Derek Riggs Interview

THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY RAN IN THE ART OF STORYTELLING MAGAZINE ISSUE #1.

For the past 25 years Derek Riggs has supplied us with countless images of the most well know monster in heavy metal history, Eddie Maiden. Eddie has transformed Iron Maiden into a merchandising giant. The attraction to Eddie is as strong today as it was with his first appearance in 1979. Riggs is opinionated, upfront, and out to impress no one. We linked up with him to talk about art, religion, politics and of course Eddie. Enjoy.

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Iron Maiden’s management came across a painting of yours that featured a character called Electric Matthew. Electric Matthew would later be transformed into Eddie Maiden. Obviously the original Electric Matthew wasn’t designed specifically for Iron Maiden. What was your initial inspiration for the character you were creating?

.The original picture was inspired by a photo of a dead soldier’s skull that I found in TIME magazine when I was about 15. I used it in a photo-montage, stuck it to the front of a folder and covered it in plastic. Years later I found it and decided to use it for the basis for a picture. It was the late 1970’s and Punk rock was big in England. I thought that maybe some punk band might be able to use it.

.What was the creation process like when doing the Iron Maiden album covers? Did you have free reign on the designs or did most of that come from the band?

.Most of the time almost nothing came from the band. I would get a title or the title and a direction to go in and then I would send a sketch to the manager Rod Smallwood. We would talk over the idea and decide if Rod felt it needed anything. Quite often he would just say go ahead and I would get on with the job. For example, the brief I got for Somewhere in Time was, “We want a city like the one in Blade Runner,” and the rest was left pretty much up to me. The look of Eddie was my invention, as was the content of the city. Steve came to me near the end of the work and asked if I could include some little details, like the names of his previous bands.

.Of all the Iron Maiden covers you created, which one is your favorite?

.Somewhere in Time, because of the detail. I like detail. Clairvoyant and Can I Play with Madness because they are so ape shit, and Stranger in a Strange Land because it looks like Clint Eastwood.

.For the 80’s, some of the album covers were very over the top. The Sanctuary single’s sleeve had a picture of Eddie with a knife in his hand, standing over the dead body of Margaret Thatcher who had just been caught tearing down an Iron Maiden poster. Did you come under attack for that and did you have any issues with doing a cover with that kind of imagery?

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How does military grade nerve gas get out of a secure facility? From that time on my experiences with the medical profession indicated to me that my health has been monitored by someone other than the local doctor.

.Margaret Thatcher was twisted and evil. She did England an enormous amount of harm. She destroyed a great deal of England’s national resources. The last thing I heard was that she was under house arrest for trying to have assassinated an African diplomat who disagreed with her policies towards his country. In England they talk about free speech, but they don’t have any. Or, the free speech they do have doesn’t matter because it doesn’t make any difference anyway. In fact, they are the most tightly constrained and highly monitored society in the world. If you go into central London, by the time you get there you will have been photographed more than 80 times and your picture will have been fed through some software which can measure your facial features and check it against databases of criminals or known troublemakers. Just so that you realize, “known troublemakers” are people who have not been arrested for anything. In other words, innocent people like you and me who have the wrong opinion about things. In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s I was on such lists because of the people who I knew (political radicals, secret service people, I even knew a hit man once, he worked for the US air force in the U.K. and he shot foreign diplomats in the middle east). I wasn’t actually one of them. For some reason I just kept meeting them all the time. So on paper I looked really suspect. There are cameras everywhere in England – shops, banks, public places. I lived in a little village and it had two cameras in the village square watching people. All of this technology was up and running in the 1980’s, so by now it’s much more pervasive. There is no free press in England. They think it’s free, but after a few years it becomes obvious that the government really has an iron clampdown on the press that is quiet and absolute. It comes down like silent steel doors whenever certain subjects come up. What the press does give people is endless shit about celebrities. Yes, it’s free, so is dog shit. About being attacked for that picture, within a few months of doing that picture I was exposed to a substance that turned out to be military grade nerve gas. It was being used by a chemical company to make domestic pesticide and somehow it “got out” of their secure facility and into my home. How does military grade nerve gas get out of a secure facility? From that time on my experiences with the medical profession indicated to me that my health has been monitored by someone other than the local doctor. I know this makes me sound like a paranoid conspiracy theorist, but you can check everything out for yourself if you have time. You will find it’s all true. Why do you think I left England? Are we there yet?

