Band: Bruce Dickinson

Bruce Dickinson's solo work is, for the most part, as good as anything he did with Iron Maiden. The first album is very Maiden-sounding but later releases showed a development of a somewhat dark style of his own that was rooted in archetypal 70s metal. The strange 'Skunkworks' stemmed from Dickinson's fleeting desire to do something outside a metal framework, but the experiment wasn't a particularly happy one. 'Accident of Birth' and 'The Chemical Wedding' are easily two of the best metal albums of the late 1990s and it was (partly) on the strength of this that he was invited to rejoin Iron Maiden in 1999.