A brand-new podcast is coming from Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson, and Oxford University psychologist Dr Kevin Dutton. Psycho Schizo Espresso will be releasing across all podcast platforms on October 31st, with new episodes created every other Tuesday.
Run To The Hills singer, Dickinson, and the best-selling author will speak to a New Testament scholar for the first episode. Author of Imperial Cults And The Apocalypse Of John – Reading Revelation In The Ruins, and professor from the University of Texas, Steven J. Friesen lends his expertise on the Book Of Revelation.
For the first ‘two-part’ episode, the guys will explore the devil’s role in heavy metal, while decoding one of the Bible’s most impenetrable secrets. Finding the hidden meaning behind 666, a number that’s certainly featured prominently in his career, Dickinson will attempt to decode The Number Of The Beast.
Speaking in the below clip, Dickinson explains why bands like Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath explore Satanic imagery in their music. He believes bands revelled the unfolding controversy of depicting satanic images as people were generally Christian in the ‘50s and their reactions was “really dramatic!”.
“At a certain point in time, certainly for people of a certain age, like me, from what you might call a society which was — ’cause I’m 62, so going back to, like, the late ’50s, Europe was broadly Christian; a lot more people went to church back then than do now. Probably four or five times, or even more, people would just turn up at church; they weren’t deserted, as they are now,” Dickinson explains.
“And they would generally believe in things like absolute evil and there being an absolute good, but nobody knew anybody who was absolutely good. But for sure, absolute evil existed somewhere,” Dickinson continues, “’cause otherwise how could anybody be absolutely good. So, you had to have something to measure yourself against.”
Dickinson continues by explaining that heavy metal bands adopted satanic imagery because it shocked people “the same way that the early Hammer movies reintroduced Dracula but with sex. So, they actually had Dracula, blood, fangs, sex, the devil — all this stuff was, like, ‘Oh my God. That is so shocking,’ but it really kind of turns us on in secret.”
Although the franchise was not suitable for children, Dickinson said they would still watch it even though they were forbidden to. Children would use their imagination to create stories, leading to “a whole raft of films” coming out such as “‘The Omen’ and ‘The Exorcist’ and things like that”.
These later films “all had this idea of an actual physical force of evil, and it was quite exciting, really. Not because you wanted to be it, but to know that you could imagine your way into the drama and put that into music and dramatize it.”
Psycho Schizo Espresso will be available from anywhere you stream your podcasts, as will soon be available in Vodcast form on YouTube. Check out Dickinson in the trailer below.
