METAL GODS
There’ve been ups, there’ve been downs, and after 50-plus years they’re still very much around. We spoke to all current members about life in, and out of, one of the greatest metal bands of them all: Judas Priest.
There’s a cactus in the yard of Rob Halford’s home in Phoenix, Arizona that looks like it’s throwing the horns. It makes frequent appearances in the Judas Priest frontman’s Instagram feed, itself one of the most joyous and life-affirming things on the internet. The 69-year-old does social media like few other rock stars of his vintage. Recent pictures of him posing in spiked, diamante-encrusted high-heeled boots appear alongside classic photos of a young Halford wearing a period-piece late-70s tracksuit and leaning against an old 12-speed racer outside his old house in Walsall. Inevitably there are shots of cats too. Lots of shots of cats.
Anyway, back to the cactus. It’s been in Halford’s yard since he moved to Phoenix from the West Midlands in 1986. Back then it was a common-orgarden desert shrub, proud and erect if not yet fully metalised. But over the decades it has gradually sprouted a pair of distinct digits a foot or two apart pointing directly heavenwards.
“They’re my Percy Thrower heavy metal fingers,” Halfords says, undoubtedly the only heavy metal singer who would dream of referencing a long-time deceased British TV gardener. “That cactus has grown incrementally into that shape. I guess that’s the effect I have – I turn everything into metal.”
Halford and his bandmates have been turning everything they touch to metal for 50 years now. Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath laid the foundations for the genre, but it was Priest who reshaped it in their own image – everyone from Metallica to Mötley Crüe bears their musical DNA, while anyone who has stood in front of a camera or walked on stage encased in leather, studs or a combination of both has got it straight from the Judas Priest playbook.
The band are marking their Golden Jubilee with a series of dates in the second half of this year, including a headlining appearance at the UK’s Bloodstock Festival. There’s also the small matter of recording a follow-up
to 2018’s stellar Firepower album although Halford is under strict orders not to give anything away.
But there’s plenty to talk about even without that, chiefly Priest’s none-more-epic 50-year journey. “We were just so full of adventure,” says Halford, speaking over Zoom from the house he shares with his partner of 30 years, Thomas Pence. “But you never really grow up in a band, you’re just having a laugh. And you’ve got to be able to laugh, because you’re about to go through some life-changing experiences, for good and bad.”
Before Judas Priest, there was Judas Priest. That Priest were kicking around Birmingham in the late 60s, an entirely different entity to the one that followed.
When bassist Ian Hill and guitarist KK Downing brought in singer Al Atkins from the original Judas Priest to join their new band, uninspiringly christened Freight, he brought the name with him. But it was only when Hill began dating Halford’s sister and heard him singing that the pieces fell into place. “Ian says it was Ella Fitzgerald, Ken [KK] said it was Doris Day,” says Halford. “I can’t remember what it was, but it definitely fucking wasn’t Doris Day.”
Your dad worked at the local steelworks. Was there ever any chance of you following him and going to work there too?
I think there was a very good chance. That’s what lads did in the West Midlands – they went to work where their dad worked. I went to my dad’s place a few times as a younger lad. I saw enough of it to think: “This is I where I’d end up until I retire and they give me a gold watch.” That’s a motivation for a lot of musicians – you don’t want to end up where your dad’s working.
Were you a show-off as a kid? Yeah, I think we all are, us singers. Anything for attention.
I remember once on a Sunday afternoon when I was five or six, I went into my grandmother’s handbag and found her make-up and did myself up as a drag queen. I remember coming in and my grandma going: “Oh, it’s a nancy-boy!” I was grinning, with the rouge and the eyeliner, looking like Dusty Springfield on crack. It was hysterical.
You spent a few years acting in your late teens. What was the attraction?
I was just enthralled by everything to do with escapism, breaking away from the reality of life. I grew up in a household where the telly or the radio was always on, there was always something going on in the background, whether it was films or music. I was just naturally inquisitive for that kind of life. I still am. I wanted to be a part of it.
