The defining event in the singing career of Paul Di’Anno – and one whose influence he never managed to escape – was his departure from the London-based heavy metal band Iron Maiden in 1981.

Having joined in 1978, Di’Anno recorded an EP and two pioneering albums with the group, but disputes with the bandleader Steve Harris over musical direction, as well as his own unreliable behaviour, led the group to fire him.

The shadow of Iron Maiden lingered over Di’Anno, who has died aged 66, for the next 40 years, with a sequence of briefly successful projects mostly alluding to his former membership of one of the world’s biggest bands. After his departure he quickly descended into a chaotic lifestyle blighted by substance abuse.

“When you’re fucked up on drugs and alcohol you turn into a complete prick,” he admitted while promoting his 2010 autobiography, The Beast, which included endless tales of drunken aggression, unpleasantly graphic encounters with groupies and confrontations with gang members and police officers, as well as incidents of domestic violence. One of these led to a prison sentence in Los Angeles in the early 1990s, after he assaulted a girlfriend with a knife while high on cocaine.

Di’Anno was born Paul Andrews in Chingford, Essex, to a Brazilian father and an English mother: he also used the surname Taylor after his mother remarried. As a teenager he worked as a butcher and chef while singing with a punk band, supposedly called the Paedophiles. His break came when he met Harris in 1978 at the Red Lion pub in Leytonstone and auditioned for Iron Maiden, which Harris had founded three years previously. Joining the band, he adopted the surname Di’Anno.

An untrained but compelling singer, Di’Anno’s raspy, aggressive vocals suited the songs that Iron Maiden recorded for an acclaimed 1979 EP, The Soundhouse Tapes, and their first, self-titled album, released a year later. The early lineup – Di’Anno and Harris plus drummer Clive Burr and the guitarists Dave Murray and Dennis Stratton – built a loyal following in London, particularly at the Ruskin Arms in East Ham, with the weekly rock music magazine Sounds labelling the movement they led “the new wave of British heavy metal”.

Iron Maiden and its lead single Running Free were minor hits, with the latter accompanied by an appearance on Top of the Pops, but the Di’Anno-fronted version of the group gained its greatest public exposure in 1985 when one of the album’s songs, Phantom of the Opera, soundtracked a TV advert for the energy drink Lucozade, starring the athlete Daley Thompson.

By then Di’Anno and Iron Maiden had long since parted ways. The group’s second album, Killers (1981), was more musically complex than their debut: unhappy with this new direction and with the prospect of extended months on the road, the singer sought distraction in substance abuse, consuming up to five grams of cocaine and a bottle of tequila per day, he later recalled. He was subsequently sacked from the band, relinquishing his share of the group’s recordings for £50,000: Iron Maiden recruited a new singer, Bruce Dickinson, and went on to enormous success with a series of high-selling albums and tours.

Left to his own devices, the singer formed a series of heavy metal bands, the first of which, Di’Anno, released a self-titled album in 1984 to limited success. He was briefly a member of Gogmagog and spent the rest of the 80s with a new band, Battlezone.

From 1990 onwards Di’Anno fronted the band Killers, and despite an erratic lifestyle and legal problems he made a living from touring in Europe and Brazil, where he lived in his later years. “In South America we’re absolutely bloody huge, so it makes you feel a bit deflated when you do a small pub and club tour [in the UK],” he told one interviewer.

In 2011 Di’Anno was sentenced to nine months in prison in the UK after being convicted of fraud, although he was released for good behaviour after two months. While performing concerts around the world, he had claimed benefits of £45,000 from the Department of Work and Pensions, stating that nerve damage to his back made him unable to work.

By 2020 he was genuinely suffering from lymphedema of the knee, which obliged him to sing from a wheelchair on stage. His injury was resolved after a crowdfunding campaign and a donation by Iron Maiden, with whom Di’Anno had maintained a distant but mostly cordial relationship.

He was married five times and fathered six children: with the exception of his first wife, Beverley, he kept details of his family members private.

• Paul Di’Anno (Paul Andrews), singer, born 17 May 1958; death announced 21 October 2024