up in a flat cap, an England rugby top beneath his leather jacket. It is bizarre to see this legend of British music – usually on stage wearing a Crimean War uniform, or mucking about next to Iron Maiden’s 10ft-tall zombie mascot Eddie – without any kind of entourage, coming to pick up a journalist on his own. 'I wasn’t a posh lad at all, which is why [my classmates] kicked the s--t out of me at school' Credit: Pete Still/Redferns After moving to London for university, and with a love of Deep Purple and Arthur Brown, Dickinson got swept up in the new wave of British Heavy Metal.

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