“I was grinning, with the rouge and the eyeliner, looking like Dusty Springfield on crack. It was hysterical.” Rob Halford on childhood days
You also managed a friend’s adult bookstore for a couple of weeks. What are the upsides of working in a porn shop?
[Laughing] You can have a surreptitious wank when there’s no customers around. No, you learn to read people – you can tell what they’re going to go for as soon as they walk through the door: “He’s going to go for the bondage”; “He’s going to go for the big tits.”
Funnily enough, history repeated itself decades later. I was doing this movie, Spun [in which Halford plays the manager of an adult shop]. I’m in this porn shop in Santa Monica with [co-star] Mickey Rourke, and he goes: “It hasn’t changed much in here.” I go: “What do you mean?” He says:
“I used to work here while I was trying to get work in Hollywood.” I said: “Have I got a story to tell you.”
You joined Judas Priest in 1973. Did you ever see them play with Al Atkins?
I have a very murky memory of seeing the band play at the Birmingham College Of Food And Art. I think they’d been together for about three weeks at that point and already the word was buzzing. There was practically nothing on stage, but you’re instinctively drawn towards something that has great potential. That’s how it was with Priest and me.
“You’re instinctively drawn towards something that has great potential. That’s how it was with Priest and me.” Rob Halford on seeing Priest before he joined
Priest’s debut album,
Rocka Rolla, came out in 1974. Did you think: “This is it, we’re heading for the big time?” Oh yeah. I was living at my parents’ house, and I remember the postman knocking at the door and handing me my one copy of the record. I was, like: “Ker-ching!” If only I knew.
Did you find those early years tough? We were on nuppence a week from the label [Gull Records, who released Priest’s first two albums]. We’d been doing shows up and down the country non-stop, we were getting a strong following, and we were saying to them: “Why can’t you support us? We only want a fiver a week. That’s all we need to be
able to quit our day jobs.”
Was there ever a time when you thought of quitting music?
No, never. Even when me and Ian were stuck in the back of a brokendown van in Germany, and it was minus-30 Celsius outside. The guys had gone off to get help, except they hadn’t, cos they were at some local club getting pissed and having a knees up while me and Ian nearly died of hypothermia. They got back at nine or ten in the morning, and we’re covered in frost. Ian looked like a cross between Chewbacca and a yeti. He was pulling icicles out of his beard. But the hard times are the memories you cherish the most.
Between 1975’s Sad Wings Of Destiny and 1980’s British Steel, Priest released a string of albums that match Black Sabbath’s first six records as one of the greatest straight runs in history. With each one, their sound came into sharper focus – intricate yet bludgeoning, tuneful yet dramatic. The image underwent a more radical overhaul. By the time of 1978’s Stained
Class, the mix-and-match kaftans, trilby hats and women’s blouses sported by the nascent Priest were gone, replaced by a heavy-on-the-leather image that was equal parts motorbike gang and S&M dungeon chic.
It was KK Downing who hit on the idea of dressing up in leather. You’ve always said
that you never made the connection with the gay scene or the S&M scene. Is that true?
I swear. [Points at himself] Look at this naive little Walsall-lad face. I never drew a parallel. I was clueless about the filth and the depravity and the debauchery. I’d love to say I was leafing through Bad Boys In Bondage and suddenly went: “Oh, I like the way he’s looking”, but I never did. It was purely this great experimentation, just seeing what worked. Something happens when I put my gear on. It’s just a wonderful feeling. You change.
Raw Deal, from Sin After Sin, was the first in a long line of songs you wrote about sex: Evil
Fantasies, Eat Me Alive, Jawbreaker, Pain And Pleasure… People always overlook what a randy band Priest could be.
