Bruce Dickinson concert

Bruce Dickinson, the lead singer of Iron Maiden, performed a concert in besieged Sarajevo in December 1994. The story is detailed in Tarik Hodžić’s 2017 documentary film “Scream for me Sarajevo”. At the beginning was the idea of two UN-soldiers stationed in Sarajevo, Trevor Gibson and Martin Morris, to organize a rock concert within the besieged city ; attempts to invite Rolling Stones and Motorhead failed, but Bruce Dickinson accepted to come to Sarajevo, accompanied by his musicians Chris Dale and Alex Elena. They were supposed to take a UN-helicopter in Split, but the flight was canceled, and they finally traveled to Sarajevo with a convoy of The Serious Road Trip.

The concert took place on December 14, 1994,  in the “Bosanski Kulturni Centar”, with local rock bands performing before Dickinson’s gig. There had been no real announcements, in order not to take the risk of provoking shooting or shelling.  But the room was nevertheless full with an enthusiastic crowd, and the evening became an unforgettable moment for all who were part of it. “There was no war, that is, in that period of a few hours, there was no war for me“, recalls one of the spectators in the movie. Dickinson’s concert was also a huge event and encouragement for local rock musicians who had continued or started after 1992 to play music in the cellars as much as possible. “None of us really believed at the time that he would play in Sarajevo. How could the biggest heavy metal star come to this hell of all places?” recalled Mirza Ćorić later in an interview. But Dickinson came, and “that night was like a dream.” Another musician, Meldin Hota, talks about the impact of the concert: “After that, it was like we all got a push to make more music, to make even more music. Constantly, wherever you could play, we played.”

Dickinsons concert remained for a long time an unknown and  untold story, unlike those of two other prominent singers who performed during the siege in Sarajevo, Joan Baez and Barbara Hendricks, whose concerts were widely covered by local and international media. It is only the 2017 movie “Scream for me Sarajevo” which drew attention to it  and which also led Bruce Dickinson to receive the honorary citizenship of Sarajevo in 2019.