Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson recently spoke with Australia's News.com about the band's new album, The Book Of Souls, as well as his careers as a singer and airplane pilot. An excerpt from the interview is available below:

The band start touring The Book of Souls in February, a jaunt that will include their first shows in China and El Salvador. They’ll return to Australia in May. At the Paris listening party, fans wonder out loud how the band will accommodate the lengthy new songs when touring a 92 minute double album.

Dickinson says they’re in the midst of trying to work out those logistics themselves, but there’ll be one absentee.

“Three songs off the new album is not enough. There’ll maybe be four or five. But we won’t be playing 'Empire Of The Clouds'. It’s too ambitious and it’d dominate the set too much. That makes life a little bit easier. Some of the classics that we haven’t played for a couple of tours, we can bring some of those back. There’s a few songs people have been demanding for a couple of years, we might make a few people happy, they might get what they want. But you can’t do all of the tunes. Some songs we’ve been playing repeatedly over the past few tours so we can put those ones into mothballs for a while, make way for some other ones. We haven’t done the setlist in stone yet, we’ll put that out closer to the tour.”

Dickinson says the band take note of online feedback from fans.

“You get a feel of what the fans what, but you also have to go with what feels right for us and the effect we want to create as well. It’s important we’re not just a karaoke band. With the reaction to the new album, the excitement over it, and the last few albums, we’ve pretty much dismissed the idea of Iron Maiden being a nostalgia band; it’s just not the case.”

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According to Billboard, Iron Maiden have achieved their best sales week in the US since Nielsen Music started tracking sales in 1991. The Book of Souls (75,000 units) debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard 200, equalling their highest rank ever, first achieved in 2010 with The Final Frontier’s debut and peak at No. 4.

Billboard adds that The Book Of Souls is the sixth straight Iron Maiden studio album to show debut week sales growth. Their steady climb started with 1998’s Virtual XI (10,000 sales debut, up from the 6,000 of 1995’s X Factor) and then continued on with 2000’s Brave New World (38,000), 2003’s Dance of Death (40,000), 2006’s A Matter of Life and Death (56,000), 2010’s The Final Frontier (63,000) and now its new album.

The Book Of Souls landed straight in at #1 in the UK with combined sales of just over 60,000. The Book Of Souls also topped the UK's Official Vinyl Albums Chart.