Ex-IRON MAIDEN Singer BLAZE BAYLEY Talks About His Battle With Alcoholism

Former IRON MAIDEN/current BLAZE frontman Blaze Bayley recently spoke to Sweden's Metalshrine.se about his battle with alcoholism. "Yeah, I have had some massive problems," he admitted. "The police phoned my wife and said, 'We have a man unconscious on the street and we think it is your husband.' After that, I had to take a pretty hard look at my life, and think why does that happen? Something inside my made me want to drink myself unconscious to the point of oblivion.

"My wife forced me to go to the doctor, I did go to the doctor and did all this tests and the doctor said, 'Well, basically you suffer from clinical depression.' I just thought I was moody or had a bad temper or something like this, but I suffer from depression, and that's a thing that's happened to me in my whole adult life. I didn't know what depression was, but now I think, 'OK, so that's that feeling,' now I am aware of that sneaking up on me, I am aware of that ugliness and that darkness trying take a hold of me and my life. With medication and with seeing a psychiatrist and things like that, I have been able to live a much more satisfied life, I have been a lot more happier and spend less time drunk and more time sober and working on the music and the things that I love, but unfortunately my marriage didn't survive. I survived it, I healed, but the marriage didn't. It's a shame really. You know these things happen.

"I met Angry Anderson from ROSE TATTOO and he said exactly the same thing, he said his wife had forced him to go see canceling for his bad temper and he changed and changed as a person, he changed so much that his marriage felt to pieces. And that was exactly what happened to me, I changed, instead of being so materialistic and such an asshole all the time, I was just interested in things that I cared about, I wasn't interested in being famous or being a rock star, I only cared about the really important things, I really love singing, and I love singing this music, I really don't care about being famous or anything like that. I'm not the best singer in the world, but I just love to sing this music, and that is what I live for really."

Asked if he is totally sober now or if he enjoys a beer now and then, Blaze said, "What I do now, I got people around me who help me, I'm just really sensible, I have one or two beers here and there, but that's it. I never touch hard drugs or anything like that.

"When I get the band together I said no hard drugs, because it is supposed to be about the music, about to be a great musician and to perform to your absolute best every night, no matter if you are in front of 50 people or 5,000 or 50,000. It is supposed to be about being a great musician not about going to a great party all of the time, you suppose to do it because you love the music and you love performing for the fans, not so you can get drunk every night, so that's the attitude I started with, but of course you know, I didn't realize I suffered from this depression, and now when I do, my life seems to make a lot more sense and a lot of that is in the lyrics of the album, it's the sober positive me, talking to that negative, drunken me that is in denial. A large part of the album is a conversion between these two parts of my character."

Read Blaze Bayley's entire interview with Metalshrine.se at this location.