IRON MAIDEN frontman delivered the keynote speech yesterday (Wednesday, October 10) at the IBM Smarter Business event at the Stockholm Waterfront Congress in Sweden. He finished off his speech with explaining why the MAIDEN song "Run To The Hills" became a hit single.
"I've had some strange experiences in my life," began Dickinson, "and one of the strangest was waking up one day and discovering that people called be a businessman, which is very odd."
Dickinson went on to describe the role that creativity has played in the mind of history's greatest minds. "Leonardo DiVinci invents the helicopter … he imagined it and eventually it happened," he said. "Jules Verne invented the nuclear submarine, he just didn't know about nuclear reactors. He imagined it, and that inspired generations of people to invent things. Einstein, of course, who was the kid at school who would never amount to much because he was rubbish at physics and didn't pay any attention in class, said, 'Imagination is greater than knowledge.' If you can't imagine it, it will never happen."
Regarding the inspiration for "Run To The Hills", Dickinson revealed the song came from the analysis of a television musicologist. "The program was about why the song 'My Way' [Frank Sinatra], was the most popular recorded song in history," he said. "The musicologist came along and said, 'It's all in the rising sixth,'" referring to the sixth interval within a scale.
Video footage of Dickinson's speech can be seen below.
