Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson may be 53 years old, but he’s forever young at heart. Speaking with Sarah Montague of BBC’s TV program “HARDtalk,” Dickinson explained that he and the guys of Iron Maiden feel no need to “grow up,” since they still feel like teenagers making metal music.

When asked by the interviewer whether the band ever felt the need to change its sound or ‘mature’ its image, Dickinson retorted, “Mature our image? Why? Inside this 53-year-old exterior — 54 in August — is a 17-year-old. Actually, probably mental age, probably slightly younger. But that’s the core of why you do this thing. When you’re a kid and you experience something that makes you feel, ‘Wow, walking on air.’

He adds, “The first song you write, the first experiences, you have to ringfence those and guard them against what I can describe as the cynicism of the world, because the world eats into people and destroys those hopes and those dreams and things like that. And it’s those things that people call childish, those are the things, actually, that motivate us and that keeps our creativity precious; that’s what’s inside people, and they lose it at their peril. I’ve seen people that have lost it, and it’s really sad…”

In other Iron Maiden news, the band’s classic 1982 disc ‘The Number of the Beast’ was recently voted the No. 1 British album of the past 60 years in the new HMV Diamond Jubilee Poll.

Iron Maiden are set to kick off their North American summer tour June 21 in Charlotte, N.C. The trek is scheduled to run through an Aug. 18 show in Houston, Texas.

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