Bruce Dickinson – who is famous for his soaring vocal abilities and super energetic stage performances that have mesmerized Iron Maiden fans for decades – spoke in a recent interview with BBC Radio 2 about how he underwent hip replacement surgery late last year.
Bruce Dickinson made the decision to go under the knife when he grew tired of the agony endured beginning in 2018, during the Iron Maiden ‘Legacy of the Beast World Tour’, though managing to conceal that he was in undoubtable pain and struggled to “walk properly” the Iron Maiden frontman pushed on with the tour by adjusting his moves on stage.
Bruce Dickinson recently told Download Festival host Kylie Olsson, “I’ve had five and a half inches of titanium hammered into my leg” following a career of jumping and running around onstage, and “40 years of fencing left-handed”, and followed on to described the most recent Iron Maiden tour as “really quite painful”.
“I mean, the last tour was really quite painful, and I put it down to the fact that during the last tour, just shortly before the last tour, I also broke my Achilles as well – my Achilles tendon snapped… It’s horrible. That was two years ago, basically. So I got that stitched back together and went out on tour three and a half months later. So I couldn’t actually walk properly or run. So I modified what I did onstage, and nobody figured it out. I was amazed. I did the whole tour – South America, the whole lot – and I ran around. – Bruce Dickinson Quote via Kerrang!
Iron Maiden – Flight Of Icarus (Live from the Legacy Of The Beast Tour)
“My hip was giving me so much shit. And I put it down to the fact that people were telling me, ‘You’re compensating for the other leg,’ and everything else, and I thought, ‘Oh, yeah. That’s it, then.’”
Dickinson went on to say that upon return, he began exercise and training again – he has been a competitive fencer for decades – as strict coronavirus lockdowns began in Paris, where the singer currently lives.
“So then I get back and I start training again seriously — doing my fencing, doing some competitions — and it’s just seizing up… it was giving me so much shit.” – Bruce Dickinson
“I was getting addicted to Ibuprofen and all the rest of it, and it pissed me off so much. I was just, like, ‘Look, it’s not gonna get any better, is it?’ And he went, ‘No.’ So I said, ‘It’s October. When the safety car comes out, Hamilton goes in for fresh tires. So let’s do it now in October, because I might have a tour next year.’ Little did I know. But being an eternal optimist, it was the best thing I’ve done.
Watch the full interview here:
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