Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson had a crazy rock and roll life in the 1980s, but apparently, it had a dark side.
In a new interview with Classic Rock, the singer discussed his fear of falling victim to the lifestyle of the ’80s. “You’re not part of normal society. PTSD, dislocation – that’s effectively what you’ve got,” he said of the rock and roll life. “And depending on your personality type, you deal with it in different ways. Steve [Harris, bassist] became a recluse. Adrian [Smith, guitarist] was drinking himself into an early grave. I was busy shagging everything that moved. And none of it was healthy.”
Dickinson recalled a piece of advice from The Who’s Pete Townshend that helped him turn his life around. “I remember something that Pete Townshend once said about groupies. ‘The moment you realise that you can click your fingers and manipulate people into having sex with you, that’s the moment you’re going down the slippery slope.’ Up till that moment, it’s innocent. You can’t believe women are throwing themselves at you. You think, well, this is nice! And it is. It’s f*cking great!”
The rocker added, “But there’s a dark side to this. Where do you stop? When does it become a prop, like alcohol or cocaine? When does this become your reality – when it’s not actually real?”
The rocker earlier talked about his experience on the matter in another interview. “When you first start out, you don’t have any realization that people might want to sleep with you because you’re onstage,” he said. “You think they want to sleep with you because they want to sleep with you, because it might be nice and because they like you. And often that’s true — it’s often that it’s true… And yes, there are some people that want you as a notch on the bedpost, just as some guys have that [same thing] with women, and, yeah, we’ve all been guilty of it, no doubt.”
“But there comes a point, which is incredibly corrupting and corrosive, in which you suddenly go, ‘Hang on a minute. You can actually kind of click your fingers and make things happen.’ And that’s a really scary moment, to realize that that power exists. And that’s why the Harvey Weinsteins and all the rest of it, and the whole Hollywood thing… So that awareness of that, that’s when it becomes really corrupting,” he added.
While Dickinson is now married for the third time, he says he has regrets about those days back in the ’80s.
