Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson has revealed he underwent a hip replacement surgery late last year.
As Blabbermouth reports, Dickinson told Download Festival host Kylie Olsson he recently got “five and a half inches of titanium hammered into [his] leg”, and described the most recent Iron Maiden tour as “really quite painful”.
“I put it down to the fact that during the last tour, just shortly before the last tour, I also broke my Achilles as well — my Achilles tendon snapped… It’s horrible. That was two years ago, basically. So I got that stitched back together and went out on tour three and a half months later. I couldn’t actually walk properly or run. So I modified what I did on stage, and nobody figured it out. I was amazed,” Dickinson explained.
“I did the whole tour — South America, the whole lot — and I ran around. But my hip was giving me so much shit. And I put it down to the fact that people were telling me, ‘You’re compensating for the other leg,’ and everything else, and I thought, ‘Oh, yeah. That’s it, then.'”
Dickinson went on to say that upon return, he began exercise and training again – he has been a competitive fencer for decades – as strict coronavirus lockdowns began in Paris, where the singer currently lives.
“So then I get back and I start training again seriously — doing my fencing, doing some competitions — and it’s just seizing up… it was giving me so much shit.”
After going to see a doctor for the pain, Dickinson was informed he had osteoarthritis of the hip.
“I was getting addicted to Ibuprofen and all the rest of it, and it pissed me off so much. I was just, like, ‘Look, it’s not gonna get any better, is it?’ And he went, ‘No.’ So I said, ‘It’s October. When the safety car comes out, Hamilton goes in for fresh tires. So let’s do it now in October, because I might have a tour next year.’ Little did I know. But being an eternal optimist, it was the best thing I’ve done.
“So now, with my new hip, I’m back to fencing again. It’s absolutely incredible. I’ve been doing physio and doing weights that I haven’t done since I was 16 or 17 years old. I’m squatting a hundred kilos. It’s mental what your body can do.”
Dickinson is headed back out on tour again later this year – for a series of spoken word dates across the UK, kicking off in August. The shows will see Dickinson taking his audiences through “a humorous and often satirical look at the world from his own very personal perspective”, and include a Q&A session.
It will be a while before Dickinson is back in metal frontman mode, however. Last month, Iron Maiden were forced to reschedule the European dates of their ‘Legacy Of The Beast’ tour to 2022.
The post Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson has undergone a hip replacement appeared first on NME.
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