“So I sort of took the Egyptian idea and I started drawing. “, ‘We’ve got this Egyptian thing and we want Eddie as part of a pyramid,’ or something, and Steve Harris had this 18th-century engraving of some guy dragging the head of Rameses,” Derek Riggs told Canada’s The Auburn Reporter. Another incredibly detailed illustration, it nominates itself for the top spot in our list of the best Iron Maiden album covers. Indeed, the designer was helped along by the Egyptian theme of Powerslave’s title track, which inspired him to create his first masterpiece: a depiction of ancient Egyptians marching a sarcophagus into a pyramid fronted by a statue of Eddie, rendered as an Egyptian god.
The logical conclusion may have been that death couldn’t be far away – but fear not, for Derek Riggs had some elaborate plans for him in the afterlife.
Iron Maiden fans may have wondered what fate could befall Eddie after he was sectioned and lobotomised for the Piece Of Mind cover. Also it took three months to do all that work, nobody will pay you to do that anymore.” Twelve inches square is a lot more forgiving that a five-inch CD cover. The only reason I got away with it in the first place is that it was done for. Somewhere In Time only just about works on a CD cover. In fact you can’t do that level of detail on a modern CD cover, it just won’t work very well. “There has been nothing that detailed before or since. “ Somewhere In Time is the most intricate album cover ever designed,” Derek Riggs declared in a 2012 interview with The House Of Wormwood. Indeed, if fans study the illustration hard enough, they can even see images of Steve Harris’ beloved West Ham United football team thrashing Arsenal, and Bruce Dickinson clutching Eddie’s brain, from the Piece Of Mind artwork.
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The first of these, Somewhere In Time – with its meticulously drawn Blade Runner-esque landscape, in which Eddie is depicted as a Terminator-like cyborg – features all manner of minute details across its full gatefold sleeve. He wasn’t some alien creature in some far off land, he was in your neighbourhood and in your face.”Īll of Derek Riggs’ Iron Maiden album covers can rightly be considered classics, but two of them are simply masterpieces. I used a dead figure and dressed him in T-shirt and jeans and put him in London where I lived. So Eddie became the symbol for the wasted youth, the disenfranchised generation who couldn’t get a job and had no obvious future.
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“I was trying to work out how to make symbolic imagery that people could read and that had some relevance in the culture of the time. “I was working with symbolism at the time,” Riggs said in an interview with The House Of Wormwood. The image was inspired by a picture titled Electric Matthew Says Hello, by the then up-and-coming artist Derek Riggs, which led to Maiden’s manager, Rod Smallwood, commissioning Riggs to illustrate the band’s debut with a wonderfully nihilistic picture which remains among the best album covers of all time.
Iron Maiden’s mascot, Eddie (also known as Edward T Head or Eddie The Head), had been known to appear onstage in a different guise during the band’s early concerts, but his gruesome visage first stared out at the world from the cover of Iron Maiden’s self-titled debut album.