"What's Number One at the moment? I couldn't tell you. It's meaningless. All I care about is what Iron Maiden are doing next week." Steve Harris, Bruce Dickinson and Adrian Smith look back on Iron Maiden's 50-year ride

Bruce Dickinson onstage.

The first time Bruce Dickinson sang on stage with Iron Maiden, he kept his eyes shut for the first half of the set. “I don’t think I opened them until we did Killers,” he says today.

The band endured an arduous three-day bus journey before that show, on October 26, 1981, at Palasport in Bologna. “When we got to Italy, it was a bit dodgy – people being threatened with hand grenades and all that,” understates the singer. “None of which bothered me in the slightest, because the main event was my big moment with Maiden.”