MTV: You talked about the band's expectations, and fans' expectations are cropping up online. People who haven't heard the album are already talking about what they want it to be. Do you ever visit those sites?
Dickinson: Yeah, I visit the sites, but only after we've done it. I'm not going to allow myself to be influenced [by them]. This is not politics. This is not where you get people saying, "Hey, Picasso, stop right there. Should it be an up stroke, down stroke, or a left? Take a vote." You can take this whole bullsh** thing too far.
MTV: You hooked up with Dean Karr to shoot a video for "The Wicker Man." What was that experience like?
Dickinson: Working with Dean was great. The only problems we had were courtesy of the Los Angeles weather, which really did us absolutely no favors at all. As I recall, we filmed it in a gravel pit in Burbank at night. It was a night shoot, which meant sundown was at 6:30, and we shot until dawn the next morning for two nights running. The first night I was actually up for 25 hours straight, because I got up fairly early that day. By the time we started shooting, I'd been up for 12 hours, and by the time we finished I was, like, wasted, and it was three Celsius, which is cold. There was hail, rain, and freezing rain and howling winds all night long on and off.
Steve got food poisoning from the catering, and we had a bunch of extras who actually were soaked hanging out under little tents. You had the compulsory Los Angeles union break at midnight, when all shooting stopped for three hours. We actually lost several shots that were going to be in the video because we just ran out of time. We had to burn the Wicker Man that day because the fire permit that they'd gotten only lasted for that day. So of course, it was chucking it down with rain when they went to burn the Wicker Man. That was a day of adversity.MTV: Not exactly a glamorous shoot.
Dickinson: Ha! Yeah, really. But it got made, and I'll tell you what, we did loads of band performance, and the band looked great. We could have done with a few more of the naked nymphs, because they were great. They stood around naked the whole night in all this stuff. Wow. They were underpaid. [RealVideo]
Working with Rob Halford and pondering onstage human sacrifice... NEXT!
