Bruce Dickinson’s Most Decadent Moment with Caviar and Vodka

Bruce Dickinson said the most decadent moment of his life came during Iron Maiden’s tour of the Soviet Union.

The road trip started out in August 1984, five years before the Berlin Wall came down, which marked the end of the U.S.S.R. While Maiden were the first Western band to take a full production show through the Iron Curtain, they refused to take credit for encouraging political change.

“We didn’t have to work too hard to build [a] bridge,” Dickinson told the Independent in a new interview. “We just had to build the other half to go and meet them halfway. Afterwards, when they took their destiny into their own hands … that Soviet-era authoritarian thing just crumbled because it had no substance, it had no basis, nobody actually wanted it.”

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One of the cross-culture issues they had to contend with was being paid in Polish zloty, a currency with zero value in the West. As a result, bassist Steve Harris said, “[w]e bought all kinds of stuff – china, porcelain, just to get rid of the money.”

Dickinson recalled an incident in a hotel dining room: “This guy comes up with a bin liner full of caviar. We were all drunk, going, ‘Come on then, how much?’ He got a half-kilo tin of caviar out and he said, ‘It’s $100.’ I’m like, ‘$100? That’s incredibly cheap!’”

Polish Vodka Made Iron Maiden See Pink

With the price settled at $50 a tin, the singer continued: “We said, ‘Have you got any more?’ He came back with five kilos – like an oil drum full of caviar. Everyone went mad. We probably had about 10 kilos of caviar, which we couldn’t possibly eat.

“This is the most decadent thing I think I’ve ever done in my life, eating a tablespoon of caviar and knocking it back with vodka. It could’ve been the scene in Tommy but without the baked beans.”

Dickinson also had stark recollections of drinking the Polish spirit: “When we started knocking back the shots of frozen vodka, you discovered that the world took on a whole different meaning, which was largely pink. That was the color that the world was the next morning when you woke up, because your eyeballs were so red.”