• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 409 0

that the smartest bands produced a new shirt for each new situation they found themselves in. Here the undoubted ‘kings of merch’ in the 1980s were Iron Maiden, who had their own in-house artist and designer, Derek Riggs, producing both their record sleeves and their most collectable T-shirts and related tour merchandise; his most famous creation that of Eddie, the phantasmagorical monster who adorned every Maiden single and album – and consequently every significant piece of official Maiden merch. ‘I liked the idea because it gave you great visual continuity,’ Maiden manager Rod Smallwood would tell me, ‘and it made the Maiden sleeves just stick out a bit more than the average sort of “could-be-anything” sort of sleeves most rock bands used then. And it became a very important part of Maiden’s image, in that way.’ Like Metallica, Iron Maiden did not do TV; could not be heard regularly on radio. ‘But because Eddie struck such a chord with the Maiden fans, we didn’t need to be. Wearing an Eddie T-shirt became like a statement: fuck radio, fuck TV, we’re not into that crap, we’re into Iron Maiden. And, of course, we’ve had a lot of fun with Eddie over the years, trying to find new and ever-more outrageous things for him to be and do. Sometimes the ideas come from Derek; usually, though, they either come from me or one of the band. But it can be anybody or anything that inspires us.’

A self-styled English eccentric and former art-school drop-out, Riggs produced thousands of images of Maiden’s monstrous mascot in whatever setting the band’s career took them: from the very Devil himself on 1983’s Number of the Beast album, to mummified Egyptian god on the 1985 Powerslave sleeve, to laser-packing time-cop on 1986’s Somewhere in Time. From there it was a short step to having Eddie become the defining image on all their merch; an idea that quickly developed into a goldmine for them. The possibilities were endless: Maiden plays Hawaii? Well, how about a picture of Eddie on a surfboard? Maiden does New York? How about Eddie as King Kong? The fact that Eddie had also transmogrified into part of Maiden’s travelling stage show in the 1980s was also not lost on Metallica and Q Prime. With Metallica now planning for their first arena-headlining tour, Lars decided they would need their very own Derek Riggs; even their own Eddie, perhaps. The others did not disagree.

Metallica found their own Derek Riggs in one of James’ skateboard pals: Pushead – real name: Brian Schroeder – who he had first met at a Venom concert in 1985. ‘He’d seen something I’d done for The Misfits,’ Pushead recalled for me, ‘and he asked if I could get him a T-shirt of it. I said, sure, no problem. Then he wore it on the back of the Master of Puppets album, and that’s when the whole Misfits cult thing took off.’ When Pushead moved from LA to San Francisco they met up again through the skateboarding scene. Working from his one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco, surrounded by his collection of skulls (cow, monkey, alligator, human) the first thing Pushead did for the band was what became known as the ‘Damage, Inc.’ T-shirt: ‘James wanted something like an animal type thing – like a wild beast…[But] it didn’t work for me. So I went to a human skull and made the head a little bigger. James wanted fangs, so I drew them in, and he wanted the mallets, so I did that. Then they all came over and I showed it to them and they loved it.’

Next came the sleeve design for the Cliff ’Em All video: the four faces of the Burton-era line-up in suitably fearsome pose, arranged clockwise on a charcoal-grey background. As a fun piece it was just about acceptable. It was with his T-shirts, though, that Pushead’s designs really came into their own. Next came the now highly collectible ‘Crash Course in Brain Surgery’ T-shirt: a gruesomely amusing, typically skull-based example of classic Pushead splat. Now, with the 1988–89 world tour about to begin, they asked him to step up production, beginning with an illustration for the inside sleeve of the Justice album cover: a hand, with the word