In a new interview with Dan Shinder of Drum Talk TV, IRON MAIDEN’s longtime drummer Nicko McBrain reflected on his last-ever gig with the British heavy metal legends, which took place nearly a year ago in São Paulo, Brazil. The now-73-year-old British musician, whose real name is Michael Henry McBrain, announced his retirement on December 7, 2024 in a statement on MAIDEN’s web site and social media. He also said that night’s concert at Allianz Parque would mark his final show with the legendary rock band. Nicko said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET):  ”It was a very mixed-emotions show. Obviously, I had 50,000 kids chanting my name and [they] gave me a fantastic, emotional welcome. And then also when I got up the front of the stage at the end of the night — I’ve always gone and been the last guy to come off stage, to be able to say good night and thank you to all the fans and stuff. And this night was unbelievably special. I remember I thought to myself, ‘I’m gonna burst out in tears here in a minute.’ I felt that emotional, and I thought, God’s saying to me, ‘Look, it’s okay, Nick, if you wanna cry. That’s why we gave you tears and emotion.’ Anyway, so I thought, ‘No, maybe stay strong. Do your weeping offstage.'”
McBrain continued: “But the most important moment that I felt from the whole thing was not only the love of the fans and the adoration that they showed me and the love, was when I went to go on stage, all the backline, they gave me a salute and a farewell. That was their last time they would actually be with me on an IRON MAIDEN show, with me performing. So that was a terrific emotion. And there were some tears, I gotta admit — some of my truly dear friends on the tour for many years had a tear in their eye.”
Asked if he had already put himself “mentally in the space” of being retired before he even played his last show with MAIDEN, Nicko said: “I certainly was in the mental space. To be honest with you, when we made [the] ‘Senjutsu’ [album in 2019], I was thinking, ‘All right, after the ‘Senjutsu’ tour, I’ll hang it up.’ I had made it my mind up, because I was feeling, my body was feeling like, well, I was 70 years old or 69, 70. As we know, the pandemic hit. Everybody experienced it. We all lived through it, and God bless those that that did, and, unfortunately, there were a lot of folks that didn’t make it. Anyway, that kind of put us back by two years, ’cause we couldn’t release that album once we’d got it finished. And so then you have to have your album out for a little while and then you plan a tour around it. So we did the ‘Legacy Of The Beast’ tour. And that ‘Legacy Of The Beast’ tour was in four parts over two years. And it was, like, ‘Okay, well, I think I’m gonna hang it up after this.’ My mindset was always to think about, ‘It’s time for me to step down and give it to a younger fellow.’ … So, yeah, I had my mind set, even back then, of thinking about, ‘I’ll make this the last tour.’ But then it went into ‘The Future Past Tour’.”
Referencing the fact that he suffered a stroke in January 2023 at his home in Boca Raton, Florida, which left him “paralyzed” down one side of his body and “worried” that his career with the band was over, Nicko said: “I was very blessed that the band would stick behind me and take that journey that I took in my recovery and the fact that I have a handicap, ’cause I can’t play 16th-note rolls [anymore]… So I had to compromise with drum fills. And the band stood by me for almost two years. It was a year and a half of touring. We did the end of the ‘Legacy [Of The Beast]’ tour and then ‘The Future Past’. And you are going into the 50th anniversary, which is obviously a massive tour for the band to celebrate. But I knew I couldn’t have opened with [the 1981 IRON MAIDEN song] ‘Murders [In The Rue Morgue]’. I mean, that drum fill at the beginning was just… I could have scratched through and done something else and changed the intro. But this is a celebration of those records, the first nine albums. So, that then, on the back end of having that decision in the back of my mind a couple or three years [earlier], it made it easier. And I sat with Steve [Harris, MAIDEN’s founding bassist] in L.A. and we talked and discussed that very thing, and the things that I couldn’t play against the things I could. And we were outweighing my health issue, and they were all very worried about me. They didn’t wanna see me — and I didn’t wanna see myself drop dead on stage. But mind you, having said that, if the good Lord calls me up, I would prefer to do it on a gig.”
Regarding how he presented his decision to retire from touring with MAIDEN to the rest of the band, and how MAIDEN decided to announce Simon Dawson as the band’s new touring drummer, Nicko said: “Obviously, I was talking with Rod [Smallwood] and Andy Taylor, our managers, and Dave Shack, who’s been part of the MAIDEN family for many years now. And he’s like Rod’s left-hand guy or right-hand guy. He’s kind of taken over the everyday running of things with MAIDEN. And we talked about it. And when I was with Steve, we were talking about Simon doing a rehearsal with the band in Portland. We had a couple days off there. Well, here’s the thing — a travel day and a day off after that. That’s really nice. We talked about that, and [Steve] said, ‘Are you okay with it?’ I said, ‘Of course I am.’ I said, ‘If, God forbid, anything happened to me in the next, say two weeks or the next week or the next gig, Simon will be able to cover for me, and you don’t lose the rest of the tour.’ I mean, it would be how we would deal with that if any one of us fell ill. I mean, there have been the times when we’ve lost shows because Bruce [Dickinson, MAIDEN singer], he’s got laryngitis or something. But if you get the flu [as a non-singing musician], you go on stage; you just have to muscle through it, as a pro musician. As they say, the show must go on. So, yeah, I understood that and I gave that my blessing, and Simon went in. And then after that we all had a meeting. Simon wasn’t there. It was myself, Rod and the band. And we all talked about me retiring after the tour. So the band were aware of it prior to Simon going in to do the rehearsal. So there was no skullduggery involved. It was all talked about prior to the announcement. I personally asked the management and the band to leave the announcement till after the gig, to January this year. I wanted to spend Christmas without having everybody and their mum sending me texts and my phone ringing off the hook: ‘Oh, what’s this? You’ve left the band.’ But Andy Taylor turned around to me. I remember the conversation like it was yesterday. Again, we were in L.A. And he said, ‘Nick, by the way, what’s this about you not wanting to make an announcement on your last show? You need to go out in a blaze of glory. You don’t want to go out on a wimpish whim.’ And I went, ‘You’re right. I’m being selfish.’ I didn’t want it because I didn’t want all my mates and family phoning me up or whatever. So, we talked about that there and then, and he convinced me that it was the right thing to do, because the notion I had was, ‘Yeah, let’s tell everybody in the new year. Let’s get Christmas and new year out the way.’ And it was a lovely way to announce it. The only thing I got a little upset about was I did ask them not to announce Simon until the Monday. ‘Cause on the Sunday I was traveling home from São Paulo to Florida. And they were gonna make the announcement almost immediately, and I said, ‘Give it a day or two.’ Well, they gave me 24 hours. Not even that — they announced it the next morning, that Simon was gonna go and be my replacement, which really doesn’t matter when they did. But I did ask them to leave it an extra day. And I must admit I was a bit miffed off about that. I went, ‘Oh, they could have left it another 24 hours.'”
Two months ago, Harris told Rock Candy magazine editor Howard Johnson about MAIDEN’s first lineup change in 25 years: “To be honest, we didn’t really have a choice and had to make the change after Nicko suffered his health issues. It was what it was, and we had a decision to make as to whether we wanted to carry on or not. Obviously we had a tour booked at the time that it happened, and the rest of us all wanted to continue. But ultimately, after we got through all that, it was Nick’s decision to step away and we all respected the fact that he’d decided to do that.”
This past July, Nicko told “Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk” about his exit from MAIDEN: “I had my health issues, which was one of the primary reasons that I decided to hang it up with the guys. And I wasn’t doing the songs justice because of the handicap that I had. And it wasn’t fair on everybody else either in the band. They supported me 100 percent through the ‘The Future Past Tour’, and that was fantastic. I couldn’t have asked for a better bunch of brothers to support me through my darkest hour.”
Elaborating on the physical ailments which contributed to his decision to retire from touring with IRON MAIDEN, Nicko said: “Primarily, I was fed up with touring in terms of the travel and not having days to recoup my body… I wasn’t so much slowing down, although we did play the songs that… I got told off at rehearsals last year because I was playing the songs too fast, ’cause I’d been playing with [my Florida-based side project] TITANIUM TART [which plays MAIDEN songs] before I went off and did the rehearsals in Australia with MAIDEN. And I actually got told off for playing too quick. So it wasn’t a question of not being able to drive the band. It was just not being able to drive the band with the drum fills that I’d been used to playing for 42 years. So the question mark was raised about the performance side. And that’s quite right…So that was part of the decision that I made.”
Five years ago, McBrain was diagnosed with stage 1 laryngeal cancer and opened up about it in a single interview in 2021 but otherwise kept it mostly under wraps.
McBrain officially joined IRON MAIDEN in December 1982 for the 1983 “Piece Of Mind” album and tour, replacing Clive Burr, after McBrain’s previous band TRUST had supported IRON MAIDEN during the U.K. leg of the “Killers” tour in 1981. McBrain brought a degree of finesse and technicality that was largely missing from IRON MAIDEN’s early output. Whereas Burr was often lauded for his heavy-handed, punk-oriented style, McBrain was largely the opposite, playing with a degree of dexterity and flair that helped primary songwriter Harris take MAIDEN down more adventurous paths. He eventually became the third longest-tenured member of MAIDEN, behind Harris and guitarist Dave Murray.