Bruce Dickinson from Iron Maiden Denies Manufacturing Drones for the U.S. Military

Iron Maiden vocalist Bruce Dickinson has been accused of manufacturing drones for the U.S. military.

I’ll just let that sink in for a few seconds.

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Okay. Ready to proceed? Swell. ‘Cause this may actually make you feel better: the accusation comes from Dorset Eye, a British website you’ve never heard of. According to Alexa, it’s nearly the sixty-one thousandth most visited website in the U.K. (not the entire world), so, yeah, The New York Times it ain’t. Still, if you’re curious as to what they said, here it is:

“While Dickinson has never been overtly political in his music, one could hazard a reasonably educated guess as to where, on the political spectrum, his sympathies might be located. The singer, from an entrepreneurial middle-class family, has extensive business interests and he recently gave an interview to the Ice Live Business Forum explaining some of his views and talking about his background and various ventures. Given all that, it would hardly drop jaws were the ‘aspirational’ musician revealed to be a Tory. While many might find it disgusting that Dickinson could be a supporter of a party engaged in a deliberate and conscious campaign to impoverish a large segment of his band’s traditionally working-class base, he’s as entitled as anyone else to support whomsoever he wishes.

“On a whole other level of inexcusable cynicism and greed, however, is Dickinson’s recent acceptance from the US military of a contract to manufacture ‘lighter-than-air’ Drones. The contract is believed to be worth anything up to $500,000,000, according to Conference Speakers International.“

The link to Conference Speakers International, you may note, no longer works — but the URL suggests that the headline, at least, would have read “Bruce Dickinson, Lead Singer of Iron Maiden, Joins Our Team.” So presumably it was a press release/bio kinda thing. How did the phrase “Dickinson recently accepted $500,000,000 in contracts from the U.S. military to build drones”? I guess we’ll never know.

Still, reps for Iron Maiden have responded to the accusation via the following statement to NME:

“This is a totally inaccurate and malicious piece of writing that seems to have stemmed from an unfortunate mistake in terminology on a South African website that the writer of said blog has since used as a starting point and catalyst to go off on a flight of sheer fantasy.

“Both Bruce Dickinson and Iron Maiden’s manager Rod Smallwood were early investors in, and remain great supporters of, Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV), a company that has nothing whatsoever to do with drones, ‘lighter than air’ or otherwise! The future implementation of HAVs is a likely global trend which has massive positive implications in many areas of life and both Bruce and Rod are proud to be involved with a British company at the cutting edge of this technology. As with many far-sighted technological advances, early adopters and financial supporters tend to be military-based as they have the resources to invest and develop, be that everything from space-travel to medicine. Possible military use of HAVs in future could be for heavy-lifting, transportation or high altitude detection of IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices), or similar, thus saving lives, both military and civilian. Rather than being involved in attacks in the Third World, as this writer has claimed in such an erroneously dramatic and defamatory manner, HAVs are designed to offer much needed assistance to civilians, businesses and governments that would be unavailable otherwise, due to the unique nature of these incredible vehicles.”

Now, let’s be real: we have no idea if Dickinson is being honest or not. Of course I want to take Dickinson at his word, because I’d rather believe that one of the best metal singers of all time isn’t a bastard, but really, I have no idea.

But I do know this: we wouldn’t even be discussing these accusations if Dickinson hadn’t responded. Prior to the NME statement, the metal world was totally unaware of the Dorset Eye piece. So this is a classic case of calling attention to something which probably would have best been ignored.

But now it’s out there. I guess we’ll see if any additional evidence against Dickinson surfaces. Or if we even remember that this happened in six months.

Thanks: Diane S.