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09/11/2005 - Day of interviews.

I slept like a rock that night. I came down for the breakfast; all guys were there already. Ralf, Bruce and I spoke for hours about cars, Ralf’s passion, and airplanes, Bruce’s passion .The conversation started, because I told Bruce that had suffered a small accident in an airplane coming back from London the second time, nothing serious, but very intriguing. He started to tell me what might be able to have caused that, and then this crazy chat started. This day we would have a full schedule, many interviews for magazines and MTV. I decided that before going to my media commitments, I would be with my band, after all, I hadn’t had much time to be with them because of all things I had to do. I went to the room where they had congregated themselves for a good chat. The afternoon arrived, we had already given many interviews, now was MTV's turn. My first time on MTV and at Bruce’s side, how cool is that, huh? As soon as the van arrived at the studio, some Iron Maiden fans were at the door, and when they saw the van, you can imagine what happened, right? Hysteria, screams and stuff like that. The security guys had come to collect us. But I was like a sailor of his first trip in a situation like that, so I stopped to speak with the fans. Then I didn’t enter the studio together with the staff that arrived with me, soon, I was barred by the security guys, as if I was another fan. If the security didn’t know who Bruce was, imagine me. But soon Paulo went down running and screaming with the security guys, "Are you crazy? This is his show ", it was very funny.

In the MTV studio.

After passing through a battalion of fans and security, we were finally inside the MTV building. Everybody there was extremely nice and polite, I liked all of them. Before we went into the interview, I saw Mr. Bruno Sutter entering the room where I was. When I saw him I thought, "Cool, Detonator", (Detonator is Bruno's alter-ego, the singer of a heavy metal band from Brazil called Massacration, it is a joke band created by some MTV humorists, and it is extremely famous in Brazil, with their first album selling more than 70.000 copies). I arose from the sofa to compliment him but he came in my direction with the Execution album in hands! He said that he adored the album and asked me to autograph it. I though that it was a trick, but it wasn’t, he knew all the tracks, it was really cool, I could never have imagined that. We went into the interview, everything ran well and we came back out to the van. Some fans pursued us in a car trough the city, I remembered that I used to do things like this several times in the past when Maiden came to play in Rio. This time I looked to my side and Bruce was talking with me, at this moment I started to think, "Why am I not inside the car that pursues anymore? How has everything happened and now I am inside of the pursued van?". Sometimes things happen and you cannot understand how, it does not matter how much search, you will never quite see where everything started.

During The Dinner.

We arrived at the barbecue house. Some fans were still outside the place waiting for us. We had a good time there talking and drinking wine (except I don’t drink wine, of course). Then when we were coming back to the van, Bruce asked me, "Which kind of airplane you were in?” he still was talking on the subject that we had during the breakfast many hours ago, when I spoke about my small air accident. Then I perceived that he was impressed.

10/11/2005 - General rehearsals .

The morning arrived, one more time the breakfast was full of talks and laughs. We received the schedule of the day, like every day, we saw that we would be free up to 18:00, therefore my band would be soundchecking the instruments, and the light team would be preparing all the final details. That was when I received an invitation, a different kind of invitation for me. All of the guest artists were going for a kart race, and I was invited to join them. Ralf was super animated, because he loves Formula One. I said I couldn’t go, because I wanted to rest, after all, after so many months preparing for a show like this one I couldn't waste any spare moment of peace. I went to my room and tried to sleep, but was impossible. So I decided to sing and to prepare my voice for the great rehearsal, it would be my first time singing at the side of all these stars, I mean, literally at the side. I needed to feel well prepared.