Bruce Dickinson says his prospective next solo album is half written – and he’s planning to reclaim his song “If Eternity Should Fail” after it was used as the opener on Iron Maiden’s most recent album The Book of Souls.

It’s not the first time one of his solo songs was re-purposed by colleague Steve Harris – in 1992 the Maiden version of “Bring Your Daughter… to the Slaughter,” first recorded by Dickinson, gave the NWOBHM giants their only U.K. Number 1 single in 1990.

“There’s half an album of solo stuff sitting on a shelf,” Dickinson told Kaaos TV in a recent interview (video below). “I just need to go and get some time and write some more material. I was half-way through doing actually a whole concept album, which was going to be called If Eternity Should Fail, and ‘If Eternity Should Fail’ was the title track to my new solo album.

“And a bit like ‘Bring Your Daughter… to the Slaughter’ it got commandeered for Iron Maiden. So if I did do another solo album, which I think I will, I might just stick to my original plan and have it as the title track. It was the first track that I wrote for it." He added that, if he did re-record the composition, “the feel would be slightly different, not very much though, from the Maiden version.”

In October, during a spoken-word tour in support of his book What Does This Button Do?, Dickinson was asked during a Q&A session: “Now you’ve written your autobiography, is this it? Or are we going to get more solo stuff and more from Maiden?” He answered: “It’s not it, and yes, and yes,” then put his hand over his mouth as if he’d given away a secret. Maiden last month announced the first dates of a 2018 tour, soon after the release of The Book of Souls: Live Chapter.