By WILIAM J. WRIGHT
At 65, Bruce Dickinson remains metal’s reigning renaissance man. Revered for his hard-hitting, operatic vocals, Dickinson has fronted the legendary Iron Maiden since joining the band for 1982’s Number of the Beast (save for a six-year hiatus from 1993 to 1999 that saw him pursuing a variety of solo and side projects). An experienced pilot, Olympic-level fencer and published author, he never shrinks from a challenge or from finding new avenues to express his singular artistic vision.
With his latest solo album, THE MANDRAKE PROJECT, Dickinson combines music with comics for a total conceptual experience that fuses horror and fantasy in an all-encompassing saga of magic and mayhem. The music, co-written with renowned axman Roy Z, is classic Dickinson, filled with complex lyrical themes, signature vocal acrobatics and face-melting guitars. The accompanying six-issue limited comic series from Z2 is no less intense, fleshing out THE MANDRAKE PROJECT’s sweeping storyline with a script by Tony Lee (IDW’s Doctor Who, Marvel’s X-Men Unlimited) and art by Staz Johnson (DC’s Robin, Catwoman).
RUE MORGUE caught up with Dickinson (attempting to stay warm on a particularly frigid winter’s day in Paris) via Zoom on the cusp of THE MANDRAKE PROJECT’s release to talk about the new album and comic and his creative process.
Bruce! Thanks for speaking with RUE MORGUE all the way from Paris today. Without giving too much away, tell me about THE MANDRAKE PROJECT.
It just gets freezing here, man. I’m very happy to be indoors talking to you!
[THE MANDRAKE PROJECT] is a story of family consequences, basically, or the things that happen in families, and there are two or three interconnected groups of people in the story. And the overarching sci-fi/occult element of it is there’s a bunch of people who have, over the years, been involved with an organization called the Mandrake Project, and, effectively, the research has culminated in “Yep, that’s it. We’ve got death nailed.” Nobody needs to die anymore. in the conventional way. We can bring you back. And if you’re Elon Musk, and you can afford it, don’t bother going to Mars, you know, hey, right here on Earth. Basically, that’s the end of episode one. But the characters involved are all, in their own way, deeply flawed. And you don’t quite know why they’re flawed until you go through the story. And it gets very dark and very Greek and very abusive. And there are consequences that happen as a result of that, both in this world and in the underworld.
You’ve been developing this story for a long time. How did the idea come about?
Well, initially, I had the idea of doing one 24-page comic to go with the album in 2014. And I thought, well, let me try and write a very, very short, basic story for one comic, and the idea was based on a song called “Accident of Birth.” In the song, a guy’s separated from his twin brother at birth; One dies and one lives, but they’re psychically linked. He basically has survivor’s guilt and rage against God and himself. Why have you done this to me? Why? Why can’t I help him? I thought, well, what if there was a way that you could bring him back? What if there was a way to take that consciousness, that entity, and somehow reintroduce it as an incarnate human being?
I invented two characters, kind of like Burke and Hare, Dr. Necropolis and Professor Lazarus. One of them is the light side, and one of them is the dark side. They both work on the project, but they have different ways of interpreting what to do with it for the good of mankind. So, that was the basic, very simple story, that would be the basis of the comic. I wrote a song called “If Eternity Should Fail.” And that’s the title of a Doctor Strange comic. I thought, “Wow, what a cool title for a record. So, that was going to be the title track. Maiden ended up using that track. And I thought, well, I’ll just kind of repossess it when I come to do the album later on, which didn’t happen for another seven years because I got throat cancer, and then COVID happened and Maiden got really busy.
That delayed everything, but during the lockdown, I started toying with the idea again and thought about these characters. They’re kind of two-dimensional. They’re kind of cardboard-cutout good guys [and] bad guys. [I thought], let’s let’s dig down a bit. What’s this guy all about? This Dr. Necropolis? He sounds kind of twisted. Why is he like this? So, it eventually morphed into this dark tale about a young guy who’s an orphan, who is a genius. He is tortured by the sound of his dead brother in his head the whole time. He has some weird deformities, and he has some weird abilities that are outside of the scientific realm that he inhabits. His partner, Professor Lazarus, is much older, and he’s employed by him. Lazarus has inherited The Mandrake project from his dad, and Lazarus worships his dad. But his dad has Alzheimer’s. And the first guy they’re going to bring back is going to be his dad. When they bring back Dad, there are consequences that none of them could possibly have anticipated.
Did you have any literary or comic book influences when coming into this story?
My comic book childhood was basically based on lusting after being the Human Torch because I was like, “Yeah, Fantastic Four… I don’t like the guy with bendy arms.” No, I don’t get him at all. Hulk? I was just like, “Nah, I don’t really get him,” but the Human Torch? I want to be him. He can set fire to shit and fly, you know? And that was me. Superman. I never got Superman. I was just like, I don’t get it. This guy’s indestructible, and how do you get a crisis out of that? It’s just too goody-two-shoes.
