Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson has weighed in on heavy metal bands using Satanic imagery.
While appearing on the first episode of the Psycho Schizo Espresso Podcast, Dickinson was asked why the likes of Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath were fond of using such imagery, as per Blabbermouth.
“Cause it’s really dramatic,” he said. “And at a certain point in time, certainly for people of a certain age – like me – from what you might call a society which was – cause I’m 62, so going back to the late ’50s, Europe was broadly Christian – a lot more people went to church back then than do now. Probably four or five times, or even more.
People would just turn up at church – they weren’t deserted, as they are now. And they would generally believe in things like absolute evil and there being an absolute good, but nobody knew anybody who was absolutely good.
But for sure, absolute evil existed somewhere ’cause otherwise how could anybody be absolutely good. So you had to have something to measure yourself against.”
Dickinson continued by comparing what heavy metal bands did to the use of similar imagery in the movies. “What heavy metal bands did by adopting imagery was they shocked people,” he explained. “Because in the same way that the early Hammer movies reintroduced Dracula but with sex.
So they actually had Dracula, blood, fangs, sex, the devil – all this stuff was like, ‘Oh my God. That is so shocking,’ but it really kind of turns us on in secret.
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And, of course, as kids, you’d be forbidden to watch it, and, of course, it would be interesting, and you’d watch it. And then you’d just use your imagination to create stories.
And then a whole raft of films came out – The Omen and The Exorcist and things like that – that all had this idea of an actual physical force of evil.
And it was quite exciting, really – not because you wanted to be it, but to know that you could imagine your way into the drama and put that into music and dramatize it.”
Perhaps Dickinson heard in the news about the recent case of a school teacher in the U.S. who almost lost her job due to her love of Iron Maiden. She proudly displayed their Satanic imagery which led to an appeal by some parents to have her removed – thankfully their appeal failed and she retained her job.
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Check out Bruce Dickinson discussing Satanic imagery below:
