I’m being passed a very cosy-looking tin of Bourbons and chocolate Hobnobs by Bruce Dickinson. “Do you take sugar?” he smiles, tinkling the teaspoon.

This is THE Bruce Dickinson, by the way. Of Iron Maiden. At the top of the album charts right now. A heavy-metaller who, even at 57, roars on stage in spiked leather cuffs – when he’s not ‘being mother’. But I’m quickly learning that’s his performer persona only.

“I never could be a typical rock star,” he says, dunking. “In my case you don’t get the stereotype. Rock stars should be tall, skinny and blond, concave-chested and wasted – I’m short, brown-haired and English. I’m a bit of an anorak, sadly.”

Yeah, I think. Nice try. This is Maiden’s fourth decade and their new album The Book of Souls is their 16th. But, clearly, giving me a colourful anecdote from a rock ’n’ roll life on the road, past or present, isn’t on his agenda.

“The old stories are irrelevant,” he says. “What goes on in rugby clubs is vastly more outrageous.”

And, as the day goes on, I start to believe him. Maybe he’s literally sweetening me up... but the very amiable frontman sounds like he’s always been pretty steady.

Yes, in the early days – he joined the band in 1981 – there was booze. “Only beer” though, he insists. And girls, naturally, although he plays that down. “You would think there was more opportunity – but it depends how high or low your standards are,” he shrugs.

But drugs? No. He never got into them. He insists he has never had friends who took drugs either and, when it came to his kids – Austin, 25, Griffin, 23, and Kia, 21, with second wife Paddy – he decided early on he was going to make sure they never wanted to touch them.

“What was great for my kids was when they were growing up and we took them out on the road. I got some cracking questions from five-year-olds, ‘Daddy, why is that man doing that?’

“They would be backstage, there would be some idiot who’d done too much coke sweating profusely, teeth chattering. ‘That’s because he’s on drugs,’ I’d say. ‘Drugs? Are they a bad thing?’ And I’d say, ‘Judge for yourself’.

“The best possible antidote for people not to take drugs is to go and see a bunch of people who are completely messed up, out of their brains. They got an education in drugs and made good decisions.”

There’s not much nonsense in Bruce. He may be worth millions as part of one of the world’s highest-earning acts – they’ve sold 90 million albums – but he uses the London Underground and his ideal break is visiting a steam train.

And today, we’re drinking tea after he’s flown us from London to Cardiff in a five-seater Eclipse, a £2million “nip-about” jet. Because as well as a rock star, Bruce is a pilot. And not a spare time, show-off one, but an actual proper pilot, who flies commercial jets as an extra job.

He learned to fly at 30 as a hobby, prompted by a life-long interest in planes triggered as a child when his godfather, who was in the RAF, took him to air shows.

But he soon decided if a job was worth doing “it was worth doing properly”.

So he trained to fly commercial jets and worked as a regular airline pilot for 10 years from 2000, adding a month of unpaid holiday to his annual leave so he could tour with Maiden.

Three years ago, he set up his own company with a business partner and Cardiff Aviation now charters planes and trains pilots in simulators.

“I have seven-and-a-bit thousand hours of airline flying all round the world for all kinds of people,” says Bruce.

(Image: PA)

“I have flown Michael Heseltine and Max Hastings, and football clubs. I have had the FA Cup on board three times.

“I’ve flown troops home from Afghanistan to their families – I was blubbing as we landed. Once we had a drug smuggler who died on the flight – his bags exploded in his stomach.”

And through all of this, most of the time, his passengers have no clue who Bruce is, or that he’s anybody. And he likes that anonymity.

In February, he’ll fly the band around the world on their global tour – 60 dates in 35 countries – in a Boeing 747.

“One advantage of being the pilot is you’ve only had a couple of bottles of water and everyone else gets off with a terrible hangover,” he says.

It will be the fourth time he’s flown the band on tour, although this time he’s training especially to fly a 747 – which is bigger than his usual planes – so they can fit all the gear in, too.

Down the back, he admits, his bandmates – Steve Harris, Dave Murray, Adrian Smith, Nicko McBrain, and Janick Gers – will be having a pretty cool time.

(Image: WireImage)

He’s going to install a table-tennis table and there’ll be plenty of booze – although he insists the lads will generally be “knackered” and probably glued to their laptops or playing cards.

“It’s usually Nicko and his card school,” he says. “He has his own wine cellar, too. They’ll have a good time back there – but it’s not exactly a holy Roman orgy.”

Whether Bruce’s pace has slowed or not over the years, he would certainly have reason for stepping back now.

In December, he was diagnosed with tongue cancer and admits he faced a 60/40 brush with death.

And his illness hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons.

Bruce’s tumours – one on the side of his neck and one on his tongue – were caused by the human papilloma virus.

The virus, mostly harmless, is contracted via any skin-on-skin contact.

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“Eighty per cent of people in the UK have been exposed to HPV,” he says. “You can acquire it in all sorts of ways, you may have been in high school kissing someone, it can be transmitted from mother to baby.”

But in recent times it became known as the virus actor Michael Douglas claimed he caught from oral sex. So Bruce knew what would come next if he admitted what he had got.

“I said to my wife I was going to say what it was. I could possibly do a bit of good. The fear was that I’d get those headlines.

“They have been potentially embarrassing but actually not, because what is needed is for someone to stand up and say, look this HPV cancer is an epidemic among men. It will outstrip cervical cancer in women by 2020.”

He adds earnestly: “I’m a rock star, so let’s take the p*** – but actually this is serious. People are trivialising what is a really serious public-health issue.”

Whatever caused his cancer, Bruce is getting back in good shape now.

“According to my doctors, the cancer has gone. The voice is healing nicely. Saliva, mucous, all that got fried, but it’s all coming back,” he explains.

He’s now a stone lighter and, after three gruelling rounds of chemotherapy and 32 daily blasts of radiotherapy, his facial hair is also growing back.

And he insists he only gets a little more tired than before.

(Image: Mirrorpix)

His mentality is one of, ‘don’t let the b*****ds get you down’, he says. It’s one he developed growing up with his “tough” coal-miner grandad in Worksop, Notts – his mother, who had him at 17, and father, an army mechanic, initially lived separately in Sheffield.

But his parents were focused on making a good living for the family and became property developers.

It was a fairly new concept at that time, but served them well.

Soon they bought a boarding house and car lot – giving them enough money to send Bruce to boarding school, aged 13.

He was bullied and thrashed relentlessly by the teachers. He says: “We had our backsides beaten until they bled.

“It’s whether you choose to carry the scars and I chose not to. People have gone through worse, people have gone through better. Get on with it.”

And he will, in his very un-rocker-like way, I have no doubt.