I think you’re focusing a little bit too much on a few of the hundreds of songs we’ve written, but I do take your point. Raw Deal was a remarkable song for me as a lyricist. People sometimes reference it as the ‘coming out’ song, because it mentions [New York gay mecca] Fire Island. But it was never intended to be that. It was just a great bunch of words about this place I’d never been to – and still haven’t. But yes, some of those songs have sexual innuendo. Because we’re all made for sex. You can’t escape those three letters.
The flip-side is tracks like Last Rose Of Summer from Sin After Sin, or Before The Dawn from
Killing Machine, which are love songs.
Before The Dawn was a reference to a guy I was seeing over here in America. It was all about young love, that first serious relationship. But there are very few songs that I’ve written with an attachment to a real person. Out In The Cold [from 1986’s Turbo] was one. That was about Brad [Halford’s former boyfriend, who committed suicide in 1986]. And Turbo Lover was probably relative to the bathhouses I used to frequent back in the day.
A lot of bands at that stage in their career would have moved to London to give themselves a leg-up, but you stayed in the West Midlands. We thought the London scene didn’t understand the band or the music. They looked down on us.
Some of the early reviews we had… classic ‘don’t quit your day jobs, guys’ stuff. But that was kind of an incentive.
Which bands were you hanging out with back then? Who were your rock-star buddies? [Laughs] I didn’t have any. Maybe that was because I was so off my tits that I can’t remember having any conversations. I was down the pub every night. But remember, this is the West Midlands, there really wasn’t that much going on.
British Steel, in 1980, was the band’s big leap forward. What was it like being in Judas Priest around that time?
That was a special time. It took exactly thirty days to make that whole album, from the day we went into the studio to the day it was mastered. And of course that’s when Priest became a household name in the UK. But there was never any intent on our part to write songs that would take us to that place. We were just having a blast. Every day was a good day.
A couple of years later, Screaming For Vengeance kicked everything to the next level for Priest, especially in the US. Did you enjoy that degree of fame?
We worked really, really hard in America, and
“Some people have said that Priest never cared about the British fans, that America meant more. That’s not true.” Rob Halford
because of that hard slog we got to that point where we were successful. But once you’re in it, you can’t let go of it. You can’t take your foot off the accelerator. We were doing five, six, seven shows a week, travelling hundreds of miles overnight, giving it loads of welly.
Some people have said that Priest never cared about the British fans, that America meant more. That’s not true. We did great things for British heavy metal in America. But we couldn’t walk away for even six months. We had to keep coming back here to keep the momentum going.
Do you know the term ‘Fuck-you money’? It means you’ve made enough money to be able to say ‘fuck you’ when people ask you to do something. When did Priest start earning fuck-you money?
[Laughs] Hand on heart, I don’t think we’ve ever been able to say we’ve had fuck-you money. One of the most beautiful moments I had was when I got my first big royalty cheque and I bought my little house in Walsall. Which I’ve still got. I was able to buy that house, cash, for thirty grand. That’s as probably as close as I got to fuck-you money. Until the tax bills started coming in and I had to give half my money away.
Speaking of your house in Walsall, there’s a photo on Instagram of you standing outside it, next to a greenhouse. It looks like you’re growing pot in there.
That was a mate of mine, Nick, who I lived with before I bought that house. He was the horticulturalist. I was in there one day and I could smell something: “This smells familiar.” I think he’d been popping in there at night and cultivating his herbs.
You had a torrid time with drugs and alcohol in the 1980s…
For me it was a massive combination of booze and drugs and toxic relationships and having to hide my sexual identity. It was just a ball of fucking shit.
I got into the cocaine thing very simply. It’s like when you’ve been drinking beer all your life and somebody goes: “Have a shot of Johnnie Walker.” That’s what it was like for me, going from booze to having a spliff to cocaine.
Did you ever get into heroin?
I didn’t. That was a no-go area for me. Just the thought of putting a needle in my arm was taboo.
From the outside, that didn’t seem to impact on the band. Did you ever bring your problems into the office?