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I started listening to Maiden in about ‘88. I remember my mother coming home from church one Sunday and destroying all of my Maiden cassettes. The priest told everyone that Iron Maiden was Satan music with “demonic imagery.” Back then, Maiden’s lyrics came under intense fire and so did the imagery on the album covers. Did that piss you off or did you get a kick out of it?

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How many of your children will you let these creatures fuck before you wake up to the truth? All priesthoods are perverted. The more you follow their lead, the worse your life will become.

.I did not experience any of that and I don’t care what they say. The Christian church has no right to condemn anyone for saying anything. After all the wars they have fought in the name of their loving god, after all the people they tortured, after all the religions they have destroyed and peaceful people they have persecuted, I think they can shut up and go away. Nazis burned books, Fascists burned books, Muslims burned books, and Christians burned books. They are all as bad as each other. They will all hate, persecute, and kill anyone who disagrees with their nasty point of view because they are sick. This is why they follow perverted priests and beg for forgiveness. How many of their priests have been found to be child molesters? How many times has it been covered up? The priests are well known for “going after” the choir boys. In America they tried to cover it up for years and failed, and in Europe it’s a bit of a joke, but it’s not really funny. How many of your children will you let these creatures fuck before you wake up to the truth? All priesthoods are perverted. The more you follow their lead, the worse your life will become. They are just manipulating you. They are very good at it. They have been doing it for thousands of years. Do not be such a sheep to be lead around by monsters like that. They call you their “flock.” This is an insult to you, they think of you as sheep. Are we getting there yet?

.After decades of designing the Eddie Maiden Characters, Iron Maiden decided to go with an artist by the name of Melvyn Grant for the Fear of the Dark album cover and he subsequently did two album covers after that. Did it bother you to see your character represented by another artist? Was there any animosity between you and the band for choosing someone else?

By the time they thought of using other artists I really wanted to stop doing it anyway, so I felt nothing about that. Working with Maiden at that point was getting more and more painful and I was just glad that it stopped. Eddie was my invention and I could have made some kind of a fuss about it but I didn’t see any reason to do Maiden that amount of harm. Eddie was a part of their core business, I couldn’t really use him for anything useful, and I wanted to stop painting him anyway. So to have other artists paint him seemed like the sensible and obvious way to go. Doing harm to other people is not really in my nature. I would rather just walk away and let them get on with it. Although, they didn’t seem to mind what became of me. I wanted to get on with other things and invent new worlds

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Album cover artwork has changed a lot over the years. Much of it is now computer generated. A lot of bands rely on fonts and text coupled with computer generated or manipulated images. A lot of metal bands still use characters and illustrations, but a lot of it looks very similar in my opinion.How do you feel about album artwork these days? Do you think that computers have taken away from or helped the progression of album artwork?

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Both of the above. They have become indispensable because these days you cannot do the work for the price and in the time allowed if you rely on traditional techniques. Big budgets to cover artwork, like they had in the past, are not available to most people. So, everything has to be done cheaply, but this is a bad thing because now you have a load of unskilled people trying to make album covers. They don’t know what they are doing or why it is right or wrong. Before I get any smart arsed children trying to tell me that art can’t be right or wrong, yes it can. Your artwork can be done in a right way or in a wrong way. You are not infallible. You can do it wrong. Suck it up. In the hands of a good designer computers are a great benefit, but not everyone who uses a computer is a good designer. A lot of what you see is by people who are untrained, so their designs are amateurish looking. The upside of computers is that you can do diffi cult things very quickly. Th e downside is that this ease of use fools some people into thinking that they are now designers or illustrators. They congratulate themselves on what they do, but they are not good enough to realize they have just made a load of slick looking crap. They used to sayin art school, “You can’t polish a turd,” but in the computer age I think you see a lot of polished turds.

