The following story is courtesy of Sophie Heawood from Timesonline.co.uk:

Long a byword for uncool, IRON MAIDEN are now our biggest musical earners abroad after THE POLICE and COLDPLAY. With a Brit in the bag and a new film opening, 2009 could be their best year yet

Your average middle-aged Brit, with a bit of time to spare during a trip to Brazil, might think, “Ooh, I'll have a nice cocktail and a stroll along the beach.” Bruce Dickinson, the 50-year-old lead singer of the heavy metal band Iron Maiden, thinks, “Ooh, I've already piloted that jet from Rio de Janeiro to São Paulo this afternoon, and I'm not due on stage to sing my lungs out to 80,000 people just yet, so I'll nip across the road to the go-karting course where Ayrton Senna learnt his trade, do a quick race against a pro, then hurl myself around a stage for two hours, stay up late boozing, go to bed, get up, baffle the international press with talk of combustion engines and Monty Python for two hours, jump in a helicopter to the Grand Prix circuit where Lewis Hamilton won the world championship last year, drive a Formula One car around it at 150mph, fit in another go-karting race after that and then head to a sports centre to get kitted up and compete against a dozen Latin-American fencing champions.”

So this is exactly what he does - all in the space of 24 hours. I know this because I did it with him, and despite being half his age and not doing any of the actual singing, steering or spiky stick action myself, I still felt ready to die somewhere after that first stomach-churning bend at Interlagos. (Dickinson was just grinning and saying something about being “ready for a beer”.) So if I was in the anti-ageing industry I would be investing everything in trying to bottle Bruce Juice.

In fact all of Iron Maiden seem to live in Shangri-La. The group was born in the 1970s but is now finding bigger audiences than ever before for the driving guitars, thunderous drums and fantastical lyrics about Coleridge and Cathars and the number of the Beast. Their solo show in São Paulo is their largest yet - it attracts about half the crowd of an entire Glastonbury Festival.

“Five years ago,” says Steve Harris, bassist and creative heart of the band, “we said we'd start easing back a bit. Just because we thought that by this age we'd be needing to. But we don't need to, or want to - and the demand is there, so we can't really. Our success is bigger than it was in the Eighties! So what can you do? You keep on going.”

Read more here.

(Photo: Mitch Lafon)