Iron Maiden makes Eddie downright scary for the cover of The X Factor

There's no way to make Eddie the 'Ead, as he's affectionately known, any scarier than he already is. WRONG! Iron Maiden managed to do it. They took their affectionately-loved-by-the-fans mascot and gave him a total overhaul for their 1995 album The X Factor. Something creative to know about this is if you know anything about Roman numerals, X is 10 and this was their 10th studio album

Created by Hugh Syme, he outdid himself on this outlandish cover, showing the famed Maiden mascot as a victim of the electric chair amidst other tortures. He was and is known for creating covers for some of the biggest names in metal. It was a common occurrence for Syme to encounter strange, creepy things around his family home. It was only a matter of time before he came up with the grotesque Eddie that would grace the cover of Maiden's 10th studio album in 1995

"My daughters benefitted [by knowing] that anything remotely unsettling or horrific that they saw in the movies was the product of models and art direction," he tells Ultimate Classic Rock.  "They grew up with the torso of Eddie in plain view in our basement, where they would often play. It wasn't lost on them that there was a thing called "special effects"."

Illustrator Derek Riggs created the original Eddie for the band's 1980 debut album, as a brain-wasted youth with longer hair. This mascot has adorned tons of merchandise for the band over the years and in the 1990s, when metal was being swept under the rug by a short-lived movement called grunge, Maiden wanted to get a fresh take on Eddie. For their 1992 album Fear of the Dark, they sought out Melvyn Grant to create a sort-of Nosferatu tree Eddie. They recruited Syme to create the cover for the follow up, which was to feature one Blaze Bayley, formerly of Wolfsbane, on vocals

"[the band's] manager at the time, Merck Mercuriadis, introduced me to [bassist] Steve Harris," says Syme. Mercuriadis was known for working extensively with Rush. "I remember asking why they would want to deviate from Derek's pretty well-established [style]. I was sensitive to that-if Rush's art director was replaced by somebody else, I know how that would feel. It's a sad day for everybody, I presume-particularly the loyal and protective fans, so unique to Rush. So when the band started talking about taking Eddie to a place with a bit more realism, I said "Where is this coming from? You have such a long history with an illustrative, graphic novel feel."

The band was blown away by Syme's work with another famed character, Vic Rattlehead, the famed Megadeth mascot and how he'd used the scary skeleton in more subtle ways than one on two of Megadeth's albums- 1992's Countdown to Extinction and 1994's Youthanasia. "They said "We like that Megadeth deviated from the norms of their Vic-centric world.", says Syme

Iron Maiden certainly gave Syme a blank slate to work with, which worked out perfectly. It allowed him creative freedom to create the cover we know of today. "They didn't say they wanted torture or evisceration or disembodied torsos," he says. "I was talking a little bit about trepanning, the ancient Neolithic curiosity of removing the top of the skull, or drilling a hole, to see what makes us tick-the very early, crude days of surgery. And I'm a huge fan of the art direction in movies like Blade Runner and Terry Gilliam's Brazil."

Syme says he entered the project free from expectations. He was sensitive to the legacy of Iron Maiden's Eddie but "eager to make it work". He took this as a personal challenge. He sculpted and painted the figure, created a torture table and hired a local friend who did hunting and trapping to "introduce some actual entrails at the bottom of the photo". Syme also states he gave this friend credit as the "entrail wrangler".

Making all of this digital was a challenge in itself, given the mid-90s technology. Syme says "It was the early days of digital medium transferring-you couldn't upload files at the time, the Internet was in its infancy. We were doing counter-to-counter shipments from my studio in Indiana to London. We would have a guy show up in the middle of winter at my place and pick up a disk which then held a maximum amount of 200 megabytes of data. That would be driven to the Indianapolis airport, put on a plane and picked up at Heathrow. It was something like $400 a trip. It was getting ridiculous and cumbersome.

"Merck said "Come on over. I'll set you up with the best digital suite in London." I spent two weeks meeting with the band almost every day. It was great to be able to hang -and drink - with the guys, present the daily work-in-progress and have them come over to the graphic studio to see my progress."

The end results, a torture chamber, exposed brain of the victim, vampiric teeth, was seen as fairly dark, even by Iron Maiden's usual standards. Steve Harris stated he was going through a lot of personal trouble at the time, such as going through a divorce from his high school sweetheart-turned-wife and the mother of his four kids and the band's previous singer quitting and the darkness of his personal troubles was finding its way into the music. Some feel that the personal demons he was fighting at the time found their way into the music and the artwork. The image on the back, however, shows Eddie strapped into an electric chair, getting ready to ride the lightning

Syme explains "The electric chair was created as an ancillary image for the back cover, or interior panel within the CD Digipak or booklet, but never as a front cover." He notes he's "unaware" of online commentary that some retailers banned the primary image and used the rear one instead. Though he never worked with Iron Maiden after that, he fondly remembers his brush with Eddie. "That was a fun project. That cover was an effort at bringing some palpable reality to the otherwise more fantasial illustrative style that preceded. And we still have Eddie laying in state in my studio, by the way."