The legendary heavy metal band have completed 50 years in action and are going strong with a two-year run of shows as part of the Run For Your Lives world tour
Iron Maiden in 1983. Photo: Ross Halfin/Courtesy of Universal Pictures
In March this year, Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson was at a comic book convention in New Jersey and met Stranger Things actor Gaten Matarazzo, who portrays Dustin in the cult series.
The show had, by then, built a bit of a reputation for using metal bands like Metallica’s
“Master of Puppets” and in season 5, fans heard Iron Maiden’s “The Trooper” rumbling into action on-screen. Dickinson tells Rolling Stone India, “We had a pic together. My Instagram went completely off the charts. That was huge.” Previously, The Walking Dead had also used “When the Wild Wind Blows” in their show. Dickinson recalls he hadn’t been informed about the song placement at the time. “The first thing I knew about it was when I was watching an episode and went, ‘Hold on a minute! They nicked that from an Iron Maiden song… just a minute, it is the Iron Maiden song!’”
Through pop culture moments like these and several more across their 50-year career, British heavy metal favorites Iron Maiden are among those rock and metal bands who have undoubtedly earned hardcore fans across geographies and generations. That includes India, where they performed for three consecutive years, from 2007 to 2009. Dickinson says they don’t necessarily think their new documentary, Burning Ambition, will bring them to a younger audience because they already have one. “If you go and look at our fan base…I mean, in America, it’s older. In Canada, it’s quite young. In Brazil and South America, it’s young as hell. It’s a very young audience there. So it’s not that we’re trying to go after a young audience,” he says.
Maiden was started in 1975 by bassist and songwriter Steve Harris. The band documents the journey since then – mostly in a clean, controlled and PR-friendly manner – in their new documentary Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition. Hitting theaters in India this week and released globally on May 7, 2026, director Malcolm Venville (Churchill at War) and producer Dominic Freeman (Spirits in the Forest – A Depeche Mode Film), take a look at the rise of the arena-packing metal heroes. There is a spotlight on a few of their upheavals, like the departure of vocalist Paul Di’Anno and his subsequent replacement by Dickinson, creative differences, and the pressures of staying relevant amid a sea of music subcultures (they survived and thrived just fine).
Alongside the band, the documentary features fanboying moments from the likes of actor Javier Bardem, Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, and hip-hop veteran Chuck D.
One of the chapters that gets a deeper look is Dickinson’s first stint with Maiden through the Eighties until 1993, before he stepped away to pursue his solo career. Blaze Bayley took over until Dickinson returned in 1999. Dickinson recalls the time between as a “journey of discovery into unknown worlds” which he could never have been in while he was part of Maiden. He acknowledges that they “may or may not have failed, but actually they didn’t and we ended up making some great records.” He adds, “And I learned so much about singing, about production, about music, about different influences I could use, and all of that came back into the pot when I rejoined Maiden and people were cynical about it.”
Burning Ambition tracks the band all the way until today, as they’re currently on the Run For Your Lives world tour. “I mean, obviously we’re all quite a bit older now and quite a bit wiser and a bit more sanguine, but I think at this point in our career, we’re still pinching ourselves, going, ‘I can’t believe we’re about to do this,’” the vocalist says.
Calling it an “amazing” experience, Dickinson says these shows that take them across the globe still constitute new experiences. As Iron Maiden broke out globally in the Eighties, Dickinson recalls how “every single day was a new experience.” He adds, “Every day was a groundbreaking day for us, because we’d never done that before, and that lasted for five or six years. Every tour was bigger. Every tour was new places, new things, new sets, new albums. Everything was just brand new and very exciting.”
Speaking on the documentary, the band says they were deliberately “hands-off” with it. He says the feedback from Iron Maiden members to the makers was that it should be done “the right way and have some truth-telling in it.” Dickinson adds, “We thought, ‘Let’s have somebody else, external, take a view on our fifty years.’ And I think it’s done really well. The documentary has been done very, very well. We had very little input – by choice – into it.”
Dickinson’s summary of Burning Ambition is an endearing one when he’s asked about it. It’s “a great story” at the core of it. “It’s a family that’s grown up, that’s fallen out, that’s got back together. It’s a great story. I think it’s an uplifting story,” he says.