A couple of months ago I so happened to delete my entire music library.
About 100 GB worth of it, like a couple decades of carefully and lovingly selected music. All gone. With a click.

I won’t go into the detail of how it happened, I’ll just throw there two sentences: “Mac root password” and “I’m an idiot”.
Anyway, one of its consequences, apart from having to gather some of that stuff back from backups, rip it from CDs and beg friends to lend me their copies, is that I’m going through the tedious process of putting playlists back together.
And, most importantly, tagging songs and embedding album artwork.

You see, people have this misconception of artists being all messy and carefree and chaotic.
That’s bullshit.
I mean, ok, I scatter clothes around and wash dishes only when the pile in the sink reaches the tap preventing me to use the kettle. But those are not places where I spend my time, if you know what I mean.
I couldn’t bear to work on a less than spotless desk. Mess would distract me.
Also, while listening to music on my iPhone I can’t stand songs popping up with Apple’s ugly default “generic music file icon”. That’s unacceptable. Not pretty.
Hence the tagging.
I know I’m not weird.
Really, I’m not!

Anyway, all this introduction is to say that today I am listening to music I normally don’t listen to while drawing at home, for tagging and rating purposes.
Enter Iron Maiden.

I haven’t listened to the Irons for ages. They used to be my favourite band when I was a kid, I played their songs thousands and thousands of times, I stopped listening to them just because I don’t need to, they’re just there.
It’s amazing how things can remain branded in our brain for decades, tucked under some neuron, between eighties’ clothes and adolescent traumas.
Then all of a sudden one song comes on, just one, and an entire closet of memories blows up in your face. I had long hair back then. Long and curly. I mean, proper heavy metal hair.
I put conditioner on it, to keep it soft and shiny, you know.
You can’t do head banging or play air guitar with short hair, that’s just silly.

One other, less painful thing I remember of that period is the pure joy of unwrapping a new Irons’ CD (no wait, it was vinyl at the beginning, fuckin hell I had vinyls).
And now we get to the point of this wordy post.
Derek Riggs.

Derek Riggs is the guy who designed Eddie, Iron Maiden’s famous mascotte.
He illustrated Iron Maiden’s covers from their first album to Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son.
These covers, for example.

He is a self taught artist, (like myself!), he briefly attended Art School but dropped out soon because it bored him and he disagreed with their approach.
His covers were exquisitely drawn, and packed with details. All those details were some kind of more or less obscure reference to the Irons’ history. A shop sign on the background recalled the first pub where they played their very first gig, another detail referenced a line in their lyrics and so on.
I used to spend hours observing those drawings, trying to figure out what the symbols might have meant. Because you know, there wasn’t the internet back then, we used to make shit up on our own sometimes.
I copied a lot of those covers. Now that I think of it, maybe that’s when it all started. Derek was one of my teenage heroes, even before Frank Frazetta and Boris Valleyo (not so much a fan of the latter’s style now, but he was The Man back then).
I can’t say that I’m a concept artist because of Derek Riggs, but well, yes maybe I can. Thanks Derek, virtual manly hug for you.

So there, I just put all these pieces together only because I’m listening to the Iron Maiden while drawing.
So it wasn’t that bad that I erased all my music library, was it?
Who’s the idiot now.