IF you told me that a heavy-metal singer was sitting in the lobby of the Holiday Inn in Nicosia, it would only take about two seconds to identify Paul Di’Anno as that heavy-metal singer. He couldn’t be anything else – well, maybe a nightclub bouncer – with his thick-set face, bushy goatee, abundant earrings and eyebrow-rings, black baseball cap matched with black T-shirt and jeans, and half-exposed tattoos over most of his body. Besides, just in case I needed any more clues, the journalist before me – having wound up his interview – has just brought out a dog-eared pile of old Iron Maiden LPs and is proffering them shyly to be autographed, like a supplicant offering tribute to a pagan god.
Paul was the first lead singer with Iron Maiden (one of the biggest heavy-metal bands of all time), singing vocals on their first two albums. He still does some Maiden songs when he performs, and indeed the previous night’s Cyprus concert – at Kallipoleos 4 in Nicosia, organised by local label Pitch Black Records – was one of the rare occasions when the set was nothing but Maiden songs; but he left the band in 1981, and he’s done a lot of living since then. He’s been in jail, though he doesn’t like to talk about it. He’s been married five times (twice to the same woman) and has six kids scattered over three countries – Britain, Brazil and the US – ranging in ages from six to 24. He’s amassed four houses and five Harley-Davidsons (bikes are one of his passions, second only to football). He’s written an autobiography, titled simply The Beast. Above all he’s been touring, endlessly touring: 250 dates a year, maybe more.
His energy is staggering. In the first place, he’s 51, an age when most men are settling down to early nights in front of the telly. In the second place, the current world tour – The Beast Is Back Tour! – has been going since October 2008, taking in 87 countries and around 600 shows. In the third place, he’s been fighting jet-lag, sleeping between two and five hours a night. In the fourth place, he’s been doing the whole thing with a smashed-up knee (more later), which is why there’s a cane perched against his chair in the Holiday Inn.
More than once, he says he’s exhausted. He’s flying to England in a few hours for a much-needed break at his home in Wiltshire – he only stays there a couple of times a year; he’s lived in Brazil since the early 00s – and says he’s looking forward to it. Yet he talks unstoppably, his accent a kind of mellowed cockney – the belligerent vowels softened by years on the road – full of jokes and four-letter words but also alert and articulate; at one point, talking of religion, he says people shouldn’t “infringe” on others with their beliefs, then corrects himself and changes it to “impinge”. (I know professional writers who wouldn’t pick up on that nuance, let alone heavy-metal singers on five hours’ sleep.) He looks ready to play another show right now, if he had to.
“I defy anyone to do my touring schedule,” asserts Paul proudly, “’cause most bands go out on a world tour maybe once every three to four years, and their world tour is three months. You’re havin’ a laugh! You’re havin’ a laugh, mate.” He has little patience with prima-donna rock stars. “If you want to play, and you’re a musician, get on with it. F***in’ do it, you know? Simple as that.”
Of course, touring all the time has its downside. Why, for instance, did his many marriages fail? “I’m never home,” he admits with a rueful chuckle. “Or else you get accused of being with some other woman, when you never did”. That’s what happened with his fifth wife, a Brazilian who accused him (wrongly, he insists) of sleeping around. They parted on bad terms five years ago, though he still sounds smitten; it’s going to be a long time before he finds anyone who’ll “come anywhere close” to taking her place, he muses. “Those Latin girls,” he adds sadly, shaking his head; “You’ve got to be careful…”
Fortunately, the judge gave them joint custody of the couple’s two daughters (aged six and eight) – and Paul is determined not to “screw up” with his youngest kids, making sure he calls or texts them every day. He’s even taken them on tour with him a couple of times (his 17-year-old niece comes over from Buenos Aires to babysit), though of course they’re too young for life on the road. “The thing is, I miss my children,” he sighs. He sounds like a doting father – maybe because his own childhood was so lacking in comfort and affection.
He was born in East London in 1958, the son of Italian immigrants. “Ghetto area,” he confirms brusquely; “No money, no jobs, no nothing. Very tough, very hard.” What did his dad do? “My dad committed suicide!” he replies, laughing mirthlessly. “Three months before I was even born.” His mum ran a café, having got remarried; Paul grew up in England and Italy, shunted back and forth between mother and grandparents. What was it like in East London? “Tough, very tough. A lot of racism around, people resenting the influx of Pakistanis and black people coming over at the time – to do jobs which English people didn’t want to do, but they still resented it.”