Well, you hide that stuff, whether it’s booze problems or drug problems or marital problems. But that’s when bands become dysfunctional. That’s why it’s important to be so honest and open and forthright with each other, no matter how difficult it is. It’s not all on your own back, you can share the load of what you’re going through. It makes you stronger.
You got sober at the start of 1986. But a few years later the band were hit with a lawsuit from the families of two boys who had allegedly killed themselves after listening to Stained Class.
That was extraordinary. They tried to push the blame for that on us, and that is a terrible thing to do.
Were you confident you’d win? No. Because we knew about the American court system, we knew how things could go sideways. It was unusual territory, these so-called subliminal messages.
There’s a famous photo of the four of you wearing suits and sitting in court. What do you see when you look at that photo?
I see a bunch of guys who were very confused, very angry, very determined. We knew that we were absolutely going to have to do the best job possible to get the truth out, so we made all the necessary adjustments and accommodations – wear suits, be respectful to the court and the judge. The prosecution created this fictitious rock’n’roll lifestyle that we were allegedly living, but we came in as four intelligent British gentlemen who knew how to deal with what was presented to us.
You were eventually cleared by the judge. Did you all go out and celebrate? No. I’d gone off to Puerto Vallarta in Mexico to hide, because the press were after us. Somebody called me up and said: “The judge has exonerated you, it’s the end of the case, it’s done and dusted.” But no, we didn’t celebrate. We were just relieved. And what got lost in all of it was the loss of these two beautiful, tragic lads.
That’s the sadness of it all.
Judas Priest entered the 1990s as a band renewed. Their first album of the new decade, Painkiller, made up the ground lost by 1986’s successful yet divisive Turbo and 1988’s underpowered Ram It Down. But it wasn’t all good news. The Painkiller tour ended abruptly and with a bump when Halford rode a motorcycle on stage and straight into a steel bar, knocking him off the bike and knocking him out. The accident marked the end of a chapter of Priest’s career. Soon afterwards, Halford embarked on a solo career that eventually saw him quitting Priest.
What does it feel like to rid a motorbike into a steel bar?
I can relive that whole episode, from leaving the dressing room to trying to get to the stage before the intro tape ended. I’m yelling at someone to do the tape again, the steps are coming down, I give it some throttle… and the next thing I know, someone’s kicking me, and it’s Glenn. I still haven’t got the cartilage in my nose fixed. Thomas has got to have some work done on his nose [laughs], from picking it. I said:
“When you go in, we’ll both have it done together.”
“What got lost in all of it was the loss of these two beautiful, tragic lads. That’s the sadness of it all.” Rob Halford on Priest’s trial in 1990
You were out of the band for eleven years. Did you think: “I don’t need those guys, I can do it on my own”, or did you miss them?
I missed them from the very start. I never once had that “I’ll show you” mentality. I remember talking to the guys around the time of the Turbo album,
saying: “I’ve got this idea of doing some stuff on the side.” They were like: “‘Yeah, we might do that ourselves. Just make sure it doesn’t clash with the band.” That was the green light we gave each other back then. So I felt that once I’d made the Fight album, War Of Words, to me that was it: ‘I’m ready to come back, let’s go.’ But there were some people working for me who were not making the appropriate things happen in terms of communication, so it wasn’t to be.
“Right from the start it was very apparent that they wanted a member of the band, they didn’t want a hired gun.” Richie Faulkner
Did you listen to the two albums Priest made with your replacement, Tim ‘Ripper’ Owens? No. I still haven’t. This might sound selfish, but because it’s not me singing, I’m not attracted to it. I sound like a twat, but I’m really just not interested. And that’s no disrespect to Ripper, cos he’s a friend of mine.
Where did you first meet him?
When the band went through Ohio he came to the show.
Was it awkward?
Not in the least. We gave each other a hug. He’s a massive Priest fan, and when the opportunity came for me to go back, he was like: “Thumbs up, it’s great. I’m happy for the band, I’m happy for Rob.” I respect his chops, he’s a great singer.
