Iron Maiden drummer Nicko McBrain talked about his health struggles during a recent episode of The Washington Tattoo podcast. The rocker shared a few updates about his surgery and how he has been feeling since then.
“The first three months of a stroke is where you have the most recovery,” he said of his 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, 10 days’ time. So I’m still not back to where I wanna be. I’ve probably got… I can’t do, I can’t do… So if this is a tempo, I can’t do a 16-note roll going into 32nd-note rolls anymore.”
McBrain also revealed what he can play since the surgery and admitted that he can’t play the band’s hit ‘The Trooper’ 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.”
In January 2023, McBrain had a stroke at his home in Boca Raton, which caused partial paralysis. This kicked off a tough journey of physical rehab and quick treatment from stroke experts at the Marcus Neuroscience Institute at Boca Raton Regional Hospital.
Nicko mentioned in another interview that he wasn’t sure if he would recover in time to join his Iron Maiden bandmates on their tour planned for that spring: “Now I’m laying in the bed, and I’m trying to move, move my hand, at least my fingers or something, encourage my body to, ‘Come on, you can do this. You can do this.’ Because we had scheduled this tour two years prior. And we were starting in May, and we were gonna do rehearsals starting the last week of April.”
“So I thought, ‘Well, I’ve got three months to see if I can at least play again.’ And even holding a drumstick, there was nothing there,” he added.
He also revealed in another interview that his bandmates helped him get through it, but it was Steve Harris who was the most supportive during his recovery.