I liked Dr. Strange. So, I was a big Doctor Strange fan. And I love the Silver Surfer. The Silver Surfer has this permanent adolescent pissed-off dark side. He just can’t get out of his own way. And there’s a lot of him in Necropolis. He’s not necessarily bad, but he was just made that way. I was just wired to be this way, but maybe there’s redemption. I haven’t quite made up my mind about whether redemption occurred. It will occur somewhere, but maybe not in an orthodox way. I’m trying to twist things up a bit with all the characters. Those are sort of my comic book kind of influences.
Why does this theme of magic versus science fascinate you?
It’s not even magic versus science. It’s poetry versus science. And it was a question posed by a big hero of mine, William Blake. William Blake continually pushed the boundaries and said that science is just measuring things. Any fool can measure something, but to know, to understand the philosophy, to see infinity an hour and eternity in a grain of sand. That’s art. That’s poetry. And if you look at the universe, surely everybody could see it’s poetic. You can measure it, but that’s not the truth of it.
That’s at the heart of THE MANDRAKE PROJECT because that’s at the heart of Necropolis as well. He measures things. He’s got this great quantum brain, and he developed all this technology – none of which impresses him because he can’t bring his brother back. And he’s deeply gone down the rabbit hole of Aleister Crowley and sex magic and trying to take tighter control of things and make things happen, but there are some things he can’t control and some things about his own body he can’t control, and he doesn’t know why it pisses him off.
Why was the medium of comics the best way to complement the album? Why not a movie or novella?
When I do music, I think in pictures, so I always do a video – if I have the budget. There’s that horrible word again. If I had the budget, I would do a video for every single song I’ve ever written because every song I’ve ever written is a mini-movie in my head. That’s what I see when I sing it. And that goes for Iron Maiden as well – even if it’s somebody else’s words. It’s weird. I can’t quite describe it. Sometimes, I see the images. Sometimes, I just have a vague idea… maybe shapes or things like that. That’s how I view singing and music.
To do a movie would be great. I did it once with a low-budget movie called The Chemical Wedding, and it took ten years to get that made. And even then, we only had half the money we needed to do a good job, you know? With the rise of Netflix and everything, everybody’s going, “Ah, yeah, that will make a great Netflix series.” Well, you know, I’ve gotten used to it. Everybody says that. I was talking to a guy called Kurt Sutter. Kurt’s a writer and did Sons of Anarchy and The Shield and Mayans MC and numerous other things. We would occasionally have Zooms together just for the hell of it because a friend of mine, Sacha Gervasi, who is also a scriptwriter, knew him. Sacha mentioned that he knew Kurt because I’d been writing the script for Iron Maiden’s “Writing on the Wall” animated music video. In it, I had the Four Biker Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which came about because I was daydreaming and binge-watching Sons of Anarchy in lockdown.
I ran this idea past Kurt. We bounced all kinds of crazy ideas about. We’d be locked up if you actually could eavesdrop on the conversations. And I said, “Can I run this one past you?” And it was Dr. Necropolis and this story that I was developing. Kurt was like, “Yeah, that’s got legs, man. That’s cool.” “Really?” I said. Kurt was like, “No, no, no, that’s a great story. That’s great. It’s dark, really dark.” I take that as a compliment coming from someone like Kurt, you know? I said, “I don’t know what to do with it, Shall I turn it into a script or do a treatment? Shall I send it to Netflix?” He said, “No, mate. Do a comic. Movies are expensive. Paper is cheap.”
Let’s get into the music side of THE MANDRAKE PROJECT a little bit. How do the comic and the album work together to form a complete narrative? Can a listener get the complete story from the album or do the two components rely on each other?
I divorced the album from the comic in terms of a literal telling of a story very early on in the development because I realized that it was going to be really limiting to try and shoehorn all these lyrics and songs, and they’re going to have their own life, you know? One or two songs were conceived as having to do with the comic like “Resurrection Men.” “If Eternity Should Fail” was repurposed. Eternity has failed because they’ve conquered death. There is no eternity anymore.
I tweaked the words a little bit there, but by and large, the rest of it is individual stories about love and death. In that context, I don’t need to have them work as part of a plot because, atmospherically, they overlay the comic. If you were to read the comic and simultaneously listen to some of the music on the record, it would make perfect sense, but it’s not a literal telling. I didn’t want to make them two trees that lean on each other, so if you take one away, the other one falls over. They’re both individual big, strong, strapping lumps of wood, but they do inform each other. Trees talk to each other through their roots, and the roots of both projects are buried somewhere deep in the midst of time. So, for that reason, they’re both compatible, but they don’t rely on each other It’s not a quote-unquote “concept album.”
Why is THE MANDRAKE PROJECT more suitable as a Bruce Dickinson project than an Iron Maiden project?
You know, I wanted to do a comic book/story/movie for Seventh Son of a Seventh Son from the beginning to end – the whole thing. Maiden, in some respects, is conservative with a small “c.” That’s not a bad thing. It’s like if you go listen to an AC/DC record, you wouldn’t expect to suddenly hear an orchestra and strings and stuff like that – because it’s an AC DC record. And it’s the same thing with Maiden, except that we’ve got our style, and sometimes, you would expect keyboards, and we’ve gone a lot more proggy over the years, but to put our whole concept together around an entire album with Maiden would require a degree of control that I don’t think Steve [Harris] would be willing to relinquish! [Laughs].
