BALLS TO THE WALL

BRUCE DICKINSON

Balls To Picasso

Bruce Dickinson wasn’t contemplating becoming a full-time solo artist when he began work on Balls To Picasso in 1992, though by the time of the album’s troubled completion two years later, Iron Maiden’s swashbuckling lead singer knew that he had no alternative but to leave the band.

“I’d taken [my time with] Maiden as far as I could without having some mighty confrontation,” he told Hammer at the time. “You start invoking parallels about leading horses to water, and you cannot expect the whole band to abandon everything and do something completely different.”

By 1994, Bruce had recorded the album three times, each attempt distancing him further from Maiden’s well-defined, foot-on-the-monitor territory. A first effort, retaining Chris Tsangarides (who’d worked with Bruce on his 1990 solo debut, ) and using London hard rockers Skin as his backing band was quickly scrapped for being nowhere near radical deeper, darker and more progressive-sounding than anything to that point.