Nicko McBrain has talked about Paul Di'Anno while promoting his memoir, and the part he keeps coming back to is not the music.
"The only thing I regret is that I didn't keep in touch with him over the years," the Iron Maiden drummer told Classic Album Review. Di'Anno died in October 2024.
He was warm about the singer and plain about what happened to him. "Paul was a very, very unique singer. I loved his vocals, I loved him as a friend and as a fellow musician. We spent a lot of time together when Trust supported Maiden on the Killers tour; Paul and I got on like a house on fire. The way he was living, it just caught up with him."
On the handover, he contradicts the version that has hardened into legend. "When Bruce came in he was very disgruntled in the early days, but he actually warmed up to it. There was no bad blood. It was nice."
McBrain was not there for any of it. He joined in 1982, two years after Di'Anno left, which makes him a witness to the aftermath rather than the event. His memoir, Hello Boys And Girls!, came out in Britain on 22 October and reaches the United States on 10 November through Harper Nonfiction.