JUDAS PRIEST Trivia — 214 Entries
214 sourced facts about JUDAS PRIEST.
Trivia
The band first came to Japan in 1978, and on their return the following year they made the first live recording of their career here. That is where 1979's Unleashed In The East came from: the band's landmark live album was captured on Japanese stages.
Defenders Of The Faith is the album Sony Music Japan's own page ranks as vying for first or second place in popularity here among everything the band has made. It reached number 18 in the US, where it went platinum, and number 19 in the UK. The songs the page picks out are Freewheel Burning, Some Heads Are Gonna Roll and The Sentinel — three of the few Priest titles with settled Japanese names of their own.
The 30th anniversary edition of Defenders Of The Faith came out in Japan on 4 March 2015, timed to that month's Japanese tour and released here ahead of the rest of the world. The remastering was done by Tom Allom, the album's original producer. Two of the three discs carry a complete recording of the band at their peak — Long Beach Arena, California, May 1984. The packaging is a slipcase with the head of the album's mechanical beast cut out of it, around an eight-panel digipak and a twenty-page booklet.
The fiftieth-anniversary box, 50 Heavy Metal Years Of Music, runs to 42 CDs — the complete catalogue plus 138 previously unreleased tracks — in an edition limited to three thousand sets worldwide. The following year, in 2022, the band were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
On 4 December 2024, the day before their Japanese tour opened, Invincible Shield was issued on cassette in Japan. Abroad, an online-store-only cassette carried the eleven-track standard edition on clear red tape; the Japanese release put the fourteen-track deluxe edition on clear blue, a specification produced only for Japan and in a limited run. It was the first Judas Priest cassette release in Japan since Ram It Down in 1988 — a gap of thirty-six years.
A number of the albums carry Japanese titles of their own. On Sony Music Japan's discography, Sin After Sin appears as Haishin no Mon, Screaming For Vengeance as Fukushu no Sakebi, Defenders Of The Faith as Haitoku no Okite and Redeemer Of Souls as Shokuzai no Keshin. Others — Stained Class, British Steel, Painkiller, Firepower, Invincible Shield — are simply transliterated, so whether a record gets a Japanese title has varied album by album.
In August 1978 the band wrapped up their Stained Class tour with five shows in Japan. They went straight home and got to work on the next album, which produced songs such as Running Wild. Japan was both the end of one campaign and the turn into the next record.
The 1979 live album Unleashed In The East was originally intended solely for the Japanese market. It turned into a far larger breakthrough, for the band and for the genre. The sleeve photograph, meanwhile, was not shot at Tokyo's Koseinenkin Hall or the Nakano Sunplaza at all, but mocked up in the rather cosier surroundings of Dunstable Civic Hall.
Invincible Shield went on sale in Japan on 6 March 2024 — a Japan-first release, reaching shops here ahead of the rest of the world. It was their nineteenth album, arriving 55 years after the band formed and 50 years after their debut.
On 6 March 2015 the band opened their first Japanese tour in about three years at EX Theater Roppongi in Tokyo, part of the world tour behind the previous summer's Redeemer Of Souls. The encore that night added The Hellion / Electric Eye and Painkiller, neither of which had been played on their American dates the previous October. Since the rest of the programme was largely unchanged, those two songs read as a gift to the Japanese audience.
The Japanese tour of November 2018 fell exactly forty years after their first visit to the country in 1978. It was their first tour here in three years, taking the March album Firepower around five cities, opening on 21 November at Zepp Sapporo in Hokkaido and closing on 29 November at the Musashino Forest Sport Plaza in Tokyo.
The Invincible Shield Tour Japan 2024 opened on 5 December at the Aichi Prefectural Art Theater in Nagoya, a hall that also hosts orchestral and operatic performances, with a set running over a hundred minutes. From the stage Rob Halford told the audience that he had shared a metal journey with the people of this country for fifty years, that he had many memories of it and was very glad to be back. The report notes the deep, careful bow he made before leaving the stage.
The starting point sits in Birmingham in 1969. The band Ian Hill and K.K. Downing were then playing in was called Freight, and it was that outfit which was later renamed Judas Priest. What became a half-century institution began as nothing more than a few local lads with nothing behind them yet.
After founding singer Al Atkins left at the end of 1972, the job went to Rob Halford, who was then fronting a band called Hiroshima. The introduction came not from anyone in the industry but from Halford's sister, who was going out with Ian Hill at the time. The Metal God reached this band through a family connection.
The band's actual Grammy came at the 52nd ceremony, in 2010, for Best Metal Performance — awarded for Dissident Aggressor, a live recording of a song first released on Sin After Sin in 1977. It is their only win across five nominations.
In 2011, ahead of the Epitaph tour that had been billed as their last world tour, founding guitarist K.K. Downing left the band and Richie Faulkner took his place. The first album Faulkner played on, 2014's Redeemer Of Souls, reached number 6 in the United States — the band's highest American placing to that point.
Firepower, their eighteenth album, was made by two producers. One was Andy Sneap, known for work with Megadeth, Arch Enemy and Accept, engaged by Priest for the first time. The other was Tom Allom, who had produced everything from 1979's Unleashed In The East to 1988's Ram It Down and was brought back after thirty years. Mike Exeter, who had produced and mixed the previous album, joined as recording engineer.
In 2018 founding guitarist Glenn Tipton disclosed that he had Parkinson's disease. The album released in the middle of that news, Firepower, reached number 5 in both the United States and the United Kingdom — a new American high for the band and their first UK Top 10 since British Steel. Andy Sneap, who co-produced it, now also plays guitar on their tours.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's own page lists seven signatures on the band's inductee plaque: Dave Holland, Glenn Tipton, Ian Hill, K.K. Downing, Les Binks, Rob Halford and Scott Travis — three drummers from different eras alongside the two guitarists, the bassist and the singer. Alice Cooper delivered the induction.
Invincible Shield reached number 2 on the UK album chart, beating the number 4 that British Steel had managed in 1980 and setting a new career high at home. Fifty years after their debut, the band rewrote their own record on the British chart.
The name arrived with singer Al Atkins. His previous band had been called Judas Priest, taken in turn from Bob Dylan's song The Ballad Of Frankie Lee And Judas Priest, and he talked K.K. Downing and Ian Hill into adopting it. The name that would become shorthand for heavy metal came out of a folk singer's song.
The twin-guitar line-up that defined them was not the band's own idea but the label's. Gull Records suggested expanding to a five-piece, and the extra place went to Glenn Tipton, who had just left the Flying Hat Band. Tipton says it took him next to no time to grasp what he was joining.
