“I said, ‘I do not want to go out and be a sad parody of myself’”: How Iron Maiden singer Bruce Dickinson faced up to his greatest challenge

Iron Maiden singer Bruce Dickinson says that he seriously considered quitting the band in 2015 while he was being treated for throat cancer.

Dickinson tells MusicRadar that he would have left the band if he had been unable to sing with the same power and range as before.

And he says that this was a decision he considered out of personal pride and out of loyalty to the band and its fans.

Dickinson was diagnosed with throat cancer just as Maiden were completing the recording of their 2015 album The Book Of Souls. And as he now recalls, he always felt confident that his treatment would be successful.

“I felt good,” he says. “I believed I was going to come through fairly strongly.

“It was going to be a hard ten months, but at the end of that, I thought - I hoped - I should be able to do what I’d done before.

“But if not, I was quite prepared to leave - because if you can't sing like you should be able to sing, that's it.

He explains: “I would have wanted the band to carry on properly. But I would have offered to help them find another singer, because there are other people out there.

“I could suggest this bloke, or this bloke, or this bloke - he could probably do a pretty good version of me.

“I had the conversation with the guys [in the band]. I said, ‘I do not want to go out and be a sad parody of myself.’ And the band don’t deserve it either.

“So I'm thinking: if I lost that voice, I could figure out something else to do. I don't know what, but I’d have to take a positive spin on it.

“But there's no way I would persist in saying, ‘Oh, no, I can do it’, when manifestly I couldn’t. That would not be fair to anybody.

“I’m not just a singer. I’m a storyteller. I finally figured out finally what I do in life - I tell stories, and I just happen to do with with my voice in Maiden, but that’s basically what I do.

“And because you lose a particular type of voice doesn't mean you can't use another voice. But not within a band like Iron Maiden.”

Ultimately, Dickinson never had to make that call.

As he told Classic Rock: “I got lucky. I got through it all, and although my cancer was in that general area, my vocal cords were not affected.

“So we didn’t have to make that decision, because it all worked out.”