About this site

We concentrate on stuff like giving more background to Bruce's albums and other ventures. Trivia is something that we intened to dig more into as well as keeping the basic info, like discographies, family trees, facts on who directed the promo-videos, etc. We also intend to cover Bruce's multitude of non-musical projects, such as fencing, writing, broadcasting and entrepreneurship.

A few years into the 2000's it became clear that we didn't have enough time for the site and it has been unintentionally unattended since 2007. This relaunch aims to present the site with all it's plethora of info, updated articles and more slim-lined navigation. The idea is to present the site as more of an archive rather than a source for news, simply becuase of lack of time.

Henrik Johansson & Mattias Reinholdsson

Mattias Reinholdsson and Henrik Johansson have been Iron Maiden fans since the early to mid 80's. Mattias has mostly been handling the business contacts while Henrik has sorted out the website. Editorial tasks have generally shared.

The Bruce Dickinson wellbeing network has been around on the web since sometime early May 1996. When we started this site there weren't that many Bruce sites around. A guy called Alan Stratton had a section of his personal site dedicated to Bruce and I can clearly remember another one but can't recall either its name or its originator.

Later that year Jeremy Haines got his site on-line (may have been there all the time, but that's when we noticed it) which spawned a much needed upgrade of this site, which until then had been called The REAL Bruce Dickinson Homepage

The new MK II of the site was online sometime in January 1997 and was the first version to sport the name The Bruce Dickinson Wellbeing Network, suggested by Mattias in a fit of cryptic weirdness. The navigation was still more or less the same, with the exception that info on related releases featuring Bruce had been added and that most if this was accessed through the "Facts" page for some weird reason.

It was also supposed to be a graphical upgrade from the Mk I (which had icons made in MS paint) with more images and more elaborate icons, this time made with Aldus Photostyler.

The Mk III and IV pretty much resembles eachother in layout but the content was constantly growing. I had stumbled upon a Queensrÿche-site which had a layout that intrigued me and I felt that it could be useful to incorporate that sort of style into the Bruce page. So this is how I learned to use HTML-tables.

The navigation was improved as I got rid of the dreadful idea of the "Facts"-page. It still had the "Past-present-future" bit which served as the news page (although there's a link to "News" it was either to the "present" or "future" page, can't remember which now).

Mark IV was the one that was active during the hey-day of the Maidencentral, which is plainly visible by the blue box in the upper left corner (Maidencentral had that same coloured layout back then) which had the link but also the rating device for rating sites that were linked from there.

Just as the Mk III the Mk IV had a link to a FAQ which remains an uncompleted project even today! It was never more than an idea that it would be nice to have a Bruce FAQ and in later versions we got rid of it altogether as we thought the site should cover everything a FAQ would anyway.

Mk V of the site is the one that was online for over two years until it was replaced by this new Mk VI version which is presently at use. It went online in early January 2000 and was the first one to have background graphics, a "photoshopped" version of the "Tears of the dragon" single cover. Some pages had only the brick wall (Bruce was edited out) as they required full screen width, when viewed in 800 x 600. (Don't ask me why I'm stuck in that "old" format)

This was the longest running version of the site, much because of what I thought a convenient layout but also due to the fact that I had less time on my hands to sit down and fiddle around with alternative layouts. Early versions of the site had a Timeline where you could access certain parts of Bruce's career, be it his school years, solo career or the Samson days. This one was removed, however, as I felt there was really no use for it.

I had loose ideas of using frames for the Mk V but due to my limited experience (I'm no computer freak, I'm more into music...) with them I made the decision to use a mainpage and "back" buttons. The first framed version is the one currently in use, and I feel it works quite alright, although there are certain discrepancies between the way I want it to work and the way it really works! What you see isn't always what you get! And add to that all little browser idiosynchrasies. I guess I'll never be able to make a webpage that works OK with Netscape!