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Outside of Iron Maiden what was some of your favorite cover art from the 80’s? Who are some of your favorite cover artists?

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Well, I like Roger Dean’s work. He was probably the most creative artist to grace album covers. Luckily he worked in an age when such originality was more readily accepted than it is today. How much of your current illustration work is created with a computer?

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Do you prefer doing illustration work on a computer vs. painting?

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The vast majority of my work is done on a computer. In the last ten years I have only done two traditional artworks. One was an oil painting and the other a pencil drawing. Th e computer is really the best tool for making commercial artwork of any kind. If you want to sell pictures in galleries then you need other techniques, but for commercial art the computer is best. I also enjoy working with computers more than I enjoy painting. I was so sick of painting in the mid 1990’s that I was about to give up making pictures and do something else. If I hadn’t discovered computers I would not be making pictures today. It gave me access to a whole bunch of techniques which were a lot more fun than paint ever was. Paint only ever got in the way really. Paint put the pain into painting. Computers took it out again.

You have also done work for bands like Stratovarius, Gamma Ray, Valhalla, and Chris Impellitteri. Has that been as rewarding as the work that you have done with Iron Maiden?

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Yes, I got to make some new and different images. I don’t think that they were always used to the best advantage – another case of untrained and second ratedesigners at work. It’s not so good financially, but life isn’t all about money. So I don’t give a shit really, as long as I can live.

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A lot of the people who are reading this magazine are heavily inspired by street art, like graffiti, wheat pasting, and things of that nature. Some of the most known artists of this class are KAWS, Shepard Fairey, Espo, and Bansky to name a few. Are you familiar with any of these artists? If so, what do you think of their work?

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No, never heard of any of them. I don’t pay much attention to other artists. I am too busy trying to work out what I should be doing to worry about what others are up to. I don’t paint pictures because I want to join some kind of bandwagon or fashion, I do it because I have ideas and I want to make them into pictures. I don’t care about creating painted originals, I don’t give a fuck about other people’s half arsed artistic philosophies. I want to make a picture, so that is what I do, and I do it the way I enjoy doing it. Then I try to sell the result. Other times I do work on commission. But to be honest, I don’t really consider that my art. It’s my job. I do that for money. Sometimes it’s interesting to me, sometimes it’s just a job.

What are your views on graffiti? Do you consider it art or do you view it simply as vandalism?

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Some of it is art, an awful lot of it is crap and shouldn’t be there, and if it’s on someone else’s wall without their permission, it’s always vandalism. Personally I see it as a waste of energy. If you think you are a good artist, then put your money where your mouth is and live by selling your art. Putting it on the walls for free is playing chicken isn’t it? It’s just a lack of commitment to your art. You are frightened of selling it in case you can’t and you fail. So instead you just spray it onto other people’s walls. Th at way you don’t have to cope with being rejected or failing. It’s artistic cowardice. Do you have any idea the number of times I got thrown out of an art director’s office? How many times I got artwork rejected by someone? Some people even told me that I never had any hope of succeeding and I should go and get therapy because I painted monsters (really, I’m not joking) but they were all assholes, and I’m still out here doing it. At the end of the day, if they don’t like it… then I don’t care. Th e fans like it, that’s what matters. I paint for them (as well as for me) not for the bloody art directors. About living by your art, a lot of people talk the talk but the number of those who actually live by their art is quite few. That is is because the soft options are many and easier to do. To a man they make up bullshit philosophical reasons about why they do it the way they do, but it comes down to the same thing, FEAR. Th ey are scared of failing, that’s all. A lot of people talk the talk. I am one of the few who has walked the walk. I have been there. I walked all the way there and back again. I know what it’s about. Get up and do it. Toughen up and stop wasting your life. Th ere is only one qualifi cation you need to become an artist and that is to paint pictures that other people like enough to pay money for. Everything else is bullshit.

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Thanks for the interview. Any last words?

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No, maybe I’ve said too much already. I think I may have pissed off half of yourreaders. Remember to have fun.

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Yeah, I am pretty sure you pissed off 99% of my readers, but no worries.

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