The break with Gull Records comes down to a specific figure. The band went to the label's office and asked for twenty-five pounds a week each so they could put their time into writing; whatever touring had brought in was already going on bills. The request was refused, and they left.
Two accounts of how Victim Of Changes came together stand side by side. One holds that the epic was welded from two earlier songs — Whiskey Woman, which predates Halford's arrival, and Red Light Lady, which he brought from his previous band Hiroshima. Rob Halford himself disputes it: as he remembers it the song only ever had the one title, and he suggests the confusion arises because Whiskey Woman is its opening phrase. The writing credit, at any rate, carries the name of founding singer Al Atkins alongside Halford, Downing and Tipton.
Studio versions of the first two albums are missing from official compilations, and the reason is ownership. After Priest left Gull Records, their new label Columbia was never able to buy those two records from Gull. So the original recordings of The Ripper and Victim Of Changes do not appear on greatest-hits sets; live versions are sometimes used in their place.
Dissident Aggressor is set in Berlin. Rob Halford has described the night behind it: unable to sleep, he went out walking, climbed a boxy watchtower-like structure by the Wall in freezing November, and looked across from the brightly lit western side to an eastern side that was pitch dark, with Russian soldiers looking back at him through binoculars. That was the seed for the line about being Berlin itself.
Raw Deal is the song Rob Halford describes in his memoir Confess as a coming-out song, a vent for his frustration as a closeted gay man. He thought he might have gone too far and that people would put two and two together from the words. Nothing happened. The band said nothing about the lyric, and neither critics nor fans noticed. He has called it a howl of rage that nobody heard.
Most of the guitar parts in Beyond The Realms Of Death were written, according to K.K. Downing, not by a guitarist but by the drummer. During the Stained Class sessions the left-handed Les Binks picked up a guitar in the studio and worked out the riff with the instrument held upside down. Everything but the solos grew from that. It remains his only songwriting credit with the band, and the song went on to become a live fixture.
After the death of a young man in Nevada on 23 December 1985, the families sued the band and their record company, claiming the word "Do It" had been subliminally embedded in Better By You, Better Than Me on the Stained Class album. A parallel case against Ozzy Osbourne had been dismissed on the grounds that lyrics are protected speech, so the plaintiffs here argued about hidden messages rather than words. The trial ran seventeen days and the case was dismissed. The 1990 ruling stated that the plaintiffs lost not because subliminal stimuli were shown to have no effect, but because they failed to prove the messages were placed there deliberately or that they caused the death.
Their fifth album was released in Britain as Killing Machine but in the United States as Hell Bent For Leather. The American label was wary of a title referring to a killing machine in the wake of school shootings at the time. The band were annoyed, but the change worked in their favour: US fans took the phrase hell bent for leather to heart as a slogan for the group.
The leather-and-studs look was assembled in 1978. Confident that the music was already where it needed to be, Rob Halford and K.K. Downing pushed the idea that a unified visual signature could take them to the next level, and had leather outfits made in London for every member. It was never a look most fans could copy: expensive and thoroughly impractical, which was rather the point. Stage wear you could not buy off the rack.
One of rock's best-known set pieces began in 1979. Rob Halford, by then working with a leather cap and a bullwhip, came up with the idea of riding onto the stage for Hell Bent For Leather. He borrowed a bike from a fan, parked it in the wings, and rode out revving it as Glenn Tipton hit the riff. The crowd went wild, and it became a regular feature wherever the venue would permit it.
British Steel was made at Startling Studios, which sat inside Tittenhurst Park, a 72-acre estate in Ascot, Berkshire that had once belonged to John Lennon and by then belonged to Ringo Starr. And they went in without having finished writing an album that would turn out to matter this much.
With samplers still years away, the effects were all homemade. The metallic clatter on Metal Gods is a drawer loaded with cutlery and shaken, with spoons and knives removed one at a time until it sounded right, as Glenn Tipton describes it. The breaking glass on Breaking The Law is milk bottles smashed on the ground. The siren on the same track is real: they went outside and recorded a passing police car.
Before release, a story appeared claiming the album's master tapes had been stolen by a gang in New York and were being held to ransom for £50,000. It was entirely fabricated by the band's publicist at the time, Tony Brainsby, who was notorious for planting wild tales to get his clients noticed. Priest were not amused, but it worked: they turned up in national papers that would normally ignore them. K.K. Downing says that had they got wind of it they would have stopped it — the music is what makes them stand or fall, not cheap shots.
The title came from Ian Hill, who felt it said exactly what they were trying to do; workers at the nationalised British Steel Corporation were on strike at the time, so the name was in the news. Rob Halford admits he initially wondered whether it was right for the album and only grew into it. Glenn Tipton, who had worked for the corporation for five years, remembers that nobody had an alternative title anyway.
The idea for the sleeve — a hand gripping a giant razor blade — began when Rob Halford noticed that Gillette blades carried the words Sheffield Steel and put the concept to the others. The design is by Roslav Szaybo. There was some argument, Ian Hill noting that a razor blade was also an emblem of punk rock, but the finished artwork was approved unanimously. K.K. Downing says that the moment they saw it they thought it was as sharp-edged as they were.
The title of Living After Midnight came out of a complaint. During the Tittenhurst Park sessions Glenn Tipton set up his amp late at night and started working out riffs in the big room downstairs, which woke Rob Halford in the bedroom above. Halford came down, asked him to turn it down, and told him he was living after midnight down there. Tipton immediately said that was a great title for a song, and Halford wrote the lyric that day.
Living After Midnight climbed to number 12 in the UK and earned the band a third appearance on Top Of The Pops. The episode aired on 27 March 1980 but was taped the day before, which made them two hours late for a show in Birmingham. Fans were rightly annoyed at seeing a mimed television slot put ahead of them, and the band agreed never again to do the programme on a day they had a gig.
The narrator of Breaking The Law breaks out of an ordinary life gone dull. Rob Halford says the song tapped into an angst Priest had never really covered until that point: they all came from tough working-class backgrounds, and Walsall and West Bromwich were pretty bleak parts of the Birmingham area in those days. The need and the want of trying to break out of an unpleasant cycle was something they could all relate to.
The metal gods of the title are machines: robots that have risen up to destroy humanity. Halford was reading a great deal of science fiction at the time, and the specific inspirations named are the giant robot on the cover of Queen's 1977 album News Of The World and H. G. Wells's The War Of The Worlds. The song title later became his own nickname.
By the time British Steel came out, the band had already completed 21 UK dates with Iron Maiden supporting them. They then went to the US for a mix of headline and support shows, played second on the bill to Rainbow at the first Monsters Of Rock at Donington in August 1980, and closed the world tour on 23 August at the Golden Summernight festival in Nuremberg, Germany.
