Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson had a conversation with Triple M radio station, where he was asked how he and his bandmates have been able to incorporate a lot of new material into their setlist, without much pushback from the fans:
“Well, yeah, that’s because they, that’s because, strangely, they actually like the music. Which is bizarre, isn’t it? I know that’s a really weird concept now, where people actually go to a show to listen to the music. But it’s because we’re not fashion icons or anything else like that. We’ve always been, how can I put it?
”We’re not like Michelin star chef-type grub; we’re meat and potatoes. And it’s straightforward, what people come to see is. I mean, the songs are not necessarily straightforward, but the attitude is. And we still play all the songs in the original key; we don’t drop, down tune, and stuff like that. We still play everything too fast, because we’re all excited.
”We’ve never played to click tracks or like time code and everything else now, ’cause I see a lot of bands now, and I’m going, ‘Hang on a minute. Hey, you sang that without moving your lips.’ So there’s all this backing vocals being flown in left, right, and center and everything. But we don’t do any of that. Everything is analog and real.
”So we are kind of old school in that respect. But I think that pays dividends ’cause the audience understands that reality is increasingly kind of rare now.”