FORMER IRON Maiden frontman, Bruce Dickinson, returns to the fray this month with a brand new band and solo album. Live At Studio A which is released on 27th February is his third solo offering to date and will feature newer songs along with material from his two previous solo albums, Balls To Picasso and Tattooed Millionaire.

“It’s really two albums for the price of one,” he explains. “And it’s a totally live recording. It came about because of the fact that I haven’t had a permanent band for the last two albums. I’ve been using one bunch of guys in the studio and putting another bunch of guys together for the road, which wasn’t an ideal situation. Now that I have a permanent band, I figured the best way to introduce them to the audience was to do some older stuff with some new stuff.

“We’d done a radio session for the American record company where we went into the studio and played the stuff live,” he continues. “For some reason the radio show never happened, but we had these tapes which sounded really good. We thought that they’d be great for a live album but the problem was, the lack of an audience! So we recorded the last show of the tour at the Marquee in London and decided to stick them both out for the price of one. Some of the stuff from Balls To Picasso sounds better than on the original album and the Marquee show has its own atmosphere with the usual fuck-ups and bits of chit-chat so people can take what they want from both recordings.”

Since quitting Iron Maiden two years ago, Dickinson has enjoyed a successful solo career with a couple of hit albums and singles, including a superb version of the classic Mott The Hoople number, ‘All The Young Dudes’. He’s also been involved in a number of unusual projects which included writing books and playing a bit-part in a TV drama. He stresses, though, that he has no plans to take up acting on a full-time basis. “Believe it or not I’ve just turned down a part in an Enid Blyton mystery,” he laughs. “But it was just too crazy mentally and I wanted to put everything into the new band.”

Late last year Dickinson and his band played a one-off gig with a difference – in the besieged Bosnian capital, Sarajevo – an experience he says he won’t forget in a hurry.

“That one was certainly different,” he muses. “We were asked to do it at short notice because somebody else had pulled out. We arrived in Split in Croatia which is 400 miles from Sarajevo and we had to travel by truck over the mountains. We went over the top of Mount Ignam on the front line – just three hours after there’d been a pretty vicious battle!

“The plan was,” he adds, “that we’d rendezvous with two UN armoured personnel carriers but they didn’t show up so we drove down the side of this mountain ourselves. Fortunately, it was very foggy so the Serbs didn’t see us. It was crazy, we were sitting in the back of this truck with no food for fifteen hours – all we had was a bottle of Jack Daniels, a bottle of Jameson, a crate of beer and about two-hundred kilos of equipment which we slept on.”

Despite their ordeal Dickinson and his band arrived at the venue and played a sell-out gig to an extremely appreciative audience.

“They really pulled the boat out for us – they organised a generator and security. It was a twelve-hundred seat theatre next door to the Bosnian Presidential Palace. The strange thing was, the longer the show went on the more it seemed like a normal gig. It was bizarre. One minute you’re at a normal gig and the next thing you’re walking into a fucking war zone with snipers taking pot shots at you and a curfew in force. But we’re glad we did it and it made us appreciate what some of our fans have to go through every day.”

Dickinson who came to fame with Iron Maiden in the dearly eighties during what became known as the new wave of British heavy metal is determined to consolidate his solo career while at the same time acknowledging that things are more difficult nowadays even for those with an established reputation.

“The business has changed completely,” he says. “Crowds have gotten smaller and there’s a lot more competition for people’s attention. The traditional Saturday night thing of going to see a rock and roll band has gone and a lot of people now are dropping an E and raving it up.

“Which is fine by me,” he adds. “I can sympathise with that and I can understand why people do it. Raves are doing now what rock and roll gigs used to do, with people going along, taking mind-altering substances and leaping around for six hours getting off on the whole thing. A lot of bands became overblown and distant but they’ve learned something from the dance scene and live gigs now are taking on more of the characteristics of raves.”

Dickinson will be taking his new band on the road for a short European tour before heading for some shows in South America but there is as yet no news of any Irish dates. “I’d love to do some gigs in Ireland,” he says. “But I don’t think we’ll be going over in the near future. What I’d really love to do is to pack all the gear and the band into a transit van and turn up and do a few gigs in a low key kind of way.”

And despite the fact that Iron Maiden notched up over fifteen to thirty hit singles including acknowledged classics like ‘Run To The Hills’, ‘Can I Play With Madness’ and ‘The Number Of The Beast’, Dickinson rarely, if ever, includes any Iron Maiden songs in his live set these days.

“Maiden is history for me now,” he says, “though every now and again I think it might be a laugh to put one or two old numbers in the set. But it’s just too easy to sit there and play to the converted. I’m just trying to make an honest living out of my own material and I hope I can continue to do that for as long as people want to come and see me.”