Bruce Dickinson kicked off his first extensive North American solo tour in almost 30 years in support of his current studio album, “The Mandrake Project”, Friday night (August 22) at the House Of Blues in Anaheim, California. Joining the IRON MAIDEN singer on “The Mandrake Project Live 2025” North American tour is once again his 2024 backing band, featuring Dave Moreno (drums),Mistheria (keyboards) and Tanya O’Callaghan (bass),alongside the group’s latest additions, Swedish guitarist, songwriter and multi-platinum-credited producer Philip Näslund and Swiss session and touring guitarist Chris Declercq (who played on Dickinson‘s “Rain On The Graves” single). Bruce‘s longtime guitarist and collaborator Roy “Z” Ramirez is not part of the touring lineup.

Dickinson‘s 16-song setlist at the House Of Blues included the live debut of “The Mandrake Project” track “Shadow Of The Gods” as well as the first-ever performance of the IRON MAIDEN song “Flash Of The Blade”, from the band’s 1984 album “Powerslave”.

Prior to launching into “Flash Of The Blade”, Dickinson told the crowd:  ”Nobody has ever played this song, apart from on the record, of course, but nobody has ever played this song. And it’s a song that I wrote. So I don’t know whether any of you have got any clue what song it might be. But like usual, it’s a conundrum. I shall not tell you. You will just have to figure it out. It probably won’t take long… You’ll die as you lived in a flash of the blade.”

The setlist for the Anaheim concert was as follows:

01. Accident Of Birth
02. Abduction
03. Laughing In The Hiding Bush
04. Shadow Of The Gods (live debut)
05. Chemical Wedding
06. Flash Of The Blade (IRON MAIDEN song) (live debut)
07. Resurrection Men
08. Rain On The Graves
09. Drum Solo
10. Frankenstein (THE EDGAR WINTER GROUP cover)
11. The Alchemist
12. Book Of Thel
13. Road To Hell

Encore:

14. Tears Of The Dragon
15. Gods Of War
16. Starchildren

Bruce talked about the setlist for “The Mandrake Project Live 2025” North American tour during an interview earlier this week with Meltdown of Detroit’s WRIF radio station. He said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “We are doing a mixture of songs from ‘Accident Of Birth’, from ‘Chemical Wedding’, from ‘More Balls To Picasso’, obviously from ‘Mandrake’, and that’s, frankly, more than enough for a full show. And in actual fact, I’ve got seven solo albums to pick from, so if I end up doing — as I will do, in probably in ’27 — end up doing another tour with another album, then I’ll still have plenty of songs to pick from, from those albums. ‘Cause there’s songs that people go, ‘Why haven’t you played that song?’ I said, ‘Well, I can’t play every single song. You have to wait. We’ll do it next time.’ But ‘Shadow Of The Gods’, for example, off ‘Mandrake’, has never been played live until now. So we’re gonna play that song every night, because it’s a really cool track and it’s the most requested track off ‘Mandrake’. We’ve not played it, so we’re gonna do that one every night.”

Regarding the addition of “Flash Of The Blade” to the setlist, Bruce said: “We’ve actually dropped a MAIDEN song in there. We haven’t done that, like, ever. And so I said we’re not a MAIDEN covers band, but I’m gonna do one song, and it’ll be a song that I wrote. We’re not covering [a song] that [MAIDEN guitarist] Adrian [Smith] wrote with me or [MAIDEN bassist] Steve [Harris] or something. And my wife said, ‘You should do this song,’ song X. I went, ‘Oh, why?’ She said, ‘Well, nobody’s ever played it. You’ve never played it. Why have you never played that song?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know.’ She goes, “Everybody wants you to play that song.’ I said, ‘Who’s everybody?’ And she’s on social media, so she does all this stuff. I don’t do social media. So I have no clue. And so I mentioned it to the band. I said we should do it. What do you think if we tried to learn this?’ And they dogpiled me, like, ‘Oh my God, that would be amazing.’ So anyway, next day they’d learned it and they played it to me instrumentally. I was just, like, ‘Holy crap. Now let me see if I can still remember how to sing it.’ So we’re gonna do that.”

Dickinson also confirmed that some of the shows on “The Mandrake Project Live 2025” North American tour will see him play another MAIDEN song, “Revelations”. He explained: “Now, I’ve gotta learn another MAIDEN one as well, because we’re doing a festival in São Paulo in the middle of the tour. We dip down to Brazil [to play] this huge festival. And it’s actually 40 years since I set foot in Brazil [for the first time] with Rock In Rio. So I thought, well, for the anniversary, I’m gonna go down there. I really do have to do a kind of a MAIDEN track in celebration of the fact that, ‘Yeah, look, it’s been 40 years.’ And there was a famous incident where I’d split my head open with the edge of a guitar, blood pouring down my face. That was the image that that still played on national TV now when they talk about Rock In Rio; they use that moment. And that moment was during a song called ‘Revelations’, which happened to be a song that I wrote. So I thought, ‘Hey, we’ll get the band to learn ‘Revelations’.’ And then my wife came in and said, [‘You’ve gotta play ‘Flash Of The Blade’]. I went, ‘Okay, okay, okay.’ Well, now I just love it. I’m just, like, ‘Yes, absolutely.’ So we’re gonna play [‘Flash Of The Blade’ Friday] night and then the secret will be out and social media will be, like, ‘Oh my God, they played that song.’ So if you wanna hear that song, whatever the hell it is, or you might not give a stuff — I don’t know. So we’ll be dropping that in and out here and there, teasing people a little bit. But it’s such a blast on the tour. Such a great fun playing with these guys.”

