Would you take advice from Iron Maiden vocalist Bruce Dickinson on the future of offshore?

Well being the opinionated man Dickinson is he certainly wasn’t afraid to give his opinions on where the energy industry was headed in interview on the side of the Press and Journal Gold Awards, held last week in the offshore energy hub of the UK, Aberdeen, last week.

Dickinson likened the current situation the oil and gas industry finds itself in to that the music industry found itself in 15 years ago when file sharing turned its business model up side down.

“It happened to the music industry 10 to 15 years ago,” Dickinson told Energy Voice, a sister publication to the Press and Journal. “The oil industry is like the record industry. It needs to look at what it’s doing. It’s an energy supplier.

“When record labels got turned over by digital it did not mean people stopped wanting music. It just meant people did not want to pay for records any more.

“They still pay for music, only in different ways. They buy the t-shirt, the concert ticket, the merchandise, but the music itself they get pretty much for free.

“For the oil industry, people still need energy, but they will use it and get it in different ways. If the oil industry only concentrates on digging stuff out of the ground it will go the way of the dinosaurs.”

With a view that the oil price would remain low for many years for years Dickinson believes oil and gas companies need to diversify their activities. Not surprisingly, given his own passions, he turned his comments to the aviation industry related to the oil industry.

“Helicopters are needed for many different things, but there are not enough of them around, so maybe people can redeploy their resources,” he was quoted as saying.

“You need to think outside the box. If you’ve got something as complex as a helicopter, but it’s not needed to take oil workers around, maybe it could be doing something else.”

With likes of John Fredriksen eyeing conversion of PSVs to aquaculture vessels maybe the man once branded the “human air raid siren” is not so far from the mark.