Bruce Dickinson Flies Solo Again with The Mandrake Project

Without the benefit of notable radio airplay or television time, Iron Maiden still manages to sell out arenas around the world. Vocalist Bruce Dickinson has been a superstar since he joined the band in 1981.

Dickinson has never been one to sit still for any period of time. In his recent and highly entertaining autobiography What Does This Button Do? he describes himself as the kid who would see how long he could hold onto the unshielded power cable of his parents’ refrigerator. Bruce famously went on to become not only a world-renowned vocalist, but also an award-winning fencing champion and a commercial aviator.

Tattooed Millionaire, Dickinson’s first solo album, appeared in 1990, presaging his decision to quit Maiden by three years. He released four more records under his own name in the ’90s, including the critically acclaimed 1998 concept album The Chemical Wedding with Maiden guitarist Adrian Smith. Dickinson’s last solo album, Tyranny of Souls came out in 2005, half a dozen years after he had rejoined Iron Maiden. 

VIDEO: Bruce Dickinson “Afterglow of Ragnarok”

Gathering the same backing band he’d used on Tyranny of Souls, Bruce has just unleashed a new full-length LP called The Mandrake Project. The mid-budget music videos for “Afterglow of Ragnarok” and “Rain On The Graves” reveal Dickinson in his elder statesman/wizard phase, not unlike latter-day Dio. It’s highly melodic, hard-charging, unapologetic heavy metal, with an alchemist’s cupboard of literary, historical and occult ingredients.

I was fortunate to spend the duration of a Zoom call with Bruce on a rainy day in February. We discussed Mandrake, its accompanying comic book series and the power of art, poetry and prog rock. He was charming as expected, exuding both the accent and curiosity of Nigel Tufnel.

The following conversation has been edited for brevity. 

You said in your book that [bands] have to come up with 40-45 minutes of new music every 14 months. I think you’ve broken the chain.

It could well be, although some of this stuff has been gestating for 25 years. That’s slightly cheating, really. We’re using stuff that’s been around for awhile.

At what point did this album—as a concept album—come together in your mind as, “this is how I should arrange all this material”?

I shy away from the term concept album, because for me, a concept album is something that is a literal story with a narrator, a sequential thing. The comic basically does that. If you want a concept, the comic is the story. 

So the concept for the album, I’d like to say it was planned, but if it was, it was planned by some supernatural intelligence that I have no knowledge of. 

Something I really liked in your [autobiography] was the references to [cult English prog band] Van der Graaf Generator. In fact I was noticing on “Face In The Mirror” you say, “There’s a house with no door…”

Yes, oh my god! You spotted that! [he laughs aloud]. You spotted that, “There’s a house with no door.” Absolutely that’s a nod to Van der Graaf. Very good, very good! Class act, man! Very good!

There’s also a lot of literary components to this record. “Rain on the Graves” was inspired by Wordsworth, and I keep seeing William Blake’s name coming up again and again.

Always. Blake speaks to multiple generations over time on a visual and poetic level. So his art, his drawings are extraordinary, but his poetry is equally extraordinary. So it’s hard to find an artist, ever, as complete as Blake. 

And apparently a huge amount of his [work] was destroyed.

Yes. In his early days, a lot of his paintings, a bit like Dali as well, a lot Dali’s most famous paintings are incredibly small. Like the Clocks; you think it would be huge, and it’s not much bigger than a postcard. Blake was the same. The detail was amazing because some of his paintings were quite small. But towards the end of his life he started doing massive frescoes. And all of those have been lost. They just broke ‘em up. Because everybody thought he was completely around the bend, that he was crazy, and that his art wasn’t worth anything. And also, nobody could copy him. So if you can’t copy somebody, obviously it’s not worth bothering with. His way of engraving and inking, I don’t think anybody’s figured out how he did it. Which is quite incredible that nobody figured out exactly by what process he achieved the results that he did. 

Must have been alchemy or the occult!

[Bruce laughs] Well, he was almost certainly, if not an [actual] alchemist, but in the philosophical sense, an alchemist. And you don’t get to the references in poetry that he did without a big breadth of knowledge of occultism or whatever. At the time, of course, it was rather frowned upon. He was the original Mr. Unorthodox. He was great. I love him.

And he’d been invoked on other albums, like The Chemical Wedding, right?

Yeah that’s right. And we—myself and the video director Ryan Mackfall—we share a common interest in vampires, folklore, Hammer horror and early Universal horror. So [Blake] makes an appearance there as well. And in the comic book as well. So in the comic book Episode One, our character, Doctor Necropolis, basically takes an acid trip (well it’s actually hallucinogenic mandrake juice but, same shit) …and decides that he’s gonna raise the spirit of William Blake from his graveyard and use him as a spirit guide to try and bring his brother back from the underworld. It doesn’t quite work out, but anyway, that’s the opening gambit of Episode One and then it suddenly turns real.

He says, “I am Necropolis, formed of the dead.”

Yes, “My name is Necropolis, and I am formed of the dead.” Why he says that will become apparent as you go through the story.

