Does fishing act as a bit of an escape from the busy, intense world of music?
“Absolutely. I mean, the perfect example would be when we did the Powerslave tour [Maiden’s famously intense World Slavery Tour from 1984-5]. That was 12 months of back-to-back American tours, European tours, Japan, Southern Hemisphere – we did everywhere. And we were burnt out, there was no doubt about it. I just took off fishing for about six weeks; I went up to Canada with my girlfriend, now my wife, and just chilled out. I went up to the mountains and fished for trout, and it restored my energy again. That’s a good example of it – you can just chill out and get away from the madness, which I love most of the time, but you know, it’s healthy, mentally, just to get away. And you can sort your perspective on life out on the riverbank. You can just meditate. Billy Connelly described it as ‘meditation with a punchline’, which I really like. You’re sat there, completely absorbed, and if you get a fish it’s a bonus, almost.”
What first drew you to fishing as a lad?
“My dad was a keen fisherman. He worked hard every day, Sunday was his day off, and he’d go fishing. It was like a religion. He’d wake me up at five in the morning and say, ‘Come on, son,’ and we’d go fishing. Me him and my brother would go down the local canal, The Gasworks Stretch in East London, which is as grim as it sounds. I’d sit there and catch nothing, and my dad would sit there and catch these beautiful roach. I couldn’t believe these fish existed in these harsh surroundings. I was fascinated, I was hooked from day one.”
How did it snowball into a big thing for you?
“In my mid-teens I started going on my own, and then I discovered music when I heard Deep Purple. My older sister had one of their albums, and I’d never heard anything like it, and I was hooked on that. I gave up other things like football and fishing to pursue the dream of being a musician. I didn’t get back into it, ironically, until I joined Iron Maiden. Clive Burr, the drummer, who’s no longer with us, sadly, he was a keen angler. He hadn’t been for a while and we started talking about it and started going again. Also, after the first rehearsal we had, Steve Harris said, ‘Come on, let’s go for a jog’. I was like, ‘Really?’ But we did that, and then started playing football. So it was ironic that those things I’d given up I started doing again when I joined the band.”