Bruce Dickinson needles Donald Trump as Iron Maiden open a North American tour

Iron Maiden opened the North American leg of their Run For Your Lives tour, and Bruce Dickinson spent part of the first night on the subject of geography. In Toronto the singer made a point of calling Lake Ontario by its name, after Donald Trump floated renaming it.

"How long has it been since we have been to Toronto? Too long, too long," Dickinson asked the crowd, before adding that the band had crossed Lake Ontario to get there and would be crossing the Gulf of Mexico later. The emphasis was the joke. He then summarised the renaming push as a ridiculous state of the world.

The context is a 2025 executive order in which Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America for United States territorial waters. International waters are generally not renamed by one country, and the International Hydrographic Organization still uses Gulf of Mexico. The name itself is old: it appears on a world map as early as 1550 and turns up in written records by 1552.

Doing this in Canada rather than in an American arena gave it a sharper edge, since the lake in question is shared with the country the audience was standing in. It also fits a long habit. Dickinson has talked politics from stages for decades, and rarely with much regard for whether it plays.

The tour is a heavy commitment for a band of this age and vintage. Run For Your Lives has been circling the world since it began, and the North American run is one of the longer stretches on the routing, which is what makes an early night the moment to set the tone.

Iron Maiden's own history keeps coming back around, including the 40th anniversary of the single Wasted Years, while Dickinson has said his next solo album arrives in 2027. Other metal routings are collected on the tour guide.