Derek Riggs on drawing “Eddie” from Iron Maiden
I remember when Killers came out…This artwork was flooring!! (chuck)
One of the people who works on the website tells a story about looking at Killers as a ten year old kid and being uncontrollably drawn to it, saying, “It was like pornography.” This is funny to me, because it’s true — it was unavoidably compelling and obviously evil, but also because of the countless Eddie posters that shared wall space with Heather Locklear or Pamela Anderson. So, how do you look back on your life as a pornographer?
[laughs] Oh, I wasn’t part of all that. I just drew a picture and the rest of that stuff didn’t really have anything to do with me. From the first thing that I drew, it was all a logical response to what I saw around me at the time. It’s funny you say that about pornography, because part of my motivation at the time was a reaction against what I was seeing in hard rock bands. They all had boring art with half-naked women and it was all really crap. I wanted to draw something that had some balls to it. There was nothing else like what I was doing at the time.
That’s funny, because Eddie ended up having such a strong appeal, to the point that people had to put posters of him up in their rooms.
I had a funny experience of my own. About two months after I submitted the art to Killers, I was walking down Oxford Street in London, where I lived. There was a huge Virgin records store at the end of the block. They did an absolutely huge 15 foot by 15 foor square painting of Killers. I didn’t even know it had been released. I thought, “Fucking hell, that’s terrible.”
read the rest here or Eddie will come and get you…
