Bruce Dickinson in 2018. "Personally, I think people are just very badly advised if they don't go and get themselves double jabbed as quickly as possible," the Iron Maiden frontman says.
Horst Galuschka/picture-alliance/AP ImagesLast week, Bruce Dickinson abruptly postponed the last two dates of his U.K. spoken-word tour because a member of his immediate household had tested positive for Covid-19. So the Iron Maiden frontman returned home to quarantine for 10 days, per government guidelines. For the first few days, he mostly felt bored — until he started feeling like he was getting a cold.
About three days ago, Dickinson, who is double-vaccinated, took a lateral-flow Covid test, and it came back positive. “I thought, ‘Oh well, shit,’ ” he tells Rolling Stone, sounding upbeat over Zoom. “I was kind of sneezing a bit. For a couple of days, I felt a bit groggy, kind of like the flu, and that was it. And I’m 63 years old. I’ve pretty much got no doubt that had I not had the vaccine, I could be in serious trouble.”
Dickinson has since rescheduled the dates he missed for October and he’s using his downtime to accommodate interviews about Iron Maiden’s upcoming double album, Senjutsu. (Rolling Stone will run the rest of its in-depth conversation with Dickinson about the record closer to its September 3rd release.)
The band will kick off a European tour next June, and Dickinson says he’s ready to get back in front of audiences. Although he personally doesn’t believe that fans attending shows should be required to get vaccinated — “It is a personal choice,” he says — he hopes they will be. “Personally, I think people are just very badly advised if they don’t go and get themselves double jabbed as quickly as possible, not for the reasons of going into concerts, but for their own health,” he says.
“Having said that, even if you’ve had a double jab, you can still get Covid, and therefore you can spread it to other people who might not have been vaccinated and they might get very sick and die,” he continues. “Now you cannot legislate against mortality. There are many things in this world that kill people and they’re not illegal but are unfortunate. Cancer kills a lot of people. Heart attacks kill a lot of people. Obesity kills a lot of people. Malaria kills a shitload of people every year. … So at some point, we have to just go, ‘We’re probably going to have to live with this. And if we’re going to live with it, then you have your vaccination.’ “
Dickinson says he has refused the flu shot in the past but, in his opinion, Covid is different because it’s more transmissible and could be deadly to those who aren’t vaccinated. He says “the jury’s out” on requiring Covid vaccine passports for concerts. While he sees wearing masks and getting vaccinated as “a personal choice” that shouldn’t be government-regulated, he adds that it’s “a responsible choice” and it comes down to common sense.
As for his own breakthrough case, he believes it could have been much worse if he were unvaccinated. “I thought I had a cold and these lateral-flow tests came back negative, negative, negative, and suddenly like, ‘Oh, it’s not a cold,’ ” he says. “So after a vaccine, that’s the extent of the discomfort. The biggest issue is just stay indoors so you don’t go and pass it on to somebody else who might go and pass it on to somebody who actually is vulnerable.”
And when the time comes for the singer, who’s known for his athletic onstage leaps, to get back on the road, he’ll be ready. “I famously snapped my Achilles just before recording the album,” he says, referring back to the band’s 2019 sessions. “So that was a question of doing the album in a boot and then trying to get my ass together to do rehab and touring three months later. But we managed that and then they put a new hip in me on the other side in October, which was great. The surgeon was like, ‘Yeah, I’ve seen what you do onstage. You’re going to be able to do that now better than you did before.’ Before it was giving me a lot of pain. And the [physical therapist] actually set up fake monitors in the gym so that I could jump on and off and bounce around and really literally leap off the walls. I was impressed.”
Suki Waterhouse has spoken candidly about how she found herself crying constantly after the birth of her daughter.
The singer and actress reflected on her experience as a mother more than two years after she and her partner, actor Robert Pattinson, welcomed their baby girl in March 2024.
During an interview with The Standard published on Thursday, Suki explained that motherhood has completely shifted her outlook on life.
"I think it's made me marvel at our humanness. It's so funny, even just your kid getting a fever, watching a little body recover from that, it's brought me down to what it is to be alive and I really love that," she said. "It feels very survivalist and medieval in a way, especially birth, birth is medieval."
The Daisy Jones & The Six actress, 34, shared that she was caught off guard by just how exposed and emotional she felt after giving birth to her daughter.
"I'm almost two and a half years in now, but when she was first born, I remember thinking that I can't believe everybody does this and I can't believe how vulnerable I feel," she told the publication. "I was crying all the time."
Suki continued, "It makes me cry now thinking about it. It was just... shocking."
The Notting Hill singer also admitted that she has never considered herself someone who cries easily, making those emotions all the more surprising.
"It's so f**king weird! I'm not a cryer! I'm so not an emotional person, I'm such a Capricorn. But being a mum just fed me up in such a sweet way," she stated. "It just absolutely broke open my heart, and I'm just madly in love and, despite my crying right now, I enjoy it so much and I'm so taken by my daughter and so in love with doing it with my partner and I just feel the preciousness of it very much."
Suki and Twilight actor Robert, 40, have been in a relationship since 2018 and announced they were expecting their first child together toward the end of 2023.
The pair have largely kept their romance away from the spotlight and have yet to publicly share the name of their daughter.
