History of Eddie: Iron Maiden Mascot ?

Steve and the band were trying out different things to incorporate in their stage shows a long time before the first Eddie appeared on an album cover. After Dennis Wilcock (a former vocalist) left the band a guy named Dave Beasly took over the whole stage act thing, and he soon got the nickname Dave Lights because of his almost insane ideas to improve the stage show with things like gunpowder, flower pots, lights and even vacuum cleaner parts. Once he it placed in the fund of the stage, beside the logotype of the band, a great mask that had acquired in an art academy and he used an aquarium air-pump to pump artificial blood through the mouth during the song Iron Maiden. The fans gave to the puppet the name of Eddie The Head, based on a well-known plenty joke at that time which goes something like this:

 

A woman had given birth to just a head, the doctor told her she needn't worry since he would come up with a suitable body for good 'ole Eddie within a year or five. So five years later Eddie's father entered the room on Eddie's birthday and said: "well today's your birthday, and boy do we have a surprise for you!" after which Eddie replied: "Oh no!, not another bloody hat!"

Eddie became the registered mark of the band but he was still only that head on the stage and nothing more, that is until the band hired Derek Riggs, through their manager Rod Smallwood, to designed the long awaited body for Eddie. The band decided to keep the "new" Eddie's appearance as a secret for everybody until the first album, therefore the Eddie which appears on the Running Free sleeve, is standing in the shadows.

The first album indeed featured the face of Eddie, it was still a 'weird' Eddie and Derek soon changed his face. It wouldn't take long before Eddie appeared in the British newspapers and caused his first controversy, this was due to the "Sanctuary" sleeve on which Eddie stabbed Margaret Thatcher, British first-minister, to death because she had torn an Iron Maiden poster off the wall. The later releases of the Sanctuary sleeve had to be censored, therefore a black bar was drawn over her eyes, this bar only appeared on the British releases. A Maggie's revenge was swift though, judging from the "Women In Uniform" sleeve , on which she's waiting in an ambush to shoot Eddie with a machine gun. This sleeve caused a second minor controversy because a handful of outraged feminists accused Maiden of sexism since Eddie was walking arm in arm with a nurse and a schoolgirl, no one really took this protest very serious though.

Other great curiosity in the history of Eddie is that only in double live album "Live After Death" the full name of the mascot was revealed. In a tombstone of its grave it was written, together with a text of H. P. Lovercraft, Edward T. Head. (Edward The Head)

The sleeves in good part of the albums and singles, have a sequence. Eddie loses an eye in the war (Aces High), an eye bionic is implanted (Somewhere In Time), he fights with the demon and it dominates him (Run To The Hill and The Number Of The Beast), it is locked into a sanatorium without his brain (Piece Of Mind), it is buried in a great pyramid (Powerslave) and he resurrects (Live After Death), besides other important sleeves.

 Over the years to come Eddie changed a lot, the stage-Eddies became a few meters tall(!) and Eddie himself changed as well. Especially around the Somewhere In Time era Eddie started to change heavily, he looked more or less like a 'terminator'. These transformations were topped two years later during the Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son era, where only the upper part of Eddie's body remained.

For some reason the drawings began to deteriorate ever since that era, the No Prayer For The Dying sleeve featured a complete Eddie again (i.e. not just a head), but Eddie wasn't drawn as beautifully as Derek used to draw him. The only really good (Riggs) Eddie drawing since 1990 was the "Bring Your Daughter... To The Slaughter" drawing. It seems as if Maiden was getting disappointed with the Eddies the way Derek started to draw them, for the sleeve of "Fear Of The Dark" was drawn by a different artist (Melvyn Grant) and the ones which were drawn by Derek were rather ugly.

Things didn't exactly improve when The X Factor was released, for the recent releases all feature a computer-drawn Eddie by Hugh Syme, in opinion of the majority of the Maiden fans this just isn't Eddie and everyone is missing of the great drawings which Derek used to make during the eighties... 

The Best Of The Beast art was done by Derek Riggs but still lacks the quality of the glory day's illustrations such as Powerslave, Somewhere In Time or Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son... It is still to be determined if Derek Riggs will work on the new Maiden Album....

The sleeve illustrations and the new appearances of Eddie are always as awaited as the new music. Eddie reached the top in "Ed Hunter", in which is the star of a spectacular game of computer made by Synthetic Dimensions.