Well then, that's the story of the site, at least it's physical appearance in cyber space. I'll try to get Mattias to write a similar story on the progress of the site as an idea and a hobby and our relation with the music industry and what not.

Until then; Thanks for browsing this site!

Henrik Johansson

PS: This retrospect was put together in the early noughties and one more version of the page has been in use since until this present one. It used to look like this, if anyone's keen to know.

In the beginning there was ...nothing special really. Henrik had the idea of starting a web page, mainly to promote his own band with myself in the ranks but also another page that would cover some of his favourite artist or artists. There were talks about making a page about Iron Maiden but already back then, in the "bronze age" of the internet, there were a lot of sites dedicated to them and their music. It was rather quickly decided that Bruce Dickinson was to be the main feature of the site and so it was done. By the time the page started to get made, I was "consulting" Henrik and became one of the producers, but not doing (and still not doing) any of the actual HTML or graphics for the site.

We soon decide to "cut the crap". We wanted our page to be "the best" when it came to actual facts about Bruce and his solo career. We stayed away from the gossip that usually flourishes on fan based pages. We aimed to be as reliable as possible on everything we featured on our page. Up until this very day we still try to hold on to information until we know that it's correct before releasing it. Therefore we may not be the quickest source of information but hopefully the most reliable.

The name! Why does anyone in his right mind choose to name a site to "The Bruce Dickinson Wellbeing Network"? We don't know. I think I am to blame for the name actually. Sorry. "The Official Bruce Dickinson website" would have been nice but I think we could get in to trouble if we did. Fansites tend to have very forced names. So why not be the worst?

We also wanted to have an as near to complete lyrics page as possible, consisting of everything Bruce has ever sung. But not the Maiden material of course. It may be hard but we do try to separate Bruce as a solo artist from the Maiden-Bruce. (The Samson lyrics are featured on our (Until recently) The only Samson web-page on the web.) We started to listen to b-sides and other obscure material to transcribe lyrics. And we are proud to tell you that even Bruce himself have consulted our lyrics page for information. How about that!? We are not yet complete but we are getting there someday. And needles to say, your help is always welcome.

Back in '96 homepages like ours was not that common. This was one of the things that we are sure helped us in getting the first actual interview with the man himself. Jerker Ågren at "Musikservice" didn't actually check out the site himself, but he took our word for being serious. And once you have done one doing another is a lot easier. You get some sort of "approval". We are of course very grateful to the different promotion and press personnel (Jerker Ågren at Musikservice, Suzan Kverh at Playground Music and Nusse Antoni at Showtime) that have given us the opportunity to do interviews with Bruce or given us promo material, or both! They have all been very good to work with. To be honest with you we did expect this kind of contact to be much harder to handle than they turned out to be. A special thanks should go to Chris Dale who have helped us a great deal with various things concerning the site. Our main aim now is to try to talk to people who have worked with Bruce, but tracking them down is far more difficult than getting half an hour with Bruce when he is his on promotion tours. So if you (reading this) have worked with Bruce or know someone who have, drop us a line, we want to get in contact with you.

One of our sayings have been "Trivia is the essence". The more absurd or obscure the fact is the more we want to cover it on our page. You can find fan reviews of Bruce records all over the internet but pages as our "Trivia page" is hard to find. And we hope to get more stuff like that to feature.

Doing a site like this is sometimes hard work, but most of the time its just great. I mean if it wasn't for the site we would have never ever had the chance to really talk to Bruce and meet other nice and interesting people. We feel very fortunate. The site can always get better so there is always things to improve and rewrite and with your help it can get better. So do not hesitate to let us know when ever you feel something is not right or if you have any other suggestions to make. Your help matters!

And finally, another thing before I sign off. It's kind of flattering to see our material or photos on other sites. I guess it means we are good at what we do. But it would be even better if the ones "borrowing" the stuff could give us some credit for it. Its not super important but it would be nice.

Mattias Reinholdsson