Overrunning in Ibiza forced the band to relocate to Beejay Studios in Florida to finish the album — and it was there that the song which defined their career got written. Rob Halford says You've Got Another Thing Comin' was one of the last things they wrote, put together quickly when they had a few days left and were casting about for one more track. Because it came together so fast, they buried it on side two.
It was the label, not the band, who wanted it as a single: when Columbia said they were releasing it, Priest thought they were mad, since they did not think the song was strong enough. Ian Hill laughs that they were wrong, thank god. AM radio picked it up and played it to death, so people heard it driving to work, taking the kids to school and in the shops. It was the song, he says, that broke them not just in America but around the world.
The only song on Screaming For Vengeance not written by Priest's own trio is (Take These) Chains, by the American writer Bob Halligan Jr., then with United Artists publishing. A song plugger at the company, May Pang, asked him for something in the vein of Foreigner, and he wrote it in a few hours. Pang placed it not with Foreigner but with Judas Priest, who were looking for a mellower hit.
Eat Me Alive, from 1984's Defenders Of The Faith, was named in 1985 as one of fifteen songs the Parents Music Resource Center found objectionable. The PMRC was made up of the wives of prominent lawmakers and was connected enough to force Senate hearings, after which the record industry agreed to label albums deemed offensive. Halford said in 2015 that the idea of giving young listeners some guidance seemed like common sense to him, but that the political shouting at the front of it smothered the message.
The guitar synthesizer that shaped the sound of Turbo was not something the band went looking for: the electronic instrument company Roland approached them to ask whether they would try out a brand-new device. Rob Halford describes it as something that took the straightforward sound of a guitar through a Marshall and altered it completely, capable of producing non-guitar sounds — and says that was exactly what purists in metal pushed back against.
Turbo was originally planned as a double album called Twin Turbos. Ian Hill says the band wanted to put out a double for the price of a single record, which the label would not accept: they could not manufacture it and sell it at that price. About halfway through the writing they decided to make it a single album instead. Some of the songs written for Twin Turbos later appeared on 1988's Ram It Down, and others turned up as bonus tracks on subsequent reissues.
Turbo Lover began with Glenn Tipton's equipment. Straight off a world tour the band went to Marbella in southern Spain, shut themselves away in a rented house by the ocean and wrote. One day Tipton kicked his pedal board, a sound came out — the one you hear at the start of the song — and Rob Halford said it sounded like a turbo engine revving up. That was the spark: the song grew from it, the title appeared, and the album took its name from the song.
Parental Guidance is the band's answer to the advisory stickers record labels agreed to put on albums with offensive lyrics under pressure from the PMRC. Priest could not fathom that anyone took Eat Me Alive seriously enough to put it on a list of fifteen, and made their position plain in the song; Halford recalls thinking it was the sort of thing that only happens in America. Ironically the controversy pushed sales up for the acts targeted, as kids bought the albums to find out what the fuss was about.
Painkiller could not have happened without a new drummer. Scott Travis, 28 and formerly of Racer X, joined only a few months before recording and found himself opening the album alone for the first fifteen seconds. Ian Hill is blunt about it: Dave Holland was a good drummer but could not handle double bass drums like that, and had he stayed in the band they simply could not have done that song at all.
Most of the bass on Painkiller is not Ian Hill. He was unwell and unable to take part in the sessions, so Don Airey — who had been booked to play keyboards — played the parts on a Minimoog. By Airey's account the whole album is Moog bass, with some of Hill's playing mixed in on parts. Because the band wanted a heavier record than before, the only track on which Airey actually played keyboards was A Touch of Evil. He says he was not credited, though he was paid.
Speaking to Metal Hammer in 2025, Rob Halford insists he did not quit in the 1990s. The Painkiller tour had been one of their most successful, but everyone was exhausted and they had agreed to take a break; he then said he was going off to do something of his own. To do that he had to file a leaving-member notice with the record label — a clause in the contract, nothing more — and everything blew up from there. They should, he says, simply have walked away and said see you in a year.
It took until May 1996 to find a replacement, and it was drummer Scott Travis who found him: an unknown American called Tim Owens, singing in a Judas Priest tribute band named British Steel. Nicknamed Ripper after the band's own song, he could reproduce Halford's shrieks with ease. Glenn Tipton's verdict was that Owens was the only person on the planet who could sing those songs better than Rob, and that finding him was nothing short of a miracle.
What rebuilt the bridge was a greatest-hits box set, Metalogy. Long-time manager Jayne Andrews called a meeting, held in the small kitchen of Halford's house in Walsall — the first time he, K.K. Downing, Glenn Tipton and management had all sat in one room. Over a cup of tea and some Hobnobs, Andrews named the elephant in the room and asked whether they were going to get back together. The answer, Halford says, was a very Spinal Tap sort of yes.
The idea of a concept album about the 16th-century astrologer Nostradamus did not come from inside the band. It was suggested by their manager Bill Curbishley, who also represents The Who of Tommy and Quadrophenia. Rob Halford says they had wanted to make a concept record for years without ever nailing it: what they needed was a subject that would push the band somewhere very different, and this was it.
The intricacy of the arrangements on Nostradamus suggests an orchestra, or at least a string section. K.K. Downing says there was none: everything you take for an orchestra is himself and Glenn Tipton on guitars and keyboards. His reasoning was that a metal riff played on a cello sounds classical, and that they used it to get as close as they could to the kind of sounds Nostradamus himself would have heard in his lifetime.
Richie Faulkner had been playing Judas Priest covers at Metalworks, a venue in Camden in London, where sessions ran from three in the afternoon until midnight every Sunday and where he says he got his real grounding. When the band's management rang and asked whether he knew any Judas Priest songs, more than half their setlist turned out to be material he already knew from that covers work. He still goes when he is in London, sometimes turning up with Scott Travis to play Led Zeppelin.
The idea of using two producers arrived once the shortlist was down to two names. Richie Faulkner thinks it was Glenn Tipton who said they should simply work with both. Tom Allom had history with the band and had worked on the 2016 live album Battle Cry, so he knew what they sounded like now; Andy Sneap could bring a contemporary approach. Both had the track record, and the reasoning was that it could not go badly.
The box set marking fifty years, Reflections: 50 Heavy Metal Years Of Music, was released through Sony Music on 15 October 2021 and gathers all the band's studio and live albums together with several discs of previously unreleased material. It was restored and mixed by Tom Allom at La Cucina W8 and mastered by Alex Wharton at Abbey Road Studios.
At the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony in November 2022 the band received the Award for Musical Excellence and performed with former members K.K. Downing and Les Binks. Richie Faulkner, who had not been named among the inductees, says his first instinct was to step aside and not play — but Rob Halford and Glenn Tipton insisted that everyone who was Priest in 2022 should be on that stage. What he most enjoyed, he says, was a Judas Priest with three guitarists on it.
The fiftieth-anniversary tour that began in 2021 took in around a hundred stops, with a setlist that reviewed the whole of the band's history. Their debut single Rocka Rolla was played for the first time in roughly forty-five years, since 1976, and songs never previously performed live — One Shot At Glory from Painkiller and Invader from Stained Class — were given their first outings. Richie Faulkner calls it a good experience for the whole band.
Glenn Tipton played on parts of Invincible Shield. Richie Faulkner's account of the arrangement is simple: Tipton plays what he can play, and Faulkner takes on what he cannot — the way they have handled it all along. Writing works the same way; ideas Tipton can demonstrate himself he does, and where he cannot they work them out together in the studio. On his better days he recorded guitars for songs such as Sons Of Thunder. The principle, Faulkner says, is that Tipton should not have to worry about what he cannot do.
The Lodger, on the deluxe edition of Invincible Shield, was written by Bob Halligan Jr. — the man who gave the band Some Heads Are Gonna Roll in 1984. Richie Faulkner says Halligan came to a show with his wife, spent time with the band and offered them a song to consider. It stuck with him: he kept thinking about it while working on other material. They gave it a Priest treatment, and rather than shelve it they put it on the deluxe edition.
The Japanese release of Invincible Shield came in two forms. The limited deluxe edition (SICP 31698) is a high-quality Blu-spec CD2 with all fourteen tracks and a 28-page hardcover book. The standard edition (SICP 6557) is a conventional disc with eleven tracks, in a jewel case with a twelve-page booklet.
The tour opened at Zepp Sapporo on 21 November 2018 in the snow. Speaking before doors, Richie Faulkner said the snow was exactly what made it feel like Sapporo to him: it had also snowed on the day of their first ever Hokkaido show, at the same venue in March 2015, and the memory had stayed with him. Coming straight from South America, he joked that he had finished a tour in T-shirt and shorts and swapped his luggage for winter clothes — and rather than hide from the cold he had been out walking around the snowy city.
On that 2018 tour Richie Faulkner said he was looking forward to comparing the ramen in each place they visited. In the same interview he addressed Glenn Tipton's absence — Tipton was not taking part in the tour as a rule, because of Parkinson's disease — saying he wanted to bring everything he had learned from him into the shows, and that his combination with Andy Sneap, deputising on guitar, was getting better by the day.
The 2024 Japanese tour was their first appearance in the country since headlining Download Japan in 2019, and their first full tour here since the Firepower run in 2018. It also formed part of their first world tour since being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2022.
Sony Music Japan's own profile records Screaming For Vengeance as the band's first US Top 20 album, and as the record that passed two million copies in the United States alone for a double-platinum award. It is the album their Japanese label marks as the point at which Priest reached the summit of the metal scene.
Painkiller earned the band their first Grammy nomination, for Best Metal Performance at the 33rd Annual Grammy Awards. Further nominations followed: Bullet Train at the 41st, Nostradamus in the metal category and Visions in hard rock at the 51st, and Crown of Horns at the 67th.
Crown Of Horns, a single from Invincible Shield, was nominated for Best Metal Performance at the 67th Annual Grammy Awards — the band's fifth nomination, counting back to Painkiller in 1991.
When K.K. Downing first auditioned, he had by his own admission been playing guitar for only a few weeks, and he was turned down. The man who would hold down one half of the band's twin-guitar attack for more than four decades started with a rejection.
Al Atkins left for domestic reasons rather than musical ones: his wife became pregnant and he had to find steady work. The vacancy went to Rob Halford, and by his own account K.K. Downing turned up at his house to find him already singing in his room. Halford reckons he had the job before Downing had even set eyes on him.
In 1973 both Al Atkins and drummer Alan Moore left for financial reasons. Rob Halford stepped forward to sing, with John Hinch brought in behind the kit. The two arrived together rather than separately: Halford and Hinch had already played together in a band called Hiroshima.
Before their debut they were an unknown local act, with support slots for the likes of Thin Lizzy and Budgie. With Glenn Tipton in from the Flying Hat Band and Alan Moore on drums, the band's world at that point extended no further than the surrounding area.
The turnover behind the drum kit in the early years shows up in the credits: the first four albums each have a different drummer. They were building the template for heavy metal without ever settling who sat on the stool.
Their 1974 debut Rocka Rolla was produced by Rodger Bain, the man who had already handled Black Sabbath's first three albums. The producer who captured metal's point of origin also recorded the first steps of the band who would give the genre its shape.
Glenn Tipton has never hidden his disappointment with how Rocka Rolla sounded. He rates the songs, many of which he says have stood the test of time, but says he went home, listened to the record and was gutted by it. The decision to change producer for the next album came directly out of that.
Sad Wings Of Destiny was produced by Jeffrey Calvert and Max West, a pairing with no rock pedigree at all. The following year the same two men, recording as Typically Tropical, took the breezy calypso pastiche Barbados to number one in Britain. The album routinely described as heavy metal's blueprint was made with help from outside the genre entirely.
A very young engineer got his first real break on Sad Wings Of Destiny: Chris Tsangarides. From there he went on to work with some of the biggest names in rock through the 1980s, and in 1990 he came back to this band as the producer of Painkiller.
Recording began at Rockfield Studios in Wales, but the money ran out partway through. By the time they had moved to Morgan Studios in London the tab had run dry, and K.K. Downing recalls the band being unable to afford food or drink. Black Sabbath and UFO were recording in the same building while Priest were living on the breadline.
Gull had been advancing them two thousand pounds per record. Signing to CBS took that to sixty thousand almost overnight. K.K. Downing recalls that in the Gull years the work was flooding in while the money for petrol and road crew was not, so the whole band took part-time jobs; his own involved screwing bolts into a ceiling.
Sad Wings Of Destiny came out on 23 March 1976 and gave the band their first UK chart placing, at a modest number 48. The number is small, but as a step up from a debut that had gone nowhere it was decisive. The album did not chart in America at the time; it has since sold more than half a million copies there.
It has sometimes been suggested that songs like Tyrant, Genocide and The Ripper were already in the live set and had been left off the debut. Halford rejects that reading: as he remembers it, the only song on Sad Wings Of Destiny they had been playing on stage before recording was Victim Of Changes, and everything else was newly written.
The Ripper is a brief account of Jack the Ripper's crimes told from the killer's own point of view, written by Glenn Tipton, who by this stage was already building the twin-lead sound with K.K. Downing. What the band did not yet have was a signature look: the leather and studs were still a year away.
Glenn Tipton is hard on Sin After Sin, the first album after the move to a major. He rates songs like Dissident Aggressor and Starbreaker but says the record was not overflowing with material, and that because producer Roger Glover of Deep Purple came in partway through the process it ended up sounding a little thin.
Dissident Aggressor has travelled well beyond its own record. Slayer covered it on 1988's South Of Heaven, and Halestorm included it on their 2013 covers EP ReAniMate 2.0. A song from 1977 became a standard for the generations that followed.
Ian Hill names Dissident Aggressor as his own favourite Judas Priest song, and what he values is its rawness. As he remembers it, the studio recording was two guitars, bass, drums and vocals, with perhaps one extra guitar through the lead break and nothing else. The absence of ornament is exactly what puts it at the top for him.
On Last Rose Of Summer, from Sin After Sin, Glenn Tipton plays a Fender Rhodes piano; the lyric is Rob Halford's. It is a gentle song built around the turning of the seasons, made at a point when the leather and studs did not yet exist and the twin-guitar style was still being worked out.
The lyric of Raw Deal names Fire Island in New York; the hamlet of Fire Island Pines has been a well-known gathering place for gay men for decades. Halford has said he worried he was going too far with those references, but when he showed the words to his bandmates the response was simply that they suited the mood of the song. He wrote the lyric; the music is Glenn Tipton's.
Rob Halford counts Beyond The Realms Of Death among the most personal lyrics he has written. In his memoir Confess he says that in 1978 the idea of gay men being able to talk to one another openly and without stigma seemed about as likely as pole-vaulting to Mars. The line in the song about being free to speak with his own kind is the other side of that.
Better By You, Better Than Me is not a Priest original. It first appeared on Spooky Two, the 1969 album by the British band Spooky Tooth, written by their keyboard player and singer Gary Wright. Priest recorded it because the label wanted something that might gain traction as a single in America. It was a last-minute addition, and with producer Dennis Mackay already gone, James Guthrie produced this one track with the band.
Heroes End, written by Glenn Tipton, names Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and James Dean and asks why people have to die before their efforts are recognised. During the subliminal-message trial the song was accused of glorifying death as heroic — but the prosecution had misheard the chorus. The actual line asks why you have to die to be a hero, which points the other way entirely.
Stained Class, their fourth album, took the band to a new level: in the UK they began playing theatres, and in America they started earning radio play and creating a buzz. It was also, by Songfacts' account, the period in which they first attracted groupies.
The leather look is often read through gay culture, and because Rob Halford is gay a persistent story held that he had engineered the image as a cover and an outlet for his sexuality. Halford rejects that flatly in his memoir Confess, calling the idea complete nonsense.
The phrase hell bent for leather also appears in Frankie Laine's 1959 song Rawhide, the theme to the American television series starring Clint Eastwood. The band are unlikely to have watched the show, but the song was a number 6 hit in Britain and they probably knew it.
The riff for Hell Bent For Leather came out of Glenn Tipton in the studio immediately after they had laid down Take On The World. Rob Halford heard it, hit on the phrase hell bent for leather, and — with the band taken by the title — built the rest of the lyric out from there.
Take On The World has Queen behind it. Rob Halford had been paying attention to the way Queen built theatricality and a direct line to their audience, and took notice when We Will Rock You and We Are The Champions appeared in 1977. The single's chart placing surprised the band themselves and earned them a slot on Top Of The Pops; the episode on 25 January 1979 also featured Blondie, Leif Garrett and Donny & Marie Osmond. By Halford's account he got into a row with Marie Osmond, who objected to his bullwhip.
K.K. Downing puts sales of Take On The World as a single at something like 400,000 copies, which he reckons is more than a recent chart-topper would manage. Getting onto Top Of The Pops astonished the band, but as he tells it they thought they were doing what Queen had done with We Will Rock You, and the sentiment of the song was entirely sincere.
Evening Star can sound like a heavy metal Christmas carol, the journey of the Magi told in the first person. Rob Halford says the title came from somewhere else entirely: the Express & Star, his local evening paper in the West Midlands. In those days newsboys stood on street corners shouting the paper's name, and that shout was the catalyst.
Evening Star was released as a single in the UK and charted in May 1979 — not exactly the season for it. Halford is happy enough with the Christmas reading, but the song was never marketed that way. They performed it on Top Of The Pops on 17 May 1979, on an episode that also featured Donna Summer, Abba and Peaches & Herb.
Rob Halford revealed on the Metal Hammer Magazine Show in 2015 that Before The Dawn, the ballad on Killing Machine, was written about his very first heartbreak. Not literally, as he put it, but with definite truth in it relating to that episode.
Unleashed In The East drew accusations of heavy overdubbing, to the point where it acquired the nickname Unleashed In The Studio. Glenn Tipton rejects that impatiently: there was some patching up, he says, but no more than any other band did, and anyone claiming it is not a live album is lying.
Their cover of Fleetwood Mac's 1970 single The Green Manalishi (With The Two Prong Crown) was not on the original UK edition of Killing Machine. It made its first appearance on the US edition, released as Hell Bent For Leather, and it was the version on the 1979 live album Unleashed In The East that established the song as a 70s metal standard — not everyone who heard it realised it was a cover at all.
Reworking unlikely material is one of this band's habits. Joan Baez's folk song Diamonds And Rust and Spooky Tooth's blues-rock chugger Better By You, Better Than Me were both remade almost past recognition, and The Green Manalishi belongs to the same line. As Halford put it in 2017, a good song will take any kind of interpretation and can be made into anything.
One of the footholds in America was a support slot to Led Zeppelin at the Day On The Green festival in San Francisco. Glenn Tipton puts the crowd at 65,000. The band had been more than ready to go home when the offer came, and he credits the show with breaking them on the west coast and beginning the conquest of the whole country.
Work started on 1 February 1980 and was finished by the end of that month — one month, start to end. The label wanted the record out in April, so it had to be wrapped by the end of February, but producer Tom Allom recalls no crises and no fall-outs; they simply got on with it.
By Glenn Tipton's account only about sixty per cent of the songs were written when they arrived. They had never worked that way before and never did again. The Rage was written in the studio, and so was Living After Midnight. K.K. Downing says they were always confident the material would come in time, and that being spontaneous like that can work in your favour.
Before handing over the house Ringo Starr removed the valuables and laid down rules: no riding motorbikes on the grounds, no fishing in the lake. K.K. Downing's account is that the band did both — what else, he asks, would you expect from a Brummie heavy metal band. There were also two enormous papier-mâché dinosaurs hidden about the grounds, which could genuinely frighten you on the way back from the pub up the road.
They did not confine themselves to the control room. Rooms all over the house were used to find the right ambience for each instrument: the drums got their enormous sound in the hallway. K.K. Downing recalls clearing the television and pool table out of the famous room where John Lennon filmed the video for Woman so they could rehearse there, and cutting his own guitar parts in the library.
There is a competing account of the siren on Breaking The Law: that it was not a police car at all but K.K. Downing working the whammy bar on his guitar. Downing himself is said to be unable to remember which it was, and the two accounts still stand side by side — Glenn Tipton's version came with the caveat that it was at least his recollection of events.
The invention did not stop there. The sound in Rapid Fire that reads as a blade cutting the air is a billiard cue swung through the room with microphones above and below, with the tape then slowed down. What passes for a cowbell on Breaking The Law is a kettle — one so badly beaten up, Tom Allom reckons, that it was probably never boiled again.
Not everything they tried made the record. K.K. Downing remembers using a slamming door at the start of Metal Gods and putting light bulbs in the microwave to hear what noises they made as they heated up, but he does not know whether any of it was actually used. Anything was possible; nothing was off limits.
British Steel was the first studio album Tom Allom made with the band, though he had already been at the helm for Unleashed In The East. He had just finished producing Def Leppard's debut On Through The Night at the same studio and went more or less straight back in with Priest. He then worked on their next five studio albums and one live record across the 80s, and returned to co-produce Firepower in 2018.
In his autobiography Heavy Duty, K.K. Downing calls British Steel a record with almost no faults — while adding that, if he is being hyper-critical, the album still does not quite capture how good those sessions actually were, and that he has no idea what is missing. He also reveals that Tom Allom invited the members of Def Leppard to sit in while Priest blasted out their riffs; they sat quietly and were, he says, friendly and respectful.
The blade appears to bite into the fingers, yet there is no blood. K.K. Downing reads that as the image saying it is safe to be into this music, and Rob Halford agrees that blood would have been over the top. In some countries the artwork was airbrushed so that the hand merely held the blade, because the cutting looked offensive. The band refused: without the finger-slicing, they said, it does not work.
British Steel was released by Columbia in April 1980 and reached number 4 in Britain — for a long time the highest position the band ever managed at home — and number 34 in the United States.
Three singles charted in the UK from British Steel: Breaking The Law and Living After Midnight both reached number 12, and United number 26. The videos for the first two were directed by Julien Temple, who says there is a definite comedic element to Judas Priest — as he is sure they know — and that the shoots were a lot of fun.
It happened again the following year. The band appeared on Top Of The Pops with United on a day when they were booked to play their home city, Birmingham, once more. They had been assured they would arrive in time, but their plane sat fog-bound at Luton Airport. By the time they reached the venue some of the audience had gone home, and Glenn Tipton does not blame them; he thinks that night contributed to the resentment that built up when the band later spent so much time in America.
Breaking The Law began on a drizzly day in a farmhouse in Staffordshire, where Glenn Tipton got the idea and took the basic framework to Rob Halford and K.K. Downing to finish the arrangement between them. Halford's recollection is that the bulk of the song came together at Ringo Starr's old house during the sessions, and that the words simply arrived out of thin air — he says he has no idea where they came from.
It was Columbia Records who suggested Breaking The Law as the second single from British Steel, and the label financed the video too. In Julien Temple's clip the band dress as vicars, rob a bank using their guitars as weapons and make their getaway past what was then the Hammersmith Odeon. Halford says they understood well enough that MTV was about to become enormous, and that a video following the lyric literally would have fallen flat on its face.
Julien Temple, who directed both videos, says that having just worked with the Sex Pistols nobody else would touch him. Judas Priest did not seem to mind, and he ended up doing a good deal of work with them. He came up with the storylines for Breaking The Law and Living After Midnight while wandering around listening to the songs on an early Walkman.
Living After Midnight was also the band's first music video: Julien Temple again, mostly performance footage showcasing the studded leather, shot at Sheffield City Hall with drummer Dave Holland playing an invisible kit. When the song did well, Columbia granted Temple a bigger budget for the next single's video — Breaking The Law, which became their first concept clip.
Metal God became Rob Halford's nickname, and in 2009 he trademarked the phrase himself. He earned the title by championing heavy metal for decades, not least in the late 70s when punk was in fashion and metal was looked down on. It has not gone to his head: he comes from a working-class background, has a keen sense of humour, wears no crown and does not require anyone to bow.
Rob Halford calls United an us-against-the-world anthem. Behind it lie two things at once: a feeling in early-80s Britain that the public was united against a government that did not care, and the band's own experience of being ignored by parts of the home press while punk dominated everything. He describes it as a rallying call to metalheads, in the UK and everywhere else.
British Steel was the record that made them arena headliners for the first time. It was their first UK Top 10 album, at number 4, and the first to sell a million copies in America. The key change was in the writing: every track was composed as a team by Halford, Downing and Tipton.
Rob Halford describes the Grinder lyric as a comment on how governments and corporations treat people like meat — grinding them up, spitting them out, exploiting them for their own ends. K.K. Downing rates it as an important track, one that he feels laid down a lot of roots for what rock and metal became in the 80s, its straight, full-on 4/4 beat doing a good deal to commercialise the genre.
K.K. Downing says Steeler has been the band's most successful track with other musicians — Dimebag Darrell of Pantera among many who cited it as a favourite. He admits he never quite understood why, given how simple it is, and puts it down to the groove and the way he and Glenn Tipton trade wild guitar figures at the end.
The first forty seconds of The Rage do not sound like a metal band at all: it opens on an island groove closer to reggae, an idea of Glenn Tipton's that his bandmates were sceptical about before coming round to it. The unusual introduction makes the guitar riff hit harder when it finally arrives.
The title Rapid Fire never appears in the lyric; it refers to the relentless pace of the song itself. K.K. Downing notes that it starts unusually — Priest traditionally went in for a big intro, and here the thing simply goes. He finds the structure odd too, and says that to this day he does not know what they were thinking.
For You Don't Have to Be Old to Be Wise the band recorded live together for the first time rather than laying down each part separately — producer Tom Allom's decision. Halford has said of the lyric that even in his thirties he was still a teenager under the skin as far as rebellion went, having had enough of being programmed and told what to do.
On the American leg of the British Steel tour the support acts were Def Leppard and the Scorpions, while the earlier UK and European dates had Iron Maiden opening. Over the course of one year, then, bands who would each go on to define an era took the stage before Priest in turn.
Years later K.K. Downing decided the album could have had another title. It came to him one night: Sermons For The Teenage Rebel. Look at the song titles — Breaking The Law, You Don't Have To Be Old To Be Wise, The Rage — and youth angst is what the record is about. He calls it a people's album, and argues that although everyone assumed the punks were the real agitators, lyrically Priest were closer to what kids on the street were actually thinking.
Point Of Entry was the first album they recorded outside the UK, on the Spanish island of Ibiza. Rob Halford says they used to assume metal could only be made somewhere busy like a city, and learned that once the studio door is shut you can be anywhere on the planet. The magic of the island did not, however, transfer to the record.
Point Of Entry was attacked for leaning too far towards radio, and the band have since acknowledged pressure from the label to record covers and write hits. K.K. Downing's summary is that they gave them what they wanted. Ian Hill puts it more mildly: they never set out to make it more commercial, it simply came out lighter than British Steel, and he thinks they took a step in the wrong direction.
Whatever the reviews said, Point Of Entry sold half a million copies in three months, and the band's focus changed completely. K.K. Downing reckons the shows they were putting on in those years were second only to Kiss, and says we may never see anything like their gigantic moving robots again.
Rob Halford describes Heading Out To The Highway as being about freedom: you have the wheel and you are not going to let anyone else take your life away from you, out in the great vast landscape of life. Coming from a band long associated with motorcycles and leather, the open road was a natural subject.
The video for Heading Out To The Highway was another Julien Temple production: the band performing on an infinity curve painted to look like a desert highway. It was cheap, but in 1981 — the year MTV went on air — there was little else for the channel to choose from. Drummer Dave Holland can be seen pairing his leather jacket with a necktie.
In early 1982 the band went back to Ibiza to make their eighth album. The island had not yet earned its reputation as the party capital of Europe, but Priest gave it a preview. Ian Hill recalls killing several cars and a couple of motorcycles as well. Rob Halford says he does not know how they got through the record: they were, in his phrase, dancing with death.
One anecdote sums up the stay. The owner of their rental car company called a meeting, came in with an envelope and poured a quantity of white powder onto the table. Rob Halford says his first thought went somewhere else entirely; it was in fact the remains of the clutches and brakes. The band had to find another firm, which was not easy since word had got round the island.
You've Got Another Thing Comin' is the only Judas Priest song ever to reach the US Billboard Hot 100, where it peaked at number 67 on the strength of radio play and single sales. In the same month it reached number 4 on the US Mainstream Rock chart.
The band first realised the song had become a radio hit while on the road. On the North American tour that began in August 1982 the bus driver would have local stations on, and they heard it more or less everywhere they went — local radio, supermarkets, shopping malls, as K.K. Downing puts it. Venues could not keep up with ticket demand and had to be upgraded.
The video, directed by Julien Temple, was shot at Kempton Park Waterworks in London: the band performing amid smoke and lasers before blowing the head off a functionary who comes to shut them down. Halford says the pyro man loaded the mannequin up with so much C4 that it was obliterated.
When Bob Halligan Jr. was told Judas Priest were recording his song, his response was simply: who? Not unusual for an American in 1982. He soon learned they had a huge following and that his song was earning him substantial royalties, and his wife urged him to write another for them. That was Some Heads Are Gonna Roll, which they also recorded — again the only outside composition on the album.
Bob Halligan Jr. said in a 2023 interview that Some Heads Are Gonna Roll is a warning against nuclear holocaust. It sounds like an aggressive, vengeful persona, he says, but it is closer to watch out than to I want to hurt people: people get hurt easily when greed for power and money wins the day. He crafted it specifically for Priest — written on guitar rather than the piano he had used for (Take These) Chains, with riffs he thought would suit them, and pitched in a tenor range because he knew the vocal had to be high but could not imitate what Halford would do.
Screaming For Vengeance was released on 17 July 1982. It peaked at number 11 in the UK within a week, while in America the radio success of You've Got Another Thing Comin' kept it climbing. By the time it reached its US peak of number 17 in October it had already been certified Gold by the RIAA — British Steel had taken two years to manage the same — and by April 1983 it became the band's first Platinum record.
The Screaming For Vengeance tour made them arena headliners for the first time. Ian Hill remembers promoters phoning to cancel venues so they could rebook the same cities in bigger ones; they were competing with Van Halen over who could pull more people, playing to fifteen to twenty thousand a night. The World Vengeance tour opened on 26 August 1982 at the Stabler Arena in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, with dates booked into late February 1983.
Iron Maiden, fresh from The Number Of The Beast and their new singer Bruce Dickinson, joined some of those dates. Rob Halford says he watched them most nights and knew internally that they were going to be massive. K.K. Downing admits it was a bit sticky at first: they were genuinely fighting for the same space, and Priest's attitude was that the crown was theirs and Maiden could not have it.
Three months after the World Vengeance dates ended, on 29 May 1983, the band played the US Festival in California — the biggest show of their career to that point, on a bill with Ozzy Osbourne, the Scorpions, Mötley Crüe and Quiet Riot, headlined by Van Halen. Ian Hill remembers being flown in by helicopter: they came over a hill, the field changed colour, and you could see people receding into the distance with the curvature of the Earth.
For Defenders Of The Faith, the studio their management had booked in Ibiza turned out to be an empty shell, its equipment removed by bailiffs. Rob Halford laughs that the band ended up helping carry all-new gear into the building at a time when they should have been working — and wonders why they did not simply go somewhere else.
Defenders Of The Faith appeared in January 1984 and is now treated as a genre classic, but at the time it was judged a relative failure. By the end of that year it had stalled at 800,000 copies — a huge figure by today's standards, but half a million behind its predecessor, which was still selling. Halford admitted in an interview at the time that he was disappointed and that they simply did not have a strong enough single. The album has since gone platinum.
The Eat Me Alive lyric was written in one night after a trip to the pub. As Halford tells it, the others were laying down riffs and by the time his turn came he was thoroughly gone, so he simply belted out whatever came. The album is full of songs with a cartoonish streak — Jawbreaker, The Sentinel — and the band's complaint is that the PMRC refused to see it.
The title Defenders Of The Faith outgrew the album and became a motto handed to anyone steeped in metal's history and values. Asked whether the band really saw themselves as guardians of what the culture holds dear, Halford answers without hesitation that they did and still do — the longer you live with the association, he says, the more it becomes a real, living thing.
What opens Turbo Lover is not, strictly speaking, a synthesizer. Glenn Tipton was playing a synthesizer guitar, a Hamer A7 Phantom the company had sent him, run through a Roland GR-700 guitar synth. The Hamer A7 Phantom did not last long on the market, and this is more or less the only song of note recorded with one.
Turbo moved studios three times. It began at Compass Point in Nassau in the Bahamas, where very little got done: Halford says they would start at six in the evening, and once Tom Allom had his gin and tonic the session was over and everyone went to the pub. They left the Bahamas for Miami and finished the record in Los Angeles, where Halford checked into rehab. He came out after thirty days and says his life had changed in a million ways.
The ballad Out In The Cold carries some of the first vocals Rob Halford recorded sober, straight out of rehab; he was glad to find he could let rip at the microphone without needing a drink first. The song was written with both guitarists, K.K. Downing and Glenn Tipton, with Tipton playing the intro and the second half of the solo.
The Parental Guidance video, directed by Wayne Isham, is live footage from a show in Dallas on 22 June 1986. Earlier in that set Halford swung his arm in a stage gesture, caught K.K. Downing's guitar and drove the end of a string into Downing's eye. Downing put on large sunglasses to cover the bleeding, and that is how he appears in the video; plenty of fans assumed it was a fashion statement.
Turbo came out in April 1986 to reviews that ranged from baffled to hostile, and its synthesized sounds pushed away a section of the audience who wanted the old twin-guitar attack. Commercially, though, it was far from a flop: mainstream American radio and MTV picked up the singles Turbo Lover, Locked In and Parental Guidance. Ian Hill's summary is that it lost them some friends but made them at least as many as it lost.
Rob Halford remembers exactly where he was the first time he heard Turbo Lover in public: driving down Sunset Strip in Los Angeles with the top down. What struck him was the unreality of it — a kid from Walsall in the West Midlands, hearing his own song come out of the radio there.
Behind Turbo sat an awareness of a new power. MTV, only a few years old, had become able to make or break bands, and Priest could see peers such as ZZ Top and Billy Idol folding new technology into their sound and supplying eye-catching videos to earn heavy rotation. Halford says MTV was a gamechanger that totally changed the face of music, and that this probably had some influence on the general outcome of Turbo.
Looking back at 1988's Ram It Down, Rob Halford describes a band uncertain about the future — not an era of confusion exactly, but an unsettled one. The album includes a cover of Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Goode. His own departure, he has said, was not spontaneous: it had been brewing since around 1986.
Ian Hill lays out the change of direction in the late 80s plainly: Turbo had been the experimental record and it lost them quite a few of their traditional fans, so with Ram It Down they decided to go for a harder edge, and that culminated in Painkiller in 1990.
For Painkiller the band changed producer for the first time in a decade. Tom Allom, who had handled their studio albums since British Steel in 1980, was replaced by Chris Tsangarides. Glenn Tipton's line at the time was that times change and you have to change with them: it was 1990 now, and they had updated their music. Tsangarides had been the tape op on Sad Wings Of Destiny back in 1976.
Scott Travis worked out the intro at Miraval Studios in Nice, France in early 1990. The drums were set up in a huge room with the control room far away, and while the producer and engineer fiddled with mic placement he simply put on headphones and played. He knew the song was going to be fast and upbeat, so he was throwing out flurries; the others liked what they heard, told him to do more of that, and he whipped it up from there.
Recording Painkiller itself went comparatively easily. Ian Hill says they had spent about two weeks in an old rented finca in Spain where they could play the song live and polish it, so everyone knew what they were doing by the time they reached the studio. The moment where the track pauses to cue a sweep-picked arpeggio into Glenn Tipton's solo is reportedly the guitarist's own favourite passage.
The Painkiller video was Wayne Isham's fourth for the band, made fresh from work with Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, Ozzy Osbourne, Bon Jovi and Def Leppard. It was shot in austere monochrome in what looks like an iron foundry; the lyric's post-apocalyptic narrative was wisely not acted out, which would have been very expensive.
Painkiller was finished in the spring of 1990, but its release was held back because the band had to stand trial — accused of inserting subliminal messages into Stained Class. They were exonerated, but only after a gruelling hearing.
By the late 80s the band were not fighting the new thrash generation but embracing it: they took Slayer out on the 1988 Mercenaries Of Metal tour. Glenn Tipton told Metal Hammer in December 1990 that their ambition was to fly the flag for metal and that they saw thrash and heavy metal as one and the same, adding that they were very aware of the young bands and guitar players.
Rob Halford told Kerrang! on 25 May 2013 that Painkiller is the song he is proudest of having written. He calls it everything a full-on screaming metal track should be: everybody going a million miles an hour and the melody still coming through. Hearing thirty thousand metalheads chant the line about the Painkiller at a festival is, he says, a great feeling — and he considers it an important song both for the band and for metal.
A year after leaving, Halford released War Of Words, the debut by his thrash-leaning band Fight. He went on to the industrial-tinged 2wo and then to a solo project under the name Halford. Priest, meanwhile, carried on with singer Tim 'Ripper' Owens and released two albums, Jugulator in 1997 and Demolition in 2001.
Rob Halford has told The Guardian that Victim Of Changes is his favourite of all the songs he has written: the way the dual guitars come in, the bludgeoning riff, the singing, the unusual arrangement, the quiet middle eight, the blistering Glenn Tipton lead break full of blues and metal, and the ending with a bang and a scream. If you were going to listen to one song to get the feel of the genre, he says, this is the one he suggests. Richie Faulkner named the same song as his own favourite in 2022.
The reunion was announced in July 2003, and most of that year went on rehearsals for the following summer's festival dates. They worked at Bray Studios, the old film studio where many of the Hammer horrors were made — and where, when Priest arrived, Teletubbies was being shot. Halford went to look at that set so often that it became a running request to get him off it.
Halford is fairly sure the first song they cranked out in rehearsal was Living After Midnight: after more than fifteen years apart they wanted a bang. He remembers everything falling back into place, everyone nodding at each other and smiling. The first show with him back came on 2 June 2004 at the Stadionsporthalle in Hanover, Germany — thirteen years after the last one.
Ian Hill's account of the reunion is that it was awkward for about ten seconds; after that it was simply a matter of he's come home. He adds, with some amusement, that even Ripper Owens thought it was a great idea, despite it putting him out of a job.
Released on 23 February 2005, Angel Of Retribution was the first Judas Priest album with Rob Halford in fifteen years. It broke the UK Top 40 and peaked at number 13 on the US Billboard 200, with the opening track Judas Rising serving as the announcement of their return.
Rob Halford says he does not know where the title Judas Rising came from — possibly, he suggests, just the psychosis of being metal phoenixes rising from the ashes. He likes the way everything fades in at the start, building anticipation, and reckons that is how the fans must have felt getting their favourite band back after so long.
Halford has said the phrase Judas Rising can be read two ways. His own reading is of the angel from the Sad Wings Of Destiny artwork — that despondent, doom-laden, oppressive world — emerging from it in full majesty and glory, having overcome the odds, full of optimism and energy. The Angel Of Retribution sleeve depicts a heavy metal guardian angel.
Playing Ