Iron Maiden stage Eddies (big and walk on) over the years

Kalata said:
Here's a different big Eddie from the BNW tour - it seems they used a different one at the start of the tour:
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Isn't that the very same one? The head section just hasn't opened yet to reveal the actual Eddie head; in the picture below the "Wicker man" head has clearly split in two and rests on the shoulders. :) The trick can also be seen in RIR footage, if I recall correctly.

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Randalf said:
Isn't that the very same one? The head section just hasn't opened yet to reveal the actual Eddie heaed; in the picture below the "Wicker man" head has clearly split in two and rests on the shoulders. :) The trick can also be seen in RIR footage, if I recall correctly.

bnw-twme-jpg.9159
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Oh fuck, it's the same, yeah :facepalm: Sorry.
 
Kalata said:
Yeah, a walk-on Wicker Man Eddie would have been great. Not that Ed Hunter Eddie was ugly, but it was used in the previous tour and it's not on the BNW album cover - this is the first and only tour to not feature the Eddie from the album cover on stage.

But I think big Eddie (i.e. TWM Eddie) was great. It looked monumental behind the drums and Bruce singing from there was cool with all the maidens.
I agree that they also could have used the Eddie from TWM video - he has that classic Eddie face.
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Do you reckon that the Virtual XI walk-on Eddie was the same as the Eddie on the album cover? Kind of looks like a generic Eddie to me, as I never really made the connection with the V XI cover. Maybe I haven't seen a good enough video / picture though.
 
Welsh Phantom said:
Do you reckon that the Virtual XI walk-on Eddie was the same as the Eddie on the album cover? Kind of looks like a generic Eddie to me, as I never really made the connection with the V XI cover. Maybe I haven't seen a good enough video / picture though.
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That particular walk-on Eddie is based on the Ed-Hunter CGI model; while it wasn't featured in the VXI cover he did make appearance in the booklet though.

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Welsh Phantom said:
Do you reckon that the Virtual XI walk-on Eddie was the same as the Eddie on the album cover? Kind of looks like a generic Eddie to me, as I never really made the connection with the V XI cover. Maybe I haven't seen a good enough video / picture though.
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You're right. The walk-on Eddie during VXI tour was basically the Ed Hunter Eddie. At least they used the one from the album cover for the big Eddie.
 
Then again, it wasn't the first time there were two Eddie designs from the same album sleeve. The Scribe Eddie and an album cover Eddie from the Seventh Son era are pretty different looking fellows and were both part of the stage show and the general visual world of that particular album. It was kinda the same with VXI, though nowhere near as sophisticated; there's the album cover Eddie and Ed-Hunter Eddie who's featured in the booklet and some single covers. Both Eddies make on-stage appearance as well, as it was with Seventh Son.
 
According to Dave Lights, for the ''Seventh Son'' tour the initial idea was to have 7 walk-on Eddies... and at the end, it didn't have any. This is the only tour not to feature walk-on Eddie, since its birth on Beast On The Road tour. (https://maidenrevelations.com/2012/11/07/best-worst-maidens-1980s-stage-productions/)

If I'm not mistaken, Dave Lights left the Maiden ship mid-tour during SIT tour or at the start of the ''Seventh Son'' tour.

He was a designer of the original Eddie stage prop (the mask that spit blood in the early days), lightning engineer, the first album cover Eddie face was casting from his face and he come up with the concept for the Killers album cover.

He was involved with the stage sets/designs during the 80's and one can argue that some of the creative spark left with him and led to the stripped down production wise stage sets in the (early) 90's. But for me Maiden always has a great stage sets, especially during the reunion era.
 
Forostar said:
A few years ago you auctioned off most of your Iron Maiden memorabilia. Was there a reason why you made that break with the past?

Yes, in the mid-90s, Iron Maiden asked me if I’d come back and re-create the shows that Maiden had done in the 80s, as they were planning to take the ‘classic’ set back on the road. I was pleased to be involved with that, and put the best part of four months work into designing the set, costing the equipment to within the specified budget, and getting all the plans drawn up for the stage production - a mammoth task, because not only had the technology come a long way since the 80s, but the venues all had varying stage-specifications - so to re-create the classic stage set was far more time-consuming than just copying what we’d done before.

Around the same time, I was out with UFO on the Walk On Water tour, and when I got back from that, I got a call to meet up with Dickie Bell, the Maiden tour manager, ten days before the Iron Maiden tour was due to hit the road. Dickie told me that they had changed their supplier of lighting equipment, and presented me with a list of what he wanted me to order from the new company. As soon as I saw the list I knew it wasn’t going to be workable - especially with only ten days till lift-off! I handed the list back to him and said “I’m sorry, this is not the same project you asked me to work on - and I‘ll be sending you a bill for wasting four months of my time”. --
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It seems that they were indeed going to do some sort of a Ed-Hunter tour with a classics setlist after VXI tour, even if Bruce had not returned. I wonder if the stage set would have turned out looking a bit more coherent with DaveLights. The one they went along with is more or less messy.
 
I think he took the same door as Blaze (who also had 10 days to rehersal the x factour) or Derek Riggs, important people for the band.
 
GhostofCain said:
It looked like a dodgy inflatable. The band did not like it and ended up re-using the GMETID one!
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Yeah, it looked strange, like it was unreal... but I like it a lot. Should have been used for the whole tour instead of the honestly ugly GMETID one.

The album cover of Killers is one of the most essential Eddies (one of the best album covers of all time) and I think they should have used a walk-on Killers Eddie for this tour (instead of the TNOTB and POM Eddies) - or for a future tour.
 
Kalata said:
Yeah, it looked strange, like it was unreal... but I like it a lot. Should have been used for the whole tour instead of the honestly ugly GMETID one.
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Let's be honest: it looked like shit and that is why it was replaced with something that was not fantastic but definitely much better.

To be fair I have had balloons at my daughter's birthday parties that look much better than that 1st album inflatable Eddie (and she is only 5 years old).
 
GhostofCain said:
Let's be honest: it looked like shit and that is why it was replaced with something that was not fantastic but definitely much better.

To be fair I have had balloons at my daughter's birthday parties that look much better than that 1st album inflatable Eddie (and she is only 5 years old).
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Yeah, while it managed to look fairly accurate, it doesn't really have any of the expressiveness of the original art. It's not too complicated to make an inflatable out of it (and to be fair, it might turn out better nowadays) , but it's almost impossible to make it look impressive and expressive enough in that particular form. The First Album cover is such a stylized one that it just doesn't come alive quite that well on stage - or any 3D environment for that matter.

And in general, there's a reason why most lively and impressive looking big Eddies are bald incarnations of the character. :D The Scribe Eddie from Maiden England tour turned out very well though!
 
Stage Eddies trivia:

* big Eddie always appear during ''Iron Maiden'' (ME tour had two big Eddies - the second one was Scribe Eddie during ''Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son'').

During which song the walk-on Eddie appears for all tours ->

LOTB tour: ''The Trooper'' and ''Senjutsu''
TBOS tour: ''The Book Of Souls''
ME tour: ''Run To The Hills''
TFF tour: ''The Evil That Men Do'', ''Iron Maiden'' (2010 leg - no big Eddie!)
SBIT tour: ''Iron Maiden'' (2008 first leg - no big Eddie!)/''The Clairvoyant'' (2008 second leg), ''The Evil That Men Do''/sometimes during ''Iron Maiden'' too (2009 leg - it has a big Eddie)
AMOLAD tour: ''The Evil That Men Do''
Early Days tour: ''Drifter''
DOD tour: ''The Number Of The Beast''
GME... 'TID tour: ''The Clairvoyant''
BNW tour: ''The Evil That Men Do'' (there were 2 walk-on Eddies - the one from TEH tour and a Wicker Man walk-on Eddie)
TEH tour: ''Futureal''
VXI tour: ''The Evil That Men Do''
TXF tour: ''2 Minutes To Midnight''
Real Live tour: ''The Clairvoyant'' (sometimes during ''Fear Of The Dark'')
FOTD tour: ''The Clairvoyant''
NPOTR tour: ''Hooks In You'' (in 1990), ''No Prayer For The Dying'' (in 1991)
STOAST tour: NO WALK-ON EDDIE !!!
SOT tour: ''Heaven Can Wait''
WST tour: ''Powerslave''
WPT tour: ''Iron Maiden''
TBOTR tour: ''Iron Maiden'' (no big Eddie!)
Killer tour: ''Iron Maiden'' (Rod Smallwood dressed as Eddie) - no big Eddie!
Iron Maiden tour: ''Iron Maiden'' (Rod Smallwood dressed as Eddie) - no big Eddie!
 
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Kalata said:
SBIT tour: ''Iron Maiden'' (2008 leg - no big Eddie!), ''The Evil That Men Do''/sometimes during ''Iron Maiden'' too (2009 leg - it has a big Eddie)
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:nonono:

We've talked about this before. ;) The Big Eddie was only absent in the first leg of the 2008 tour (February-March, as documented in Flight 666), due to limited cargo capacity of Ed-Force One. It was part of the 2008 show for the second leg, which took place in May-August. As you mentioned, it returned for 2009 leg, save one or two shows (Belgrade, for example) where they couldn't include it. Therefore the "walk-on Eddie" appeared during The Clairvoyant in 2008 - from May to August anyway. :)

Kalata said:
TFF tour: ''The Evil That Men Do''
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Apologies for being super nitpicky here, but you might want to add that walk-on Eddie appeared during "Iron Maiden in the 2010 leg where the Big Eddie was completely absent, and the same goes for the first leg of 2011 too, save the few shows in South America where the big Eddie was specifically shipped to, due to filming of En Vivo! concert footage. Apart from that, the first leg of 2011 featured walk-on Eddie only. :)
 
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Kalata said:
Stage Eddies trivia:

* big Eddie always appear during ''Iron Maiden'' (ME tour had two big Eddies - the second one was Scribe Eddie during ''Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son'').

During which song the walk-on Eddie appears for all tours ->

LOTB tour: ''The Trooper''
TBOS tour: ''The Book Of Souls''
ME tour: ''Run To The Hills''
TFF tour: ''The Evil That Men Do''
SBIT tour: ''Iron Maiden'' (2008 leg - no big Eddie!), ''The Evil That Men Do''/sometimes during ''Iron Maiden'' too (2009 leg - it has a big Eddie)
AMOLAD tour: ''The Evil That Men Do''
Early Days tour: ''Drifter''
DOD tour: ''The Number Of The Beast''
GME... 'TID tour: ''The Clairvoyant''
BNW tour: ''The Evil That Men Do'' (there were 2 walk-on Eddies - the one from TEH tour and a Wicker Man walk-on Eddie)
TEH tour: ''Futureal''
VXI tour: ''The Evil That Men Do''
TXF tour: ''2 Minutes To Midnight''
Real Live tour: ''The Clairvoyant'' (sometimes during ''Fear Of The Dark'')
FOTD tour: ''The Clairvoyant''
NPOTR tour: ''Hooks In You'' (in 1990), ''No Prayer For The Dying'' (in 1991)
STOAST tour: NO WALK-ON EDDIE !!!
SOT tour: ''Heaven Can Wait''
WST tour: ''Powerslave''
WPT tour: ''Iron Maiden''
TBOTR tour: ''Iron Maiden'' (no big Eddie!)
Killer tour: ''Iron Maiden'' (Rod Smallwood dressed as Eddie) - no big Eddie!
Iron Maiden tour: ''Iron Maiden'' (Rod Smallwood dressed as Eddie) - no big Eddie!
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When I saw the original WST in 1984 we didn't have the big Eddie in the UK, so we had the walk on mummy Eddie during Iron Maiden instead.

Also, for the 1986 SOT tour we didn't have the cyborg walk-on Eddie at all, just the inflatable big Eddie.

I was really surprised to see videos and pics later on in the US tours from magazines / TV etc pre internet of the stuff we didn't get to see.
 
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