Bruce Dickinson, the singer of Iron Maiden, discussed “The Mandrake Project” with VSX at last month’s San Diego Comic-Con. This cross-media multimedia concept combines a heavy metal solo album with a 12-issue quarterly adult comic book series produced by Z2 Comics, as per Blabbermouth. Science, the occult, and human souls are all explored conceptually in both the story and the music. Bruce explained how the concept for the record and related adult-oriented comic series came to be.
It started out 14, 15, 16, nearly 17 years ago. I was writing material for a solo album. I was thinking about a comic as a way of promoting it, effectively. ‘Cause, to me, it struck me that a lot of people that like the kind of music that I do probably dig comics as well. So I thought I’d come up with a very simple story, and it would just be one comic. And so I wrote the characters into some of the songs. 14 years later, ‘The Mandrake Project’ comes out, but in the intervening period, it had turned from one comic to two to 12. We have this structure of three four-part episodes. So book one was last year, book two is now done, and book three will be the conclusion of the story. So that’s how the music got involved. I’ve got a new record coming out next year, new solo album. It’s kind of standalone. There’s one song that has a bit of something to do with ‘Mandrake’. Now, the album is heavy as shit. I’m not digging into ‘Mandrake’. I think ‘Mandrake’ has a life now on a comic book level, so it can just go on the basis of story and everything else. I don’t need to associate music with it unless it’s a really good idea.
While asked if he considers his earlier solo albums while creating new songs, Dickinson responded as follows.
I try to not repeat — not because it’s bad. You want to move on and put different nuance on things. It’s like, I would say, if you have an amazing girlfriend and you start thinking, ‘Yeah, I’m getting a little bit bored,’ or something else like that, just turn the lights down and turn it a different way, and you see a side that you think, ‘Oh, my God, she’s absolutely incredible.’ Just the red light there or the green or whatever, and you see, you see the same person in a different day, in a different light. Music is something which you try not to stick too much of a format, but you are still within a particular… I’m within a particular style, for sure. But I try and vary it as much as I can.
