IRON MAIDEN Drummer NICKO MCBRAIN Talks Recovery From January 2023 Mini-Stroke – “I’m Still Not Back To Where I Wanna Be” (Video)

Iron Maiden drummer Nicko McBrain suffered a mini-stroke in January 2023 and has been on the road to recovery ever since. Guesting on The Washington Tattoo, he recounted the experience and offered an update on his current health.

McBrain: “The first three months of a stroke is where you have the most recovery. After that, the next three months, it’s a little less and then the three months after that, and so on and so forth. I’m over — almost a year and a half now, but it will be next week. What’s the date? Yeah, ten days’ time. So I’m still not back to where I wanna be. I can’t do a 16-note roll going into 32nd-note rolls anymore. What happens is I can play eighth notes, like that kind of groove. I can do doubles, but when I try and play that 16th at that speed, instead of going up and down, it wobbles from left to right, when I start playing fast, when I try to play fast. So I’ve had to adjust my fills now. I mean, I don’t play ‘The Trooper’ fill anymore because I can’t get it. It’s the speed of it. I can do everything slow, but I’ve had to make sure that as long as I can keep the groove of the song.”

During a Q&A session at Bio Roy in Gothenburg, Sweden on February 25th, when asked about McBrain’s ongoing recovery, Iron Maiden fromtman Bruce Dickinson offered the following:

“Honestly, what he did on the last (Iron Maiden) tour was nothing short of amazing. At the risk of going more into my medical history than you really (need to know), in February (2023)… both of my hips are worn out from jumping around on stage and fencing and doing stupid shit. So, I’ve got like metal ones, titanium, so it’s not so heavy. They work great, and I’m running around and doing everything and doing all the stuff that I did before. It’s exactly the same, no difference at all. So I had new one, a new right hip in February, and so all of that tour that I just did was all two months, three months after that. Nicko had a stroke almost at the same time. I’m wandering around going, ‘Hey, look at me. I got rid of my walking stick and I’ve stopped taking paracetamol. Everything’s fine….’ and Nick just sent us a little e-mail going, ‘Chaps, just so you know, I had a little bit of a stroke the other day.’ I was, like, ‘What the fuck?’ And it wasn’t a little bit of a stroke; it was a proper full-on. Lluckily, his wife got him to hospital, because it happened in his house. They knew exactly what to do, and they gave him this fairly new drug, which kind of, it’s kind of like Control-Alt-Delete for strokes; it reboots your system and hopefully it comes back. And the answer is most of his left side all came back within a matter of hours, except his left hand. And Nick, that’s his snare drum hand. So how he coped with that, it was just amazing.”

“He started learning to drum again because he couldn’t hold a stick. He couldn’t hold a fork. In fact, when we were mixing (The Mandrake Project) in April in Florida, I invited him up to the studio. I thought he probably needed cheering up a bit, because we didn’t start rehearsing until May, so he still had a month to go. So he came up to the studio, and the first thing I thought when I saw him was, ‘Wow, you look sensational!’ He was tanned and he was skinny; he lost a bit of weight. He goes, ‘Yeah, I couldn’t hold a fucking fork. I couldn’t get out of bed last months.’ So, he had not lost his sense of humor there. He explained to me everything he was doing to get his drumming chops back, and he acknowledged he won’t be able to do everything that he did – not within a year or two years – but it will come back. He’s working every day. He’s got a little band and he’s made them learn the Iron Maiden set. He’s really, really determined because drumming’s his life.”