IRON MAIDEN
MONSTER, INC.
Iron Maiden wouldn’t be Iron Maiden without Eddie. This is the history of metal’s greatest mascot
WORDS: PAUL TRAVERS
JOHN MCMURTRIE
He’s been a knife-wielding killer and a flag-waving 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.”