Bruce Dickinson smiles when he pops on Zoom at the beginning of an interview.
The Iron Maiden frontman sits in a Florida hotel room, preparing for his “An Evening with Bruce Dickinson” tour, which comes to the Mesa Arts Center on Saturday, February 26.
This isn’t a concert but a discussion with fans about his list of accomplishments, all told with humorous stories.
A true polymath, his accomplishments include pilot and airline captain, aviation entrepreneur, beer brewer, motivational speaker, podcaster, film scriptwriter, twice-published novelist and New York Times Top 10 best-selling author, radio presenter, TV actor, sports commentator and international fencer.
“It’s a show that has been developed over several years, really — since I wrote an autobiography and started road testing the show,” Dickinson says. “People thought they were getting a promotional event about a book. Actually, what they were getting was a tryout for a one-man show, which is how I evolved it into where it is now.”
Now, he says, was the perfect time to bring it to theaters. “An Evening with Bruce Dickinson” is easy to adapt to these pandemic times.
“As soon as things looked like it was opening up, we thought we would bring it to theaters, with the help of Live Nation promoters, who do the theatrical side of things, not the music side of things,” he says.
The 90-minute show is in two “unequal halves.” It starts with how a “spotty kid from a town’s nobody’s ever heard of in the world gets from wearing the world’s most ridiculous trousers to the world’s biggest heavy metal band,” he says.
“How does that happen? A lot of it is about first experiences. Birth is one of them. So, I start with something that’s common to everybody and it goes from there: adolescence, being in an English boarding school, a place where you might bump into Boris Johnson, if it was a few years later.”
Fans understand, he says, because it’s something that they have in common.
“They’re going to recognize their own goofy things,” Dickinson says. “What mistakes did you make, audience? How come you’re not standing here, you know? That’s it. It’s a slightly semi-satirical look at how we ended up where we ended up.”
Dickinson says the show’s second half is written by the audience, based on comments they write on index cards.
“They can write whatever the hell they want,” he says. “They can write questions. They can make any comment they want about anything at all. I collect them all up. I basically arrange them into a kind of improv script in the intermission.”
While he’s doing that, audiences watch the video for “The Writing on the Wall,” Iron Maiden’s 2021 single, on a large screen.
“I wanted to premiere it at actual movie theaters,” he says. “Because of COVID, we never got around to it, so people have to watch it on YouTube, which is nice but rubbish.
“When you have something that’s really cool looking,” you want to show it the right way.
“I thought, what the hell, I’m going to America, let me just take it with me,” he adds.
“It’s the Dolby version with the big sound system with the sound effects. You can hear the motorbikes. You can hear the boots on the ground. People have never seen it on the big screen. So, during the intermission, I go off and arrange the cards and, in the meantime, here’s what I made earlier.
“When I come back, it’s a Q&A with a twist.”
“An Evening with Bruce Dickinson”
WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Saturday, February 26
WHERE: Mesa Arts Center’s Ikeda Theater, 1 E. Main Street, Mesa
COST: Tickets start at $24.50
INFO: 480.644.6500, mesaartscenter.com
