Engineering stimulates the mind.
Apart from death and taxes, the one thing that's certain in this life is that I'll never be a fashion icon.
I don't like being recognised, I have no interest in being famous at all, I just do what I do. If I could be like Captain Kirk and beam myself up and then beam myself down, I would!
I'm very good at daydreaming. Ask any of my schoolteachers.
My son is in a band, and he’s a singer, and his vocals … they’re screaming-growling stuff … and he’s got a pretty reasonable voice. Yet he practices really hard to get the screaming-growling thing without losing that voice every five minutes. So I’m, like, “Hats off to you.”
Tyranny of freedom is do what you like. There's a world gone crazy, cause it can't say no.
When you cut human beings down to size, we're really quite simple creatures; food, shelter, warmth, light, heat and you build it up from there really until you finally go Gucci shoes or whatever it is or whatever your consumer desires are. All those desires are ultimately, they're about gratification.
Everything you need to know about Iron Maiden is onstage.
The celebrity thing, I mean, Lindsay Lohan - what's she for? I look at that and throw my hands up in despair.
When I write with Maiden, then I write only with the guys in Maiden, we don't do songs from outside people.
In the days when Glastonbury was an alternative festival, it was quite interesting. Now it is the most bourgeois thing on the planet ... we'll leave the middle classes to do Glastonbury and the rest of the great unwashed will decamp to Knebworth and drink a lot of beer and have fun.
The mystical poetry of William Blake's artwork also forms the basis for the album cover.
It was like finding some weird tribe in the middle of the jungle and, you know, they all come out and go: "Fear of the Dark. Favorite Album." What?!?
In my naïvety, I thought people who were in rock 'n' roll bands were great artists, and it was a huge shock to the system to realise that they weren't, that they didn't even aspire to be, really. Some of them did, maybe, but some of them, like Samson, were very frightened of the idea.
I guess it was the first time I really thought about leaving. I don't just mean Iron Maiden, I mean quitting music altogether. I just thought, 'Nothing is worth feeling like this for.' I began to feel like I was a piece of machinery, like I was part of the lighting rig.
King in Crimson is actually an alchemical term. King Crimson is a metaphor for Devil or Satan, but at the same time it's also a metaphor for one of the statures in the purification of man and the purification of mankind soul towards union with God and with Infinite, which is the philosophical aim of alchemists.
One of my earliest ventures was when I was nine years old. I realized there was a shortage of pencils at school, so I started Rent-a-Pencil. But I made a fundamental mistake. Everybody stole my pencils.
I'm trying to be as green as I can. As an airline pilot, I have a carbon footprint that's a size 10, so it's pretty hard.
Life on the road can get a little one-dimensional. I didn't want to reach 40 and have to say all I'd done was look out the window of a tour bus and get drunk.
I find that fencing and training give me more stamina and help me deal with the craziness of being on the road so much.
In my teenage years I was put off the idea of a career in flying, because I'd convinced myself that you had to be a boffin with degrees in maths and physics, which were my weakest subjects.
If it all just happens like this for the rest of my life, it's going to be one endless Groundhog Day. I determined that I was not prepared to submit to this regime, so I thought I had to do something about it.
Major labels blow all their money massively and blame it on the band.
A few of these interviews have gone slightly awry, because every now and again there has been the odd conflict of interest between interviews because of the Iron Maiden record, and I am a bit long-winded.
Don't ask me to put up a shelf, but I love engineering.
