“After scrapping two albums I went to the accountant to find out how many pennies were left in the piggy bank. The answer was not many”: How Bruce Dickinson gambled everything on his second solo album – and ended up leaving Iron Maiden because of it

Bruce Dickinson posing for a photograph in 1994.

Bruce Dickinson wasn’t contemplating becoming a full-time solo artist when he began work on his second solo album Balls To Picasso in 1992, though by the time of its 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,” Bruce 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.”