Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson is probably one of the most interesting figures in metal, as you'll quickly find out in his new interview with PBS' Charlie Rose. Dickinson discusses Iron Maiden's coming live album The Book Of Souls: Live Chapter, his new biography What Does This Button Do?, being famous, how he's not a huge fan of doing any solo work, and his writing process in general. Now all we really need a brief talk show where Dickinson talks about all his awesome business ventures and ideas, and we're all set!
Blabbermouth transcribed an interesting quote from the interview, where Rose asked Dickinson what the definition of heavy metal was: "I haven't got one. I've given up. There's no point in even trying to define it. It's defined more by other people than it's defined by me. 'Cause when I started out listening to music, there was no such thing as heavy metal. It was a term coined by a journalist, actually, and I think it was from a William Burroughs novel — but that's a minor detail.
"Metal came out of something that was called heavy rock," he continued. "Heavy rock was simply an offshoot of blues rock — you know, Led Zepplin and Deep Purple and things like that, and Free, and all those bands. They weren't heavy metal, but they kind of came into the heavy metal orbit, and then the whole world of music became polarized. It became very niche; everybody was put in their little silos. And that was as much a fact of life because of the media, because the media did that. And then record companies figured out that they could market it and yada yada yada and so on and so forth. But we've managed to survive, and not just survive, but to thrive, in a sense, outside that system. So people call us heavy metal, and we say, yeah, fine, we are."
