TeamRock.com recently caught up with Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson to pick his brain for their ongoing Thinking Out Loud feature. An excerpt from Dickison's trip down memory lane is available below.

- “We were all fit as trouts at the end of the World Slavery Tour, running around, skinny as rakes. I think we’d all gone a bit barking mad. I was going stir crazy. Thirteen months on the road was not conducive to the state of my mental health!”

- “I don't take back any of my fashion statements however awful. I never regret anything because it's all part of life's rich tapestry. And in any case you can always hold it up to scare your children later.”

- “It’s a very bizarre story, how I ended up writing 'Empire Of The Clouds'. Basically, I won a piano in a raffle. It was one of these charity dinners, hosted by Jamie Oliver. There were various auctions where you could win things that were utterly useless to me, like free facial pampering session at some place in the Cotswolds. But there was also a little portable electric piano up for grabs – signed, it must be said, by Jamie Cullum! I thought, I wouldn’t mind having a piano at home to muck about on. And in the end I won it – I am to the piano what two fingers are to typing.”

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In a report published by Energy Voice, Dickinson - who is also a professional pilot and a successful businessman - made comparisons between the downturn of the oil industry with the decline of the music industry.

Dickinson said record companies tried to "arrest their whole consumer base. People did not want to be thieves − they were just enthusiastic about bands and could not believe their luck.”

Not for the first time, oil and gas companies are staring down the barrel due to low crude prices. For them, the challenge is to protect their talented workforces while finding new ways of using their assets.

Dickinson: "It happened to the music industry 10 to 15 years ago. The oil industry is like the record industry. It needs to look at what it’s doing. It’s an energy supplier. When record labels got turned over by digital it did not mean people stopped wanting music. It just meant people did not want to pay for records any more. They still pay for music, only in different ways. They buy the t-shirt, the concert ticket, the merchandise, but the music itself they get pretty much for free. For the oil industry, people still need energy, but they will use it and get it in different ways. If the oil industry only concentrates on digging stuff out of the ground it will go the way of the dinosaurs.”

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