Behind the Cover Part 1: Derek Riggs and the Birth of Eddie
The rejected punk painting that grew into heavy metal's most famous face
Somewhere in a wooden portfolio full of commercial artwork sat one canvas nobody had commissioned. A dead-eyed figure in a torn T-shirt stood under a streetlamp, his skin the color and texture of something exhumed.
Derek Riggs called it Electric Matthew Says Hello, and roughly two years before he ever crossed paths with Iron Maiden, his own agent handed it back with a verdict: not very commercial. The painting sat in that portfolio, unsold and unwanted, until a manager named Rod Smallwood walked past a wall of EMI jazz covers and asked to see what else the artist had.
Self-Taught
Riggs got a year and a term into art school in Coventry, where he’d grown up, before he was asked to leave for complaining about the course. He went back to teaching himself, drawing on Jack Kirby’s Marvel pages, American horror comics, H.P. Lovecraft, and pulp science fiction.
In his early twenties he’d landed in Finsbury Park, a corner of London he later described as falling apart around him, unemployment thick in the air. He paid his rent painting jazz covers for EMI, work he later called simple and not very good, along with rock and disco covers and some work for a reggae band. None of it touched what interested him, which was building his own mythology out of science fiction and dread.
On his own time, with no brief and no deadline, working alone in his shed, Riggs had been developing a personal iconography built around urban decay and wasted youth: dead figures dressed like his neighbors, propped up in the actual crumbling streets of Finsbury Park, standing in for a generation nobody in power seemed to be watching. Electric Matthew was the purest version of that idea he’d painted, and it was also, structurally, useless: too strange for the industry that had commissioned everything else in his portfolio.
The Portfolio at Wessex Studios
The story of how that portfolio reached Iron Maiden gets told a few different ways, but Smallwood spotting the jazz covers on an EMI art director’s wall is the version Riggs keeps returning to, and it lines up with his own recollection of the timeline. Riggs hauled the portfolio to Wessex Recording Studios, where the band was working. Who actually pulled Electric Matthew out of the stack shifts depending on which telling you catch: Smallwood spotting it and calling it their guy in some versions, Steve Harris sifting through the portfolio and landing on it in others.
A Prop Called Eddie
Riggs worked freelance for the first few albums before the band put him under contract, offering him royalties in exchange for exclusivity that would keep him off every other act’s covers for years. They also inherited a name they’d already been using for years. Long before Riggs entered the picture, Iron Maiden had toured with a papier-mâché mask cast from the face of their lighting technician, Dave Beazley, rigged to squirt fake blood during the band’s title track. In a thick London accent, “head” comes out close enough to “‘ead” that the prop had already picked up a nickname on the road: Eddie. When Riggs’ painting became the album cover, the crowd kept calling it what it had always been called.
Not a Monster From Anywhere Else
Riggs insists Eddie was never meant to be a monster from somewhere else. He wanted a figure that lived on the same street as the people looking at him; not an alien, but a neighbor. A story has circulated for years that a photograph of a dead soldier’s head mounted on a tank in Vietnam was the spark for the whole character. In later accounts, Riggs has pushed back on that framing, insisting the photo was reference material for corpse skin texture and nothing more. The real starting point, in his account, was sociological before it was anything else: a symbol for a generation society had written off, made scary enough to sell records.
1980 The Debut
That figure, hair lengthened at the band’s request to lose its punk mohawk edge and read a little heavier for the new-wave-of-heavy-metal crowd, became the cover of Iron Maiden’s self-titled 1980 debut: the same Finsbury Park streets Riggs walked every day, rendered under the streetlamps. The original painting didn’t survive its own release. Riggs has said someone at the printers assumed the job was finished and threw it in the trash.
It means one of the most recognizable images in heavy metal exists today only in reproduction. For the Running Free single that preceded the album, Riggs got his first solo commission to paint Eddie outright, and used the moment to sketch a wall of graffiti behind him name-checking Zeppelin, Scorpions, AC/DC, Priest, and the Sex Pistols. A small, private nod to the scene Maiden was breaking into.
The Thatcher Single
That first year also produced one of the more telling anecdotes about how Riggs and the band worked together. The Sanctuary single art started as something simpler: Eddie standing over a nameless woman, an image Riggs traced straight back to the song’s own line about never having killed a woman before. When he brought it to the band, they asked him to swap in a specific face: Margaret Thatcher, who manager Rod Smallwood has said the band had come to think of as “the Iron Maiden” after her hard line against the Soviet Union.
Riggs made the change. The uproar that followed didn’t come from newspapers refusing to run the image; by Riggs’ own account, the black bar slapped over Thatcher’s eyes and the talk of a “ban” were the band’s own management manufacturing free publicity, and at least one paper printed the uncensored cover regardless. An idea Riggs sketched loosely, the band sharpened into something with teeth.
1981 Killers
Killers, a year later, is where the partnership finally had room to breathe. The density of the image says as much on its own: Eddie on rain-slicked cobblestones with a bloodied axe, a victim’s hand clawing at his shirt, the actual block of flats Riggs was living in rendered in the background along with cats on rooftops, a half-hidden sex shop sign, and the number 22 stamped on a doorway, a detail fans would later connect to the Maiden song “22 Acacia Avenue,” though Iron Maiden wouldn’t release it for another year.
