Bruce Dickinson - What Does This Button Do?

‘There’s nothing I can do to save you,’ he told me. This was a surprise to me. I never thought of him as the messiah, and I certainly didn’t now.

I was called to see the headmaster: the cosmologist, the wielder of the birch, the flogger of the minor transgressors – the king rat. I put on my overcoat and took a contemplative slow walk through the dark November fog. I would be out, but I would not be broken. After all the bullying, the fencing, the drama, the music, this was it – the showdown. Admitted to the warm head-magisterial study, I sat down in front of Mr B.M.W. His feet were crossed over – very big feet , I thought fleetingly. He spoke, almost absentmindedly: ‘This is not the kind of behaviour we tolerate in a civilised establishment. Therefore I must ask you to leave the school.’

Therefore? You have to be kidding me. In what century, from what misanthropic ivory tower, did this creature originate? The hypocrisy, the twisted regime, the cover-ups, the maintenance of good order over all principles of humanity – therefore fuck you. But I didn’t say any of that. I smiled and looked him in the eye and thought, You have eaten my piss.

‘Any preference as to when you would like me to go? Next week? End of term?’ I said.

‘Tomorrow morning,’ he shot back.

‘Oh, that’s clear. Is that it?’

‘You may go.’

I closed the door gently, with a satisfying click. The cold, damp air felt good. I was out. I was on my own. I had taken a pot-shot at the system and, by God, I think I winged the blighter.

Winter, leading into spring and summer and culminating in my eighteenth birthday, was a period of cleansing and essentially re-entering the human race. I was allocated a place at King Edward VII School in Sheffield. It was an ex-grammar school, now a comprehensive, but with a good academic reputation. It was mixed, girls and boys, and – shock-horror – it was friendly. I waited for the hierarchy to become clear, for the punishment beatings, but nothing of that sort went on. I wondered about what might have been, had I not been packed off to boarding school.

There was little point in attending the school, except for the legal requirement to do so, because in a few months I would have to sit my exams, and unfortunately the exam board in Sheffield was radically different from the one in Oundle. I spent lots of time in the library, mugging up on my Norse mythology rather than studying.

I joined the Territorial Army as a private. My number was 2440525 and the sergeant said that I was too clever to be a private, and asked why I didn’t wait to become an officer at university. I told him I just wanted to get on with it, so he issued me with kit and that was that.

Our unit – D Company, Yorkshire Volunteers – was, in theory, on 24-hour call in the event of a war. We would be sent direct to the front, with mortars and rocket-propelled anti-tank weapons, one of which was given the surprisingly cute name of the ‘wombat.’ Our life expectancy in combat, I was informed, was 1 minute and 45 seconds.

I got drunk with a lot of steelworkers, dug holes in inhospitable pieces of Northumbria and got to carry a big belt-fed general-purpose machine gun, which used a lot of bullets, all of them blanks.

Otherwise, I shovelled shit on the farm, of which there was a great deal, and drove tractors and dump trucks, laid concrete and constructed fences. I converted my anger into the physical, and I felt a relief from the rage that had burned continually at boarding school.

Then, one English class, one fateful lunchtime, I heard mutterings from the back: ‘We don’t have a singer for rehearsals tonight.’

I turned round, and suddenly recognised my drumming buddy Paul Bray. He had two very cool dudes who already looked like seasoned rock professionals flanking him.

‘Er, hi …’ I began nervously. ‘I sing a bit.’

They looked me up and down. I was a bit pudgy, with an awful short haircut and terrible trousers.

‘Brilliant. See you at six o’clock.’

It would be nine months till I was due to start at university. Time to listen to Radio Caroline under the bed, draw fantasy stage sets and rehearse in my mate’s garage on a Tuesday evening. Limbo ain’t a bad place to be.

Our band had a real drum kit and two guitars, and the bass player had his own gear, a self-contained amp and speaker. The rest of us shared one Vox AC30. Two guitars plugged in plus the new vocalist: me.

My microphone had been snipped off the side of a portable cassette recorder and spliced via Sellotape onto a longer cable and thus into the Vox combo. It sounded truly awful, but the band were light years ahead of anything I had experienced up to then. They had learnt half of the album Argus by Wishbone Ash, plus ‘All Right Now’ by Free and the inevitable ‘Smoke on the Water’.

After one song and letting rip my Ian Gillan shriek a few times, they all nodded sagely: ‘You are the new singer.’

I asked if they had a name. ‘Paradox,’ came the reply. I thought it was a rubbish name.

I regarded home in Sheffield as being a kind of holding pattern. I didn’t feel as if I belonged, but then it wasn’t an unpleasant existence. It just seemed as if I was walking on eggshells unless I was outside digging holes or shovelling horseshit.

The local pub was a 20-minute walk, which was arduous in deep snow, and on the way was the old German prisoner-of-war camp, complete with half-demolished prison huts. Beyond that, down a steep hill, was the bus stop and, above it, looming Bram Stokerish in the moonlight, the Fulwood isolation hospital.

On two occasions, walking back from the bus stop in the darkness and wind, I met people wandering in the road, confused. I had to wait until I could flag down a rare passing car to get them to safety. I suspect now that they might have had Alzheimer’s. They would almost certainly have died of exposure, left to their own devices. In the seventies, people were simply ‘loopy’ and that was that.

Having done my good deed for the day, fate returned the favour. We actually had a gig. We debuted at the local youth club, with at least four people in front of the stage and the rest pinned against the wall in sheer terror as we hacked our way through ‘Smoke on the Water’. I think they had the Four Tops more in mind.

I had spent 15 quid on a half-decent mic, a Shure Unidyne B, which had a ridiculous stand that could lose its legs and vertical integrity suddenly and for no obvious reason. I had a tambourine, and had saved up for a very old pair of Vox 4 × 10-inch speaker columns. Signing on for the Summer, my dole cheque appeared in the post and I had enough to buy a 60-watt Carlsbro guitar amp from a secondhand store. Now we were all equipped, but with no gigs to go to.

I turned salesman. I went out and door-stepped publicans who had gigs. I scoured the ads in the local paper for bands and then went through the phone book to find the number of the pub where they were playing. I bullshitted for England, but there was no evading the awful truth that came with the question: ‘Do you have a demo tape?’

Of course we didn’t. I forget how we made one in the end, but anyway, it was awful. I think we just put a cassette recorder at one end of the garage and made a racket.

Somehow, we got a booking at a pub called the Broadfield, and we may even have done a second gig. We were paid three quid, as well as one dog-eared hamburger and a bottle of Newcastle Brown apiece, and had to sign a receipt.

Next was a council-sponsored Afternoon in the Park in Weston Park, by the university and just up the road from the Royal Hallamshire Hospital. A local DJ from Radio Sheffield turned up, but he’d been in the pub all afternoon and was quite possibly on acid.