Get Ready To Roll! has issued an interview with with Dave "Lights" Beazley, who is currently the lighting director for UFO and is also the genius who gave us IRON MAIDEN's Eddie.

The following is an excerpt from the interview:

Q: Dave, you were there right back in the early days of Iron Maiden. What part did you play in their early years?

A: "I promoted Steve Harris’s first gig back in about 1974/75. There was a Battle Of The Bands competition in our local church hall, and his band was called GYPSY'S KISS (so called cos Gypsy's Kiss is cockney rhyming slang for ‘piss’). That was the first time I met Steve. The next time we met up, he was with his girlfriend Lorraine, who was a friend of my first wife Kim. I’d left home at 15 and was living in a vicarage, and Lorraine asked me if her new boyfriend ‘Bomber’ Harris could come round and rehearse with his new band at the vicarage. This new band was Iron Maiden! As time went on I got more involved with them, and when they started getting gigs I offered to set up a lighting rig for them, as I was doing an interior design course and lighting was something I was very interested in."

Q: What creative juices led to the concept of Eddie, and how much input did you have into the way he developed? And have you come to look on Eddie as one of your family?

A: "Eddie The ‘Ed was a joke that was going around at the time, i.e. - a couple had a child, but when the child was born it was only a head - no arms, legs or anything else. The couple were devastated but the doctor said ‘Don’t give up hope. When the head’s grown to its full size, which will be when the boy is about 14 years old, we’ll fix him up with a body‘. So the couple put Eddie on the mantle-piece and looked after him for the next fourteen years. On his fourteenth birthday they said to him ‘Eddie, we have a very special present for you’, and Eddie replied… ‘Not another fuckin hat!’.

So yes, the idea for Eddie grew out of that joke! In the song ‘Iron Maiden’, the lyric goes ‘See the blood begin to flow‘ etc. So, on the backdrop that we used for the pub gigs, with the help of a friend from art college I rigged up a mask that was made from a mould of my own face which coughed up blood in time to those lyrics. The Eddie that was used as the band became more famous was designed from artwork by Derek Riggs, but the original idea started with that joke, and that first mask. As to whether I see him as family, yes, in a way I suppose I do!"

Read the full interview at Get Ready To Roll!.