You say in your [autobiography] that you wished even Seventh Son had been a graphic novel. So it’s cool that you’re getting to do that now.

Oh, for Seventh Son I came up with a whole story: The Seventh Son. And I actually was developing the story during lockdown for it, and during that process, ended up running the idea that became Mandrake Project past a couple of Hollywood scriptwriters. …exhumed not for any great financial purpose. It was just for the hell of it. What else were we gonna do? Everybody’s locked up.

So I was having a chat with a friend of mine, Sacha Gervasi, who [has written and/or directed] Anvil, My Dinner With Hervé, and The Terminal… And I mentioned the four bikers of the apocalypse in the [“Writing On The Wall”] Maiden video. 

What inspired me to do that was binge-watching Sons of Anarchy. So he said, “Oh my buddy wrote that!” I’m like, what? Kurt Sutter? He goes, “Yeah, he’s my buddy. Shall we get him on a Zoom next week?” So I’m pinching myself. I can’t believe I’m on a Zoom talking to Kurt Sutter, who is a lovely guy and very generous. 

And we got talking and we started running some ideas together, which I may revisit one of these days, you never know. But in the meantime, I ran the story of the Mandrake Project past him and said, “Look, I’ve got this idea. Do you think it has legs? Just tell me, and I’ll shut up.” And he said, “No that’s a great story. You should definitely do that.”

I said, “Well what should I do with it? Is it a screenplay? A book?” He says, “Eh, do a comic.” And I went “Hmm, okay. I was thinking of doing a comic. How the hell do you do a comic? I don’t know where to start. I mean I could write a screenplay, but that’s not a comic.” So he sent me a comic he’d done called Sisters Of Sorrow. He sent me the script that underpinned it, the backstory, the characters, the world that he’d built, and the initial pitch. 

Okay! This is the keys to the kingdom, Kurt. Thank you! And basically I used that template to create Mandrake Project. So I ended up with twelve episodes and the backstories and the characters… And that’s what I presented [publisher] Z2 [Comics] with. This would be like a three-year project, like a Watchmen-style comic.  They were down for it.

So and then we started putting a team together to create it. 

How cool to decide to write a comic and then get Bill Sinkiewicz doing your cover art.

I couldn’t believe that he would even give me the time of day! He’s a very cool guy. I think what sold him on the project is I had a Zoom call with him and all the guys in Vancouver. I shot him the idea of the philosophy behind [The Mandrake Project], and at that point, he said “yes.” 

It really helps elevate it as an art project to have him involved.

Oh very much, but again, [Judge Dredd artist] Staz [Johnson is] doing the heavy lifting of all the art, but we’ve also got Piotr Kowalksi now on board. As we go through, there’s more flashback things and more backstory and so those are gonna be drawn by Piotr. There’ll be a slightly different feel to them as they are flashbacks.

[On the album cover] there’s a Latin saying on a coin: “Morte Capti, Non Carcere 1941 – 1968.” 

Yeah you know it’s basically “death will take me, but death won’t hold me.” Rough translation. And that in effect is the setup for the Mandrake Project. At the end of Episode One you get this bold statement: “Science Has Conquered Death.”

Would you say that was inspired in any way by your [successful] cancer treatment?

Oh, your subconscious takes anything like that: doom, death, destruction, catastrophic illness, and all that kind of stuff. If you survive it all, your subconscious just keeps munching on it. It’s gonna come out somewhere. With me it comes out as music or writing or whatever it is. I’m not going to turn it into a weird therapy session or something else like that. 

VIDEO: Bruce Dickinson “Rain on the Graves”

I noticed on several of your solo records that it seems like the front end is a little more packed with a metal punch and then things get a bit more expansive and epic toward the end. And I like that.

I’d probably say that’s a fair comment. Definitely with [Mandrake Project]. This one, when we did all the tracks, that spanned 25 years. There were one track like 25 years old, one track 20 years old, then like six tracks that were all written in and around 2014.

And then fast forward to like a year ago, we got back together after lockdown had ended and all that rubbish, and the first thing we did was write two brand new songs, which is the first two songs on the record. And that gave us kind of another lens with which to view all of the old material. 

And when I put the running order of the album together, I realized that what we’d been creating all along was, not a concept, but it was a musical. It was an emotional journey that you start at the beginning… and then when you get to “Face In The Mirror” it really takes a U-turn. Takes you to a completely different world, which I love. That’s what I love about records. That’s what I love about sitting and listening to Pawn Hearts or Van Der Graaf. I love the world they take you to. 

When I think of Mandrake, one of the first things that comes to my mind is a Paul Verhoeven film called Flesh + Blood from 1985. It’s a medieval fantasy. And there’s a scene where these lovers are standing at the site of a hanged man. And the guy says, “When a man is hanged, he cums, and his semen drips into the ground, and that’s where the mandrake root grows.” And they pull out this mandrake root, and it’s really awesome.

Oh my god! We already have that in Episode two. That story about the mandrake. I did a podcast called “Psycho Schizo Espresso” and I do it with a University of Oxford professor of psychology who’s an expert in psychopaths. And we interview odd and interesting people, a lot of them psychopaths. But… successful psychopaths… clinically diagnosed. 

One guy who we interviewed (a non-psychopath) was one of the world’s leading forensic pathologists. And we were talking about auto-erotic strangulation. And he said exactly that, “Yeah yeah, 50 percent of people who are hanged, at the moment of their execution, the moment of death, the body involuntarily ejaculates.”

So women would wait underneath the gibbet to try and catch the cum that would drop off these guys’ shoes and there were all these legends about mandrake that would grow underneath the gibbet, that were nourished by the cum from victims. 

So yes, Paul Verhoeven got it spot on. 

You talk a lot in your [autobiography] about “the theater of the mind.” Do you feel that ties in with the graphic novel as well?

Oh, very much so. When I sing tunes, not exclusively, but often, I’ll create a little mini-movie to go with what I’m singing. For example if I’m singing some stuff that [Iron Maiden bassist and songwriter] Steve [Harris]’s given me, I’ll create a mini-movie that reflects what the words are reflecting and then I will visualize that so I’m not actually singing the words, I’m describing the pictures that the words inspire. 

You had a television from a really young age. Do you think that affected that in any way?

Possibly… I think television, as opposed to [a] computer-based or Internet-based visual medium, was very different back then. Because you had no choice at all. You were restricted. In England there was like one channel or two channels and it would go off at midnight and there’d be a drum roll and they’d play the national anthem, and some people would stand up and salute and stuff like that. And then it would stop. 

And because it was a cathode ray tube… it would go shhhhhhhh to a singularity at the end and that was the coolest thing of all. I was thinking, what was behind the dot? Where did the dot go? And if you could continue the dot, where would you end up? I was already thinking that way at an early age.

That’s the next concept album.

Hahaha!

You must have a lot of faith in [producer and guitarist] Roy [Z] at this point.

Roy was great. We mixed in Jupiter, Florida, a lot of the album, with Brendan Duffy. And Brendan technically is astonishing as a repository of technical knowledge about mixes and sounds. And he’s been doing the ATMOS mixes for us. So we’ve done our ATMOS mix of the album. 

He’s just finished remixing [my third solo album] Skunkworks, which [original producer] Jack Endino absolutely loves. He loves the remixes. And the reason we remixed it is not just to say we’ve done a remix for the hell of it, but because it needs to be remixed in order to be prepared to go to ATMOS.

It’s funny because I’ve actually seen Jack Endino be dismissive of ATMOS mixes.

Yeah, and I don’t blame him. Because there are some songs which are frankly not improved by ATMOS. If you have a song like, for example on the new album, “Sonata” or “Shadow Of The Gods” where there’s piano and space, lots of space, and you can populate the spaces in the sound with having the sound move around, you can detect it aurally, and yeah, great. 

So what we did when we were doing “Sonata” in ATMOS, and I’m [singing], “Here in this dark forest where nothing will live, I see the frozen eyes…” I said, “Can we have the ATMOS so that you’re like inside my head as I’m looking around the forest? 

My voice goes around the back of your head… Literally you’re in this world and moving round within it. That’s when ATMOS is cool. But if you’ve got something like “Many Doors To Hell” which is basically a straightforward stereo mix, there’s not a lot you can do with it in ATMOS.

I have a quad mix of Paranoid. There’s supposed to be a wall of sound, and it just pulls things so far apart that it doesn’t really work anymore. 

Funnily enough we had a moment in the studio when we did the ATMOS mixes for this album, and the same day we’d had the acetates delivered from the cutting place cuz we wanted [legendary mastering engineer] Bob Ludwig to cut the album. And we phoned up and [they said] “we’re very sorry sir, but Mr. Ludwig retired yesterday.” 

We’re like, “No! No! Bob Ludwig’s retired? What are we gonna do.” So there’s a studio up in Seattle called Black Belt mastering. And a guy called Levi at Black Belt mastered the album. Oh. My. God. It’s the best sounding album I have ever heard in my life. 

We got the acetate and before we left the ATMOS place, we said, “Hey listen, we better go play these. Just check that they’re okay.” And there was a stereo outside the studio, like a regular stereo. We brought along a turntable. We put it on, turned it up, and honestly, we were, Brendan, me and Roy, we were just like, “Oh, fuck ATMOS. This sounds unbelievable.” Fucking hell. Just stereo. And vinyl. Jesus Christ what an amazing sounding record. What have we done? And that was it. That gave me a sense of proportion!

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Nathan Carson

Nathan Carson is a writer, musician, and MOTH StorySlam Champion from Portland, Oregon. A founding member of the international doom band Witch Mountain, Carson is the host of the FM radio show The Heavy Metal Sewïng Cïrcle, owner of boutique booking agency Nanotear, and author of the weird horror novella Starr Creek. More about his music, music writing, fiction and graphic novels can be found at www.nathancarson.rocks.

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