Heard any complaints about Simon Dawson? Well, they’re not from Iron Maiden

Iron Maiden singer Bruce Dickinson recently discussed the spring/summer 2025 European leg of the band’s “Run For Your Lives” global tour in an interview with the “Talk Is Jericho” podcast, which is hosted by Fozzy frontman and professional wrestler Chris Jericho. The journey began on May 27 in Budapest, Hungary, and ended on August 2 in Warsaw, Poland. It was Maiden’s first tour with new drummer Simon Dawson, who took Nicko McBrain’s position in December, as reported by blabbermouth.net.

Obviously, it was different, because Simon is not Nick. He’s not a copy of Nick. His emphasis in terms of the way he drums, the sound of his drums is different. He’s a different type of drummer. But he does everything that a drummer should do, which is he keeps the time. And that’s it. Nick was like a human fireworks display every night in terms of his drumming, personality and everything else. And Simon’s not; he’s low key. He is not exactly the polar opposite to Nick, but he’s different. He’s more thoughtful. He’s very analytical. He warms up for, like, two hours, and he’s just putting things together and refining and tweaking things and stuff like that. So he’s a different drummer, but the songs are the same. And he’s happy. Everybody in the band is perfectly happy. But they’re not the same. You can’t replace Nick with a clone.

But Dawson appears to be more similar to Clive Burr.

His natural feel is that, that inclination. And I was shocked at how I was, like. ‘Oh my God. I’m having a flashback here,’ looking over my shoulder, going, ‘Wow.’ ‘Cause his natural feel is to be kind of like around the beat, almost like a swingtime thing, like an Ian Paice-type feel. And it’s just nuance. But Clive was great. I loved playing with Clive.