What Does This Button Do?: The No.1 Sunday Times Bestselling Autobiography. Bruce Dickinson

took the 277 bus down to the Greenwich foot tunnel and walked under the River Thames to the old wharves that lay on the south of the river. Wood Wharf Studios was a rehearsal room with a panoramic view of the water, but for today my destination was the small portable shed around the back.

      Head still buzzing from cabinet papers about Munich, appeasement and the fall of France to the Nazis, I opened the studio door. It was 1979. I was 20 years old and I was about to start singing full-time with Samson.

       A Heavy Metal Crusade

      It was not quite what I expected. There was more gear than I had ever seen in a rehearsal room: Marshall amps, weave-fronted Marshall speaker 4 × 12-inch cabinets, Paul’s Gibson SG, Chris’s Fender Precision bass and, of course, the greatest number of drums I had ever been in close proximity to.

      While the equipment was certainly not lacking, the will to do anything was curiously absent. I was raring to go, but we immediately decamped to the pub. Thus fortified, we made a start. Sort of.

      ‘Shall we start?’ I asked.

      ‘Nah. Let’s get wrecked first.’

      And so it began. It was to be two years of madness, and yet we still managed to pull off some decent music, plus some variable gigs, although secretly we quite liked it that way.

      The immediate task at hand was to get wrecked, so I went back to the pub and had a third pint. When I returned, the wreckage had already started. Although I’d been in a band called Speed, I had no idea that there was a drug called speed until a couple of years later. There was a light white crusting on the tip of Chris’s nose. He was unusually active, being as he was fairly languid under control conditions.

      Paul, on the other hand, was carefully rolling one of several joints using resin crushed atop tobacco removed from a Marlboro cigarette. This, plus a new echo machine, made for pleasant interludes of overlapping feedback that went on for several minutes.

      Barry, or Thunderstick, as he had named himself, was wearing a blue boiler suit. As the engine room of the band on the drums, he didn’t seem to be his usual bouncy self. This, I discovered, was because he had washed down a handful of downers with his pint. After half an hour or so, we launched into a number: stoned guitar, speeding bass and a drummer on downers periodically losing consciousness and threatening to fall off his drum stool backwards. Fortunately there was a wall behind that prevented this, and which meant he would suddenly wake up and thrash his kit much faster, as if to make up for lost time.

      I did a bit of singing. Three pints, I thought, is not enough.

      In the midst of this quick, quick, slow and stoned routine, the door opened and in walked what I thought might either be a travelling salesman or a minicab driver. He stood and watched. I have never liked being watched in rehearsals. I don’t even like being watched by people I know, truth be told. Rehearsals are where you can screw up and feel safe to experiment.

      Now he started tapping his foot and nodding his head, pursing his lips in the way that people who know absolutely zero about music do. He thought he was important, but he was just irritating.

      We stopped, but not all at the same time. It took a while for Thunderstick to realise and slowly collapse onto his tom-toms, fast asleep.

      ‘Hello, can I help?’ I offered.

      ‘Ah, yes. I’m Glyn. Alistair sent me down to have a listen. You know, see how it’s going.’

      He had quite a strong South African accent, and I was right: he was a minicab driver. The Alistair he referred to was Alistair Primrose of Ramkup Management, Samson’s manager.

      ‘We’re just knocking it on the head,’ Paul announced.

      Short but sweet, the first rehearsal ended up back in the pub. Glyn had a cash float and we figured we may as well convert cash into food and beer. After an hour or so we went back to retrieve Thunderstick, and found him on the roof staring at the sun with his eyes closed. He was in no state to walk so we all sat on the roof while Chris and Paul smoked a lot more joints. We waited for our respective chemical states to stabilise so we could go home.

      I found communication as I would normally understand it quite arduous with people who were out of their gourds. It’s difficult enough when you are straight. I resolved to adapt. That’s what evolution is for, I reasoned. If the mountain wouldn’t move in my general direction, then I would jolly well find out what all the fun was about and clamber aboard.

      Day two of rehearsals was looming large, and I was sure that eventually we would play something in tune that started or finished in time. And, dear reader, that’s exactly what happened. So there. Samson did have a record deal and they had produced an album as a three-piece with Paul on lead vocals. The album was ready to be released, but the slight technical hitch was the addition of a fourth member, for whom no useful purpose could be assigned on the record.

      The record label was an independent one, Laser Records, and the album was called Survivors, featuring a kindergarten bad-taste painted sleeve with the band standing atop a mound of dead rock stars. On the credits were instructions to ‘play loud when wrecked’, and it was certainly advice that we heeded for the next couple of years.

      It’s safe to say that almost every mishap, catastrophe and legal disaster that could befall a band happened to us over the next two years. We were sued, injuncted, arrested, on the run for various offences and utterly misunderstood by everyone except our own mothers.

      The management were all accountants or company secretaries, and their skill set was recruiting accountants and financial personnel. They had offices on the top floor of a building in Blackfriars, wore suits and were drunk for 50 per cent of the day as part of their job description. There was some money they had obtained from a mystery backer, and that funded their foray into music. The other group they managed were the UK Subs, a hardcore punk band led by the evergreen Charlie Harper.