Asked what it is like going from playing stadiums with IRON MAIDEN to performing mostly in theaters with his solo band, Bruce told WRIF: “There’s no comparison. One is one type of thing, one is the other type of thing. So I don’t go into a theater going, ‘Oh my God. I wish I was playing a stadium.’ No, I relish the idea of going into a theater. It’s great. And the same thing — if I go into a stadium, I don’t go, ‘Oh, I wish I was playing a theater.’ No, I’m playing a stadium. That’s what you’re doing and that’s what’s in front of you.”

He continued: “I love performing and I love wherever I am, whether it’s three people, 300 or 300,000. Things change a little bit, techniques change a little bit from one to the other to the other, but it’s still a performance and you’re still trying to do the best thing by everybody there. So, yeah, I love it.”

Dickinson also talked in more detail about “The Mandrake Project Live 2025” North American tour, which will take his solo band across North America, including shows in New York, Los Angeles, Texas, Florida and Canada, with festival appearances at Rocklahoma (Oklahoma) and Louder Than Life (Kentucky). The tour also includes a quick return to Brazil for the prestigious The Town festival at the City Of Light in São Paulo.

“It’s the same band that did the tour last year,” Bruce said. “We did 55 shows together. So, we’re a crew now. This is not me standing on the spot and saying, ‘Oh, nobody else come within 10 feet of me. Your aura is disturbing my vibe.’ No. I mean, we are a band — we sweat together, we get messy, and eye contact. It’s a great rock and roll band. And we have fun. We’re heavy emotional creatures on stage. So we can play to make you wanna jump up and down in pogo. We can play to make you cry and we can play to put a smile on your face. And hopefully all of those things. So when you leave the show at the end of the evening, we hope we’ve made your life better.”

He continued: “We’re a great crew. It’s a great show live. We’ve got a video wall. We’ve got MAIDEN‘s sound engineer, MAIDEN‘s monitor engineer, MAIDEN‘s lighting engineer as well. And they all love doing it because they love getting their hands dirty in theaters. [MAIDEN‘s lighting designer] Rob Coleman, on the lights, gets to play and go, ‘Hey, yeah, that’s weird. Look at that structure on stage. If I put a lamp there’ and blah, blah, blah, ‘I can get a really great effect.’ So we can kind of do things on the fly in theaters or work with what we’ve got. It’s fantastic. You can improv a little bit there. And it’s not the same show every night. With MAIDEN, it is. I mean, sure, there are variations in the way that this song is better one night than it was last night and things like that. But with this band, we’re so flexible, we can go, ‘What’s the setlist today? Well, let’s shift things around a bit. Let’s do that. Oh, we haven’t done that song for a while. Let’s drop that one in there.’ And [if] we’re playing Boston and New York back to back, [we can go], ‘Oh, yeah. We should definitely play two different songs so people don’t go, ‘Ah, I went to both shows and they did the same stuff.’ [We want them to go], ‘Ah, they did something different.'”

Prior to the April 12, 2024 Whisky A Go Go show, Bruce last performed with his solo band on in August 2002 at the legendary Wacken Open Air festival in Germany.

Roy played guitar on Dickinson‘s 1994 album “Balls To Picasso” and went on to produce, co-write and perform multiple instruments on Bruce‘s subsequent three solo albums, “Accident At Birth” (1997),“The Chemical Wedding” (1998) and “Tyranny Of Souls” (2005).

O’Callaghan is an Irish musician who joined WHITESNAKE in 2021 and toured with the David Coverdale-fronted outfit the following year. She also hit the road with Dickinson in 2023 as part of a performance of Jon Lord‘s “Concerto For Group And Orchestra” on nearly a dozen dates in Europe and South America.

Californian drummer Moreno previously played on “Tyranny Of Souls” and has worked with BODY COUNT, Jizzy Pearl, Dizzy Reed and Steve Stevens, among others.

Italian keyboard wizard Mistheria has collaborated with an array of artists live and in the studio, including Rob Rock, Mike Portnoy, Jeff Scott Soto and Joel Hoekstra.

“The Mandrake Project” arrived on March 1, 2024 via BMG.

Bruce and Roy recorded “The Mandrake Project” largely at Los Angeles’s Doom Room, with Roy doubling up as both guitarist and bassist. The recording lineup for “The Mandrake Project” was rounded out by Mistheria and Moreno, both of whom also featured on Bruce‘s previous solo studio album, “Tyranny Of Souls”, in 2005.

Dickinson‘s reworked version of his classic 1994 album “Balls To Picasso”, now titled “More Balls To Picasso”, arrived on July 25.

Dickinson made his recording debut with IRON MAIDEN on the “Number Of The Beast” album in 1982. He quit the band in 1993 in order to pursue his solo career and was replaced by Blaze Bayley, who had previously been the lead singer of the metal band WOLFSBANE. After releasing two traditional metal albums with former MAIDEN guitarist Adrian Smith, Dickinson rejoined the band in 1999 along with Smith.