Ronnie James Dio’s opinion on Bruce Dickinson and Iron Maiden

Nicknamed the “air-raid siren,” Bruce Dickinson has one of the most powerful voices in the history of Heavy Metal. When he joined Iron Maiden in the early 80s, he elevated the band to a new level of success and expanded their songwriting possibilities, becoming a fundamental part of their rise to prominence as one of the biggest bands in the world.

He remains a major influence on Metal artists worldwide and over the years many renowned singers who preceded him have shared their opinions about his work, including the late Ronnie James Dio.

What was Ronnie James Dio’s opinion on Bruce Dickinson and Iron Maiden

Ronnie James Dio was a big fan of Iron Maiden and admired Bruce Dickinson as a singer, considering him one of the greatest singers in the world. “There are so many types of vocalist these days. I think Chris Cornell from Audioslave is a great singer , really excellent, I really love his voice, I think he’s top notch. Bruce Dickinson is a really good singer as well, you know. I’m sure there are others out there but those are some of the people,” Dio told Alternative Zine in 2005 when asked who was the best vocalist in the world back then.

The legendary singer had a lot of respect for Iron Maiden and said that they were one of the bands that made him proud to say he was a Heavy Metal musician. He mentioned them when explaining why he was bothered by new artists who were not dedicated to their music.

“What I don’t like about (Heavy Metal), I sometimes don’t like how easy it seems for musicians to say ‘I’m gonna be a Heavy Metal musician’ and not do it well. I think that bothers me the most. That it seems such an easy route to go because the Marshalls gonna be turned up to 10 and what goes out of it is normally a rhythm first, anyway and then an attitude.”

Ronnie continued:

“But you know, what happened to the guitar players? What happened to the singers? I found that it has become too easy (for people) to just go out and flail away your instrument and screech away at your voice or mumble away. That bothers me, because I came from a place where my peers, guys from Zeppelin, Deep Purple and then later on from Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. All people that I respect, who can sing, play and think. (People who) have a good social conscience or people that make me proud to do this,” Ronnie James Dio told Sam Dunn in 2004 (Transcribed by Rock and Roll Garage).

Dio can be seen hanging out backstage at Iron Maiden’s show at the Forum in Los Angeles in their famous documentary “Flight 666” (2009).

Dio was Iron Maiden’s opening act during the Bruce Dickinson and Blaze Bayley eras

Ronnie was a good friend of Maiden and he had the chance to be the band’s opening act multiple times. In 1998 he was the band’s opening act when was promoting the live album “Inferno: Last In Live” and Maiden had just released “Virtual XI”, their second and final album with Blaze Bayley.

Bayley recalled the experience of touring with Dio, saying: “The toughest part (touring that era) was when Ronnie James Dio was supporting Iron Maiden. I’m the lead singer of Iron Maiden, and Ronnie James Dio is literally God of heavy-metal singing. I’ve loved him. He’s my inspiration to be a heavy-metal singer.”

“I’ve got everything he’s done on vinyl. I’ve seen him in concert four or five times, and he’s supporting me? God is supporting me? Ahh!! I watched him every night on the tour. I would be in the back with fans watching Ronnie with the fans. Then I’d run back and get ready for our set. It was fantastic,” he told Rolling Stone in 2022.

In 2000, in a show in Belgium, Dio received Bruce and Nicko on stage to play “Rainbow in the Dark”. Then in 2003, Dio alongside Motörhead were Iron Maiden’s opening act during a tour in the United States and Canada.

During the conversation with Alternative Zine in 2005, Dio explained that a Heavy Metal band mascot should have a silly name just like Eddie from Iron Maiden. “(I named mine Murray) because it sounded silly. I think something that is supposed to be so evil and so dark deserves a silly name, just like Eddie from Iron Maiden,” he said.

Dio, Bruce Dickinson and RobHalford considered forming a supergroup

Curiously, Bruce and Dio almost were in a band together. They considered creating the project The Three Tremors with Judas Priest’s Rob Halford. They wanted it to be a Metal version of the Three Tenors, which was an operatic singing trio formed by Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingos and José Carreras.

Ronnie has always been one of Bruce’s favorite singers ever since he first heard his voice on the radio when Rainbow was being played. He recalled the idea for that project, saying:  “We were gonna do this thing with three metal singers. Myself, Ronnie James Dio and Rob Halford. However, for reasons that (didn’t make much sense). (It was) managerial bullshit or whatever. There was some opposition, not from me, to having Ronnie there, which I thought was crazy. So the suggestion was that we would have Geoff Tate instead. So Roy (Z) and I wrote a tune. We thought we’d have a go at writing an album that would be sung by three singers.”

Bruce Dickinson continued:

“We only got as far as one song, and that song was ‘Tyranny Of Souls’. And the idea was that had we done the project, the chorus would have been all three singers (singing together). But the beginning of it would have been kind of one line me. Then one line Geoff, one line Rob, and so on, through the song. Each line would have been written so it would suit the delivery. It would suit the vocal characteristic of whoever was singing it.”

“So it was quite a tall order. It (would have been) quite difficult to do. I thought, ‘Shit, it’s gonna be pretty difficult to do a whole album of this stuff’ and, of course, we never did. But ‘Tyranny Of Souls’, the demo of it was designed to illustrate how that would have worked,” he said during his spoken-word tour in 2022.

Bruce’s favorite Ronnie James Dio song

Although Bruce loved Dio’s work in Rainbow, Black Sabbath and solo, his favorite stuff was from a side project. An album called “Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast” (1974), which was produced by Roger Glover. “One of my favorite tenors is Ronnie [James] Dio. Ronnie was kind of a hybrid. As he got older his voice was much more robust. But if you hear him on some early stuff, in particular some of the stuff he did pre-Rainbow… There was an album he did called Butterfly Ball.”

“He was a guest on it and Roger Glover from Deep Purple wrote a lot of it and produced it. There’s a song on there called ‘Love Is All’ and his voice is like glass. It’s so transparent and it’s just amazing. I’ve always wanted to cover that song. Not necessarily on an album, but live,” Bruce Dickinson said in an interview with Loudwire in 2021.

Trivium’s vocalist Matt Heafy once told a funny story involving Bruce and Dio. According to him, the Iron Maiden frontman told him in the beginning of his career that his voice would probably develop “to be something like Ronnie James Dio. One year later, Trivium was the opening act of Heaven & Hell, Sabbath’s spin-off band. Heafy had the chance to talk a lot with Dio and told him what Bruce said. He answered saying: “You know, Bruce finally admitted I’m one of his heroes.”