Censored Iron Maiden Cover Explained By Derek Riggs

11-03-2024

Legendary Iron Maiden artists and creator of Eddie, Derek Riggs has explained why the original cover art for "Maiden Japan", featuring Eddie holding late frontman Paul Di'Anno's severed head was changed to the cover that went on to be released with the live EP.

Riggs shared the story with Kenny Kessel of The Metal Voice in a new interview where he discusses a number of his paintings, including his famed Iron Maiden covers. Derek shared this story about the rejected Maiden Japan cover, "They wanted to call it Maiden Japan cuz it's a take from Deep Purple Made In Japan so it was a pun. So, they wanted a cover.

"The manager (Rob Smallwood) was off with the band somewhere in America and so he phones up and says, 'I'll let you get on with it.' So I thought well the obvious thing was to put Eddie chopping off Paul Di'anno's head. And so I did that.

"It's not a bad portrait for two days work actually, considering all the other things I had to do. So I got it (artwork) down to the record company and then they got a call from the manager and the manager said destroy all of those cuz they printed 250,000 single covers he says. I don't want to ever see one again. So they destroyed them and I painted a new cover."

He continues, "And later on when the manager came back, he said you know that cover that I had destroyed and I had you repaint the second. He said that Paul Di'anno's voice was giving him problems and he was doing one day in three, one day in four, you know sometimes one day a week singing. And Maiden just couldn't deal with that and they couldn't function under those conditions.

"So, they had to find a new singer. They found Bruce Dickinson in the end but the manager said they've been auditioning new singers at this point and [Di'Anno] was (Paul getting wind of something going on he knew something was happening. And if [Di'anno had] seen that cover at that point we would have freaked out. They'd have been left without a singer for the rest of the tour, potentially. So they had all those destroyed I had to do a different cover and that's the story behind that."