He’s been a knife-wielding killer and a flagwaving soldier, a cyborg bounty hunter and a Japanese samurai. He’s been mummified, lobotomised, disembowelled, set on fire, interred and dug up again (twice), and turned into a tree. He’s fought the Devil, murdered a Prime Minster and attempted to kill members of Iron Maiden onstage on numerous occasions. We’re not exaggerating when we say there’s nothing like Eddie.
From his humble beginnings as a papier-mâché mask stuck over the drum kit at early pub gigs to various towering live incarnations, via his appearance on virtually every Maiden album sleeve, single cover and t-shirt, Eddie – aka Eddie The ’Ed, aka Edward T Head, aka Edward The Great, aka (possibly) Benjamin Breeg – is absolutely integral to the history of not only Iron Maiden but metal in general. This is the story of Eddie, by the people who know him best.
Steve Harris (Iron Maiden leader and bassist): “We used to have a singer [Dennis Wilcock] who was really into Kiss and used to pull a sword through his mouth with blood capsules and all this business. When he left we thought, ‘It’s good for people to come and see that sort of thing’, but we didn’t want it to be within the band itself.”
Dave ‘Lights’ Beazley (lighting technician): “In the song Iron Maiden the lyric goes: ‘See the blood begin to flow’, so on the backdrop that we used for the pub gigs, with the help of a friend from art college, I rigged up a mask that was made from a mould of my own face, which coughed up blood in time to those lyrics.”
Steve Harris: “Dougie [former drummer Doug Sampson] used to get covered in fake blood every night. And he had blond hair so he could never get the bloody stain out!”
Dave Lights: “The Eddie that was used as the band became more famous was designed from artwork by Derek Riggs, but the original idea started with that first mask.”
Derek Riggs (original Eddie cover artist): “Eddie was supposed to be a punk. He had the mohawk part and Rod [Smallwood, Maiden manager] and Steve Harris had a little conversation, and came back and said, ‘Can you give it more hair sticking out the side?’, because their fanbase was a new layer of metal just coming through, and the punk thing wouldn’t go down very well with them.”
Steve Harris: “When Derek Riggs came along with that artwork, we were like, ‘Wow, that’s where we want to take Eddie The ’Ed!”
The illustrated Eddie’s first appearance was on Maiden’s debut single, 1980’s Running Free, but his face was shadowed as the band didn’t want to ruin the big reveal of their eponymous debut album.
Derek Riggs: “Eddie represented the idea that the youth of today were being wasted by society. He started out like that, anyway, and I made him more scary.”
Steve Harris: “We didn’t want to be on the front covers. We’re all pretty shy really, deep down. So Eddie fulfilled all of that.”
Derek Riggs: “I never knew the band very well. I had only met them a few times until The Number Of The Beast. That particular idea [the TNOTB cover] I stole from a comic book that I had read in the 70s.”
Bruce Dickinson (vocals): “Powerslave is one of my favourite album covers, possibly of all time, but certainly of Maiden. I just think it’s a classic, and it has inspired so many of our stage performances as well. It’s just like ancient Egypt itself: it’s eternal and eternally interesting!”
Derek Riggs: “[Somewhere In Time] took three months in all – I just had to stop, because I had had enough. It got into my head and I just couldn’t see anything else. I couldn’t think about anything else. It did my head in, because there are all these little details.”
Bruce Dickinson: “I had worked with Derek Riggs on the cover of [Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son], which had a touch of Salvador Dalí about it, with its slightly surreal procession of candles and a partially disembodied, skeletal Eddie. Next to Powerslave, it’s my favourite Derek Riggs cover art.”
As well as the album artwork, Eddie became a staple of the band’s live show, appearing in various formats ranging from painted backdrops to gigantic mechanical versions and lumbering walk-on roles.
Rod Smallwood (manager): “At first it was just me with an Eddie mask on. I’d just go bounding around the stage like a lunatic during the intro to get the audience worked up, and the place would go mad.”
Bruce Dickinson: “I remember when [The Number Of The Beast walk-on Eddie] was unveiled. They had a roller-shutter door, and it came up and there it was, standing there like in [1939 horror film] Son Of Frankenstein. We were, like, ‘Holy fuck! What the fuck is that?!’ That was the closest we’ve ever got to that feeling that fans get when that thing first walks onstage.”
Charlie Kail (stage set engineer, World Slavery tour): “There were some groundbreaking special effects, like the Eddie-on-a stick. It was a head, shoulders, arms and torso on a cherry picker – I think it’s still the biggest Eddie ever built.”
Steve Harris: “I’ve always liked the Somewhere In Time walk-on. That one had so much detail on it. The Trooper one is really good as well.”
Adrian Smith (guitar): “I had mixed feelings about Eddie over the years. I thought, ‘Is this overshadowing the band? It’s a big puppet, is it a bit questionable?’ We’ve had a few really dodgy Eddies over the years where I’ve thought, ‘Oh my god…’”
Iron Maiden and Derek Riggs parted company on less-than-amicable terms after 1990’s No Prayer For The Dying album. The baton was picked up by a series of artists, including Melvyn Grant, Hugh Syme, Timothy Bradstreet and Mark Wilkinson, each of whom put a different spin on Eddie.
Melvyn Grant (artist): “My approach to Fear Of The Dark was to see how sinister I could make Eddie. We’ve had all the physical violence with the blood and sharp things, now let’s instill something more psychological… I went off and produced a few pencil drawings, of which the Tree-Eddie was one. I had wanted to redesign the look of Eddie quite extensively, but [Maiden’s management company] Sanctuary said to keep it close to the original.”
Bruce Dickinson: “The [Dance Of Death] cover was also controversial. A partially finished work in progress, but Steve loved it and was not to be shifted. Personally, I still find it embarrassing… The artist was so mortified that he withdrew his name from the album credits. I didn’t blame him.”
Mark Wilkinson (artist): “I always say that the artists that came after Derek Riggs are caretakers of his brilliant creation. If you don’t respect that, then you are fooling yourself. However, there’s not much point in simply recreating the same thing over and over again… or attempting a pastiche in the same style as Derek, which would be disrespectful.”
More than 45 years after he made his first appearance above the drumkit, Eddie remains one of the most recognisable and iconic images in music.
Corey Taylor (Slipknot): “There wasn’t a dude that I hung out with that wasn’t trying to draw Eddie on their schoolbooks.”
Lars Ulrich (Metallica): “It wasn’t just the music… you had the best packaging, the coolest t-shirts, everything… it was a big inspiration for us in Metallica.”
Bruce Dickinson: “We have Eddie, so we don’t have to be the rock star. We don’t have to go and take some overdose and be found lying outside some Paris nightclub and go into rehab and have all these things and go and have, like, six porn-star girlfriends and all that shit, which is just, like, nothing to do with music. We’ve got Eddie. And Eddie is more radical and cool than any of them.”
Dicky Bell (production manager): “The kids fucking love Eddie more than they love the band. And you can see why: it’s cause he’s one of them. In their minds he’s like the Iron Maiden fan from Hell!”
Steve Harris: “Has Eddie ever done me a damage onstage? No. [The people inside the costume] usually avoid me. They normally go for the guitar players. Not that I’ve told them to, but they sidestep me.”
Bruce Dickinson: “Eddie is Iron Maiden’s mascot, monster, alter ego – call it what you will. Part supernatural, part primal, part aggressive adolescent, Eddie is a super anti-hero with no backstory. Eddie doesn’t give a fuck. He just is.”
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