Bruce Dickinson shares his strong point of view once more about recording live performances

Bruce Dickinson, the singer of Iron Maiden, recently spoke on the Appetite For Distortion podcast and bemoaned the fact that so many people are no longer truly living in the present because they have become so fixated on documenting their lives on their phones in order to revisit them later and get “likes” and “followers.”

Look, in so many ways I wish the camera on those things had never been invented. But it has been invented. It’s now a kind of infestation, is the way I would describe it. It’s like some terrible disease, that people feel the need to look at the world through this stupid little device. And so it’s like a failing of humanity, basically. You’re surrendering your senses completely to this little fascist in your hand. And put it down, put it in your pocket and look around you. Look at the people, look at the joy, look at the band, feel the emotion, feel the music. What a phone does, it cuts all of that off. And so I feel sad. I also feel pissed off, because as a performer, it’s, like, I want to perform for an audience of people that have some emotional feedback — not a bunch of like Android twerps.

As a matter of fact, there is a policy when you attend an Iron Maiden show about filming content.

People who are real music fans, I think, understand, and I think they’re getting better about it. They understand what’s going on. I went to see the Ghost show and it was a no-phone show, and so all the phones are in baggies. Oh my God — the difference. It was astonishing. The atmosphere — it was, ‘Wow.’ I mean, really, really noticeable. Even the way people behaved with each other, interacted with each other — not looking at the band, just being civil to each other, talking to each other was different.