It’s the cover where Eddie’s look finally locks into place: no longer a rough sketch of an idea, but a complete character with a world around him. The Twilight Zone single from the same era drew a different kind of pushback: press coverage branded the image “gratuitous sexism,” reading it as Eddie stalking a girl in her bedroom. What the outraged coverage missed, critic Garry Bushell later pointed out, was the framed photo sitting on her dressing table and the song’s own lyric about three long years gone; Eddie wasn’t an intruder, he was a dead lover reaching back through the mirror. Riggs painted the whole thing over a single weekend, modeling the girl on a friend of his.
1982 The Number of the Beast
Nothing about The Number of the Beast started as a grand statement. The central idea, Eddie looming over a horned devil who in turn controls a puppet figure below, didn’t come from any deliberate attempt to build atmosphere; by Riggs’ own admission, it came from a comic book he’d read as a kid and adapted under pressure. He painted it in roughly forty-eight hours without sleep, and modeled the devil’s face loosely on Salvador Dalí as a private joke; the time crunch meant other details, like the distorted figure he’d originally envisioned, never got worked out.
Riggs had actually painted it for the Purgatory single, but Smallwood decided it was too strong for a picture sleeve and held it back for the album instead. When the album landed in 1982, the backlash arrived from a direction Riggs’ painting alone hadn’t invited: American religious groups staged record burnings, ringed venues on tour with picket signs and crosses, and treated the album’s title and lyrics as an endorsement Riggs never intended and Bruce Dickinson spent years explaining away. Riggs has shrugged off the question of what the band thought of the cover, insisting he genuinely doesn’t know, only that Smallwood liked it.
1983 Piece of Mind
By Piece of Mind, Eddie had started accumulating history. The cover puts him in a padded cell, straitjacketed and chained, a bolted metal plate now fixed permanently to his forehead, visible proof of a lobotomy that stayed with him, unhealed, in the covers that followed over the next several years. The logic, as Riggs has framed it since, was continuity: Eddie keeps his scars because they’re his life. The band had been calling the album Food for Thought since deciding Eddie would be lobotomized on the cover, until the title Piece of Mind came up in a pub in Jersey during the writing sessions, a name that worked as two puns at once: a piece of Eddie’s mind, quite literally removed, and a play on peace of mind. The inner sleeve carries its own private gag: Riggs and producer Martin Birch photographed in full armor as Dr. Death and Black Night, and on the back cover Riggs’ signature is worked into a necklace held in a skeletal hand.
1984 Powerslave
Powerslave pushed Riggs somewhere he had never worked before, literally: he was flown out to the Bahamas while the band recorded at Compass Point, painting alone in a room while Maiden worked in the studio down the hall, barely crossing paths with any of them. He built the composition at a scale he rarely allowed himself. The finished board was twenty-three by thirty-two inches, big enough that Riggs later said he simply couldn’t have drawn it any smaller.
Tropical humidity turned the process into a fight: his airbrush kept spitting condensed water onto wet watercolor, and he lost hours trying to lift a single water blot off Eddie’s nose before bringing in a dehumidifier to save the piece. Steve Harris had handed him the visual seed — an eighteenth-century engraving of figures dragging the severed head of Rameses — and Riggs built an entire Egyptian tomb around it, researching hieroglyphics well enough to mix real ones with invented glyphs and slip a tiny Mickey Mouse into the corner as a private joke.
When commentators later pointed out the resemblance to Earth, Wind & Fire’s Egyptian-themed All ‘n All, Riggs waved it off, insisting he’d gone back to the same tomb of Rameses II that record had drawn from and simply done it better. He pointedly noted that Earth, Wind & Fire’s cover didn’t have a hieroglyphic Mickey Mouse hiding in it.
Working for Rod, Not the Band
Across these five years, the phone kept ringing the same way even as the stakes climbed. For most of the early period it was Smallwood on the other end, not the band: Friday night, a cover wanted by Monday morning, then two or three days of work delivered with next to no oversight in between. The Number of the Beast is the extreme version of that rhythm; by Powerslave, the deadlines had loosened slightly and the work had gotten more integrated with the band’s schedule, even if Riggs was still mostly working alone.
Riggs has maintained, not without some bitterness, that he was the one quietly building a visual language that carried across every release: scars that persisted, streets that recurred, a mythology stitched together cover to cover, and that the band eventually came to believe the connective thread had been their idea all along. Nothing about that tension had boiled over yet in 1984. It would, eventually, but not on these five covers.
The Template
What Riggs built in that stretch, whether or not anyone around him clocked it at the time, was a template other metal mascots would follow in the years after. A mascot that could headline an album cover the way a band member headlined a stage, evolve without losing its core identity, and reward long-term fans with details only visible if you’d been paying attention since 1980; Eddie carried his scars from one cover to the next in a way few band mascots before him had, and he had already been doing it for years before Megadeth’s Vic Rattlehead or Anthrax’s Not Man ever showed up.
Riggs never set out to invent a genre convention. He was a self-taught painter from Portsmouth who wanted to make a scary picture and got the job done under deadline, working alone in a room while the actual rock stars were somewhere else entirely. Eddie became bigger than any of them anyway.
