Bruce Dickinson

Paul Bruce Dickinson (born 7 August 1958) is an English singer, best known as the lead vocalist of the heavy metal band Iron Maiden.

Paul Bruce Dickinson was born on 7 August 1958 in Worksop, Nottinghamshire.

His mother, Sonia, worked part-time in a shoe shop, and his father, Bruce, was a mechanic in the British Army.

His birth hurried the young couple, who were then just teenagers, into marriage.

Initially, he was brought up by his grandparents; his grandfather was a coal-face worker at the local colliery, and his grandmother was a housewife.

This is referred to in his song "Born In '58" from the album Tattooed Millionaire.

Dickinson started school at Manton Primary in Worksop while his parents moved away to Sheffield.

Soon afterwards, when he was six, he was also despatched to Sheffield, where he attended a primary school in Manor Top.

After six months, his parents decided to move him to a small private school called Sharrow Vale Junior.

Due to constant moving, Dickinson states that this period of his life taught him to be self-reliant as he was unable to make close friends.

Dickinson has a younger sister, professional showjumper Helena Stormanns, who was born in 1963.

He tried to isolate himself from her as much as he could when he was young, supposedly out of spite because she, unlike him, was a planned pregnancy and birth.

Dickinson's first musical experience was dancing in his grandparents' front room to Chubby Checker's "The Twist", when he still lived with them in Worksop.

The first record Dickinson recalls owning was The Beatles single "She Loves You", which he managed to persuade his grandfather to buy him, which made him more interested in music.

He tried to play an acoustic guitar belonging to his father, but it blistered his fingers.

By the time he moved to Sheffield, Dickinson's parents were earning a good living from buying property, refurbishing it and then selling it for a profit.

As a result, much of Dickinson's childhood was spent living on a building site, until his parents bought a boarding house and a bankrupt garage where his father began selling second-hand cars.

The income from their business success gave them the opportunity to give Dickinson—then 13 years old—a boarding school education and they chose Oundle, a public school in Northamptonshire.

Dickinson was not opposed to moving away from home because he had not built "any real attachment" to his parents, having been raised by his grandparents in Worksop until he was six.

At Oundle, Dickinson was picked on and routinely bullied by the older boys of Sidney House, the boarding house that he belonged to, which he described as "like systematic torture" and meant that he became an outsider.

His interests at Oundle were often military; he co-founded the school wargames society with Mike Jordan, and he joined the school's cadet force.

This gave him access to live ammunition, which he used to create explosions as booby-traps.

Oundle was where Dickinson became attracted to progressive rock and early heavy metal after hearing Deep Purple's "Child in Time" being played in another student's room.

As a result, the first album he ever bought was Deep Purple's In Rock, which created his interest in rock and metal music.

After In Rock, he went on to buy Black Sabbath's debut, Jethro Tull's Aqualung and Tarkus by Emerson, Lake & Palmer.

Dickinson began his career in music fronting small pub bands in the 1970s while attending school in Sheffield and university in London.

In 1979, he joined British new wave heavy metal band Samson, with whom he gained some popularity under the stage name "Bruce Bruce" and performed on two studio records.

During his first tenure in the band, they issued a series of US and UK platinum and gold albums in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Dickinson has performed in the band across two stints, from 1981 to 1993 and from 1999 to the present day.

He is known for his wide-ranging operatic vocal style and energetic stage presence.

He left Samson in 1981 to join Iron Maiden, replacing Paul Di'Anno, and debuted on their 1982 album The Number of the Beast.

Since Bruce Dickinson joined Iron Maiden in 1981, the band has sold well over 100 million albums as of 2024.

Outside his career in music, Dickinson has pursued a number of other activities.

He undertook a career as a commercial pilot for Astraeus Airlines, which led to a number of media-reported ventures such as captaining Iron Maiden's converted charter aeroplane, Ed Force One, during their world tours.

Dickinson quit Iron Maiden in 1993 (being replaced by Blaze Bayley) to pursue his solo career, which saw him experiment with a wide variety of heavy metal and rock styles.

He rejoined the band in 1999, along with guitarist Adrian Smith, and has released six subsequent studio albums with the band.

Dickinson presented his own radio show on BBC Radio 6 Music from 2002 to 2010, and has also hosted television documentaries, authored novels and film scripts, created a beer with Robinsons Brewery and competed at fencing internationally.

Since his return to Iron Maiden, he has released two further solo records, in 2005, Tyranny of Souls and The Mandrake Project in 2024.

His younger cousin, Rob Dickinson, is the former lead singer of British alternative rock band Catherine Wheel, while his son, Austin, fronted the metalcore band Rise to Remain.

Following Astraeus' closure, in 2012 he created his own aircraft maintenance and pilot training company, Cardiff Aviation.