You officially rejoined Priest in 2003. What was the first meeting between all of you like? I’d seen Ian around, and I’d made sure I’d spoken to Ken and Glenn. But the first time we all had a meeting together was at the Holiday Inn in Swiss Cottage, just to talk about the business plan of the reunion and the record and the rest of it. It was very informal, but for some reason I put a suit on. Bill [Curbishley, manager] was like: “Why are you wearing a suit?” I just went: “I have no idea.”
Were there any kind of apologies made by either side?
Well, I’d written a heartfelt letter to the band
before I rejoined. I went and sat in a coffee shop in San Diego and poured my heart out. I basically laid out the feelings I was having, the fact that I missed Priest more than anything I could say, if there was any chance for us to get back together then I couldn’t wait for that day. It was a six- or seven-page letter, and I know that all the lads saw it, and that was enough. But I don’t think I ever went: “Oh, I’ve been a naughty boy,
I’m sorry.” I’d love to read it again.
I think it’s somewhere in the office.
The reunion found Halford and Priest picking up where they left off 11 years earlier. The four albums they have released since then have range from the solid (2005’s Angel Of Retribution, 2014’s Redeemer Of Souls) to the ambitious (2008’s bold, if over-reaching, Nostradamus) to the genuinely spectacular (Firepower, the best Priest album since their 80s heyday).
There have been bumps in the road. Founding guitarist KK Downing departed in 2011 and was replaced by Richie Faulkner (the relationship between Priest and Downing seems to be cool at best). Fellow guitarist Glenn Tipton announced in 2018 that he was stepping back from playing with the band after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, although he is still involved with the band.
As for Rob Halford, he endures, occupying a unique position as Metal God, late-life LGBTQ+ icon and the ultimate ambassador for not just Judas Priest but also heavy metal as a whole.
Does it feel to you that Priest have had the recognition and respect they deserve?
Yes, it does. And it’s beautiful. Your music has permeated all around the world, it’s filtered through to all of these places. It’s a lovely feeling to have that come back at you. It only reinforces you even more to continue flying that flag of British heavy metal.
I’ve always wondered: Priest were named after a Bob Dylan song, The Ballad Of Frankie Lee And Judas Priest. Have you ever met him?
I met him for about three minutes when [Halford’s solo band] Fight were doing a show at the Sony Studios. One of the label people said: “Bob Dylan’s in the next room. Do you want to meet him?” I’m like: [enthusiastically] “Yeah, who doesn’t want to meet Dylan?” So this guy takes me round to this room. And there’s Bob, he’s got five or six chicks hanging out with him. And this record guy goes: “Bob, here’s somebody I’d like to introduce you to, it’s Rob Halford, he’s from the British heavy metal band Judas Priest.” And Bob goes: [spot-on Dylan impression] “Heeeeey, what’s goin’ on? What’s happenin’?” And I go: “Hey Bob, it’s really nice to meet you.” And he goes: “Where ya from?” I say: “I’m from Birmingham.” And he goes: “Birmingham?” [pause]. “How’s Ozzy doin?” Then I was whisked off.
Does it bother you that Priest aren’t in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame?
It doesn’t bother me, not at all.
Where are things at with the new Priest album?
We had one really big writing session, the songs were great, they were really instinctive… I’ve got to stop talking or management will kneecap me.
“Everything I want in music comes from this band. That’s what I discovered when I was away from the band.” Rob Halford
It seems like you get a lot of joy out of being in Judas Priest.
It completes me musically. Everything I want in music comes from this band. I don’t need to go anywhere else. That’s what I discovered when I was away from the band.
Do you ever look back over Priest’s career and think: “How the hell did that happen?” Oh yes. For us in metal, this was a whole new experience. We were literally making it up as we went along. [Laughs] We were clueless.
Judas Priest’s 50 Heavy Metal Years Of Music Ltd Edition box set is out on October 15 via Sony. The band headline Bloodstock on August 15.