Confess

★★★★ Rob Halford (With Ian Gittins) HEADLINE. £20 Revealing, hilarious memoir by man who trademarked the phrase ‘Metal God’. As a 12-year-old Judas Priest fan opening the programme for their 1980 British Steel tour, I remember a clear but unspoken disconnect between the pop-up centrefold of a leather and studs-clad Halford on his motorbike and the relentless hetero-normativity of NWOBHM. Not the least entertaining of Confess’s many revelations is its brief account of Halford’s unsuccessful attempt to seduce support act Iron Maiden’s then-lead singer Paul Di’Anno. Whether he’s handcuffing himself to Andy Warhol, stealing the perspex obelisk from John Lennon’s Imagine video, or leaving a US toilet cubicle after an anonymous sexual encounter to discover that his unseen partner on the other side of the Glory Hole had been dressed from head to toe in Judas Priest regalia, Halford’s dry Black Country wit is the perfect complement to his eye-popping candour. And bonus points to Walsall-born co-writer Ian Gittins’ for his pinpoint transcription of the dialect linguists’ term “Fluent Yam-Yam”. Ben Thompson