`IT'S SO WE CAN BANG OUR HEADS'
Queen once asked Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford why heavy metal is so loud
Confess Rob Halford Hachette Books
Queen Elizabeth II makes a surprising appearance in Confess, the eye-popping autobiography of Rob Halford, frontman of veteran British heavy metal rock band Judas Priest. A staunch royalist, Halford was thrilled to be invited to a reception at Buckingham Palace in 2005.
The overenthusiastic rocker ticked off the late Cilla Black for breaking royal etiquette and reaching out for a handshake. “Cilla was nudging me in the ribs, saying `I can't take you anywhere!'” laughs Halford, recalling how the Queen gave his hand “the slightest brush with the tips of her fingers.”
It was at this moment that the Queen asked the question many music lovers have always wanted to ask: “Heavy metal,” she said. “Why does it have to be so loud?”
Speaking from Phoenix, Ariz., Halford laughs. “It's a good question,” he says. “It's so we can bang our heads, Your Majesty,” is what he told the Queen.
But he's had a chance to give it serious thought since then, considering the rock form's origins with Black Sabbath in Birmingham in the late 1960s, and the West Midlands roots of Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant.
“The character of the West Midlands is born and bred into heavy metal,” says Halford, 69.
“It is loud but it's full of angst. Maybe it needed to be that loud so you could hear it above the steam hammers, and the welders, and the coal mining, and the heavy industry when we were growing up.”
Halford's book vividly describes the greyness and soot that filled his childhood, and the pounding sound of the iron works he passed every day. Confess is a rip-roaring tale, a funny, often shocking and genuinely emotional story of how a sensitive, working-class boy became known to fans as the Metal
God. Tattooed, leather clad and steel-studded, he and his band evolved from '70s prog and glam rock into hard-riffing pioneers of the new wave of British heavy metal, selling 50 million albums over their 50-year career, and still going strong.
But for decades, Halford harboured a secret he feared might destroy his career, driving him to drink and drug addiction and suicidal despair. Halford is homosexual, something he realized at 10 years old, but kept hidden until he was 36, “a gay man fronting a straight band in a macho world.”
“It's different for young people today — there are resources,” says Halford. “Growing up, gay people were all in hiding, we were all afraid, we could go to jail.”
His fear of exposure was exacerbated by the impact of sexual abuse by older men when he was a naive youngster. “I still think that's left me broken. Even now I find it difficult to be intimate with somebody. So that whole business of hiding in the closet, it's all wrapped up in the psychosis of what happened to me from an early part of my life.”
It led to an almost split-personality existence, with Judas Priest indulging in a wildly hedonistic rock 'n' roll lifestyle whilst their charismatic frontman led a haunted private life of loneliness, celibacy and repression. Like Elton John, Freddie Mercury and George Michael, there were rumours about Halford's sexuality, but he didn't come out until 1996, with unplanned comments during an MTV interview.
“It was the right time for me,” he says. “Some people never come out.” By then, Halford had settled into his first genuinely stable relationship and he is still with the same partner today.
“When you're in the closet, you're protecting everybody but yourself. That's no way to live. I would urge anybody, if you have the strength to face it — and it does take strength — it's the greatest thing you can do for yourself. It really is. And you'll be surprised, for the most part, by the acceptance that is there.”
Many of his family, friends, band members and fans told him they always knew he was gay. “So you're going ` Why the f--- didn't I speak earlier?' It's a terrible self-torture. If you can let yourself out of your prison, do it as soon as you possibly can.”
These days, he refers to himself as “the stately homo of heavy metal,” but when he started visiting gay bars in his 30s, management warned him about “the damage it could do to Priest if it leaked out.” Meanwhile, his alcohol and cocaine addictions were spiralling out of control. “The other party was more concerned about lining their own pockets than my ongoing battle with booze and drugs,” he says. In the closing days of 1985, Halford attempted suicide with whiskey and sleeping pills.
“I think it was a cry for help,” he says. “Because why didn't I finish it? Something made me drag my ass out of bed and bang on my friend's door and say, `I think I've overdosed.'” He wound up in rehab and has remained sober ever since. “I just stopped drinking, and I stayed stopped,” he says in his book, ascribing it to West Midlands belligerence: “If you've got something to do, just get on with it.”
“I support AA one-thousand per cent,” he says now. “There are people who absolutely need to go to a meeting and sit with others going through the same recovery. You do whatever you need to do to stay clean and sober. For me, there was a gigantic shift, a determination never ever to feel as bad as I did, ever again.”
A crucial moment arrived during his first sober show in
May 1986. “I felt like I was floating on air, cause I was experiencing music in its purest form, free of interference, feeling the reaction of the audience and the band around me. There was a clarity that I didn't want to ever cloud over again.”