IRON MAIDEN singer Bruce Dickinson has disputed the stereotype that heavy metal music appeals mostly to alienated working-class males, saying that he doesn’t think “you can allocate any style of music to a particular class.”
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During a brand new interview with The Irish Times focusing on his recently released autobiography, “What Does This Button Do?”, Bruce spoke about the fact that he went to Oundle, a prestigious English boarding school. When the interviewer pointed out to Dickinson that boarding schools are regarded in the U.K. as a very middle-class thing while heavy metal is thought of predominantly as a working-class genre, the singer responded: “I’m not too sure about that. I’m not sure you can allocate any style of music to a particular class. You would imagine that punk was terribly working class, but it was actually quite full of quite posh people at the top end of a lot of punk bands. At the top of a lot of punk bands were a bunch of middle-class or aristocratic anarchists. It had also had its fair share of working-class people as well.
“I’m not one to start class warfare in music,” he continued. “Class warfare is one thing that I would be extremely eager to avoid in any way shape or form because it is bollocks. People are people. Where they come from and their backgrounds are very varied. Money shouldn’t or doesn’t enter into it unless people want it to.”
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In his book, Dickinson wrote about being bullied and being “pretty fucking angry” in his time at Oundle.
Asked what it was about his son’s boarding school that he didn’t like, Bruce said: “It was all the usual suspects. Actually, he did go to a semi-boarding school subsequent to that, a few years later. It was actually quite reasonable. One of the big things that was reasonable about it was that it was 50:50 (boys: girls) and that makes a huge difference to the dynamic. Some people handle it differently. Some people crack up. It’s a bit like post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). You are in effect in a hostage situation or in jail. It’s like a prisoner of war camp for adolescents. [Laughs]”