He shrugs, having long since come to terms with those early years. “It was good but it was weird,” he says, “because there were only three Italian-named kids in school, and we used to get the shit kicked out of us when we was young!” He laughs again. “But it’s a learning curve. You grow up tough.” Aged 11, he was already doing three jobs, delivering milk and papers then working in a market stall before trekking off to school, already exhausted (“I’ve been tired all my life”). Aged 14, he was also working two nights a week after school, learning the trade at a local butcher’s. Where did he think he was going to end up? “Probably in prison.”
He came of age in the late 70s, “in the punk era – and there was no work, no jobs, nothing”. There were only three ways out of the ghetto: football, gangs and music. Paul was in gangs from about 10 years old (many of his tattoos are gang-related), though that’s another thing he doesn’t like to talk about. Then he turned to music, joining Iron Maiden at the age of 20 – “and then, all of a sudden, things just happened.”
Cue the rock’n roll lifestyle, shifting his life from one extreme to another. “You go nuts,” he admits. Meaning what? What did he do? “What does everyone do? Alcohol, drugs and f***ing around, and buying things you don’t really need… But you can only go nuts for so long.”
He’s had ups and downs. On the one hand, much of his money has been spent taking care of family – his mum, his nonna in Italy and of course his kids (“They’re all set for life now”). He’d like to see every child in the world helped out of poverty, he adds sentimentally, and he’s “trying to get people involved in UNICEF in little ways”. On the other hand, he’s made big mistakes – and unwittingly fulfilled his childhood prophecy by ending up in prison (he won’t say what for) in the US.
What was that like? “Tough,” he confirms. Other inmates knew who he was, making him a target, but he refused to be fazed. “I ain’t no sucker, put it that way,” he says. “The thing is to make your statement as soon as you get there – so I walked in there, and there’s about 100 people in the f***in’ prison and only about 20 beds. I got out there, I’m on a bunk and this big black dude comes up and says: ‘That’s mine’. I say: ‘Who says so?’. He’s like: ‘I do’. I said: ‘Well, f*** you’.”
So what happened? “Nothing!” he replies, and laughs uproariously. “It’s all that,” he adds, flapping his hand to mean ‘It’s all talk’ – though of course “I was prepared to fight for it. You have to – if you don’t then you’ll be used as a target all the time. Growing up where I grew up, I’m a tough f***er. I can take care of myself.”
You only have to look at Paul Di’Anno to know that’s true – and you also have to wonder where he’d be today, if music hadn’t offered a way out. He can’t be easy to live with (five broken marriages attest to that), nor do childhood scars ever heal completely. His late father was apparently a Muslim – and Paul himself apparently converted to Islam for a while, as if to try and bond with him from beyond the grave (Wikipedia links to an interview he gave to an Egyptian paper in 2006, discussing his conversion), but it sounds like that didn’t work out. He avoids the question during our interview, and talks scathingly of Muslim extremists in Britain “biting the hand that feeds them”. Indeed, he has ‘666’ tattooed on the back of his head, the better to express his distaste for all religion; “I’m making a statement!” he laughs. “It used to say ‘God = F***er’ underneath, but I tattooed over that ’cause it was a bit too extreme”.
Maybe that’s why he tours so obsessively – not just because he loves music, but because he knows how important music’s been to his well-being; one could even say his relationship with music is the most stable relationship he’s ever had. His fans are more than fans, he enthuses; “They’re more like friends”. After a show he’ll spend hours with them, signing autographs and just hanging out. Fans invite him to their weddings. They feel free to criticise his singing. Some even “come round to the house on weekends”, just to say hello. Paul’s relationship with his fans is almost physical – in fact, it is physical, because it’s the fans who are responsible for his dodgy knee, having mobbed him onstage out of sheer enthusiasm first in Finland, then in Sao Paulo. “They just jumped the stage, and smashed my knee to pieces,” he explains with a touch of pride. Now he’s going to need a prosthetic knee, but it doesn’t matter: “They’re great.”
Does he ever wake up, look around and feel – to quote Roger Murtaugh – that he’s getting too old for this shit? Paul looks affronted: “F***in’ hell, I’m nowhere near Mick Jagger, he’s got about 20 years on me!” But of course it’s something he thinks about. “I’ll know when the time is right,” he says simply. “When it’s time to go”. Till then, Paul Di’Anno keeps on playing – whether the songs are his own or Iron Maiden’s – using the music to fuel his inexhaustible energy. “I don’t really play much for money anymore,” he admits. “I’m just doing it because I like to play.”
“Being in the music industry is great,” he adds wryly, “but only for two hours every night. The rest of it is 22 hours of bullshit – hanging around at airports and hotels and stuff like that. The only good part of the day is getting up onstage.” He nods, his bruiser’s face caught in a beatific smile. “That makes it all worthwhile.”
