It’s an honour that puts them in rarefied company – The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Queen and The Rolling Stones are the only other groups anointed by the Royal Mail. Their proudest moment, though, came with this year’s set of Iron Maiden stamps. Their beer, Trooper, recently celebrated its 10th anniversary, with 35 million pints sold, while Dickinson is frothing with excitement about their bespoke brew for Brazil, “a mango-chocolate IPA, which is a huge success there because we use those local ingredients”. The band edition of Monopoly has just been released in America. Every single fan packed into the O2 Arena seems to be wearing an Iron Maiden T-shirt.
It’s ironic, for a group often looked down upon, that Iron Maiden are one of the smartest bands around, having made a fortune through canny and inventive merchandise. Well: we don’t make disposable pop music.” But by the fact that it doesn’t conform to their worldview of what pop music should be, which is: pop music is disposable, darling. “Some people feel almost actively threatened by metal. Yes, they’re nominated for Rock Hall entry again this year, “but I don’t want to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame! Because we’re not dead yet!” Dickinson believes there is lingering snobbery about the merits of their genre. “We don’t give a monkey’s because the people that get us are not the people that run the music business establishment, whatever that is, because that is largely run by people that can’t make a living doing anything else,” says Dickinson, witheringly, when we talk in the band’s hotel the afternoon between their two Prague shows. Yet they’ve never been invited to play Glastonbury (“the most bourgeois thing on the planet” shrugged Dickinson in 2014), have won only one Brit (voted for by the public) and are still not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Almost 50 years, 17 studio albums, 100 million record sales and two-and-half-thousand (give or take) concerts into their career, no other band can match the east-London-formed six-piece for their combination of rich back catalogue, ardent fandom, playful theatricality and savvy business acumen. Prague roars its approval with a fusillade of fist-punching and devil-horn hand-signs. To the great excitement of the 20,000-strong crowd packed into Prague’s O2 Arena, the lithe, hyperactive frontman Bruce Dickinson – at 64, the “baby” of the band – mans a Gatling gun-cum-flamethrower, launching pyrotechnic volleys at the band’s long-serving mascot Eddie, a pistol-wielding, 10ft-tall robo-Samurai, who stomps across the stage, shots sparking off his helmeted head. At the third show of Iron Maiden’s sold-out, 36-date arena tour, the band’s long-haired quartet of 60-something guitarists are hard at it: headbanging, pogoing, playing on their knees, striking ballet poses, and pretend-strafing the audience with their six-and four-string “weapons”, while their 71-year-old drummer is buried in a thicket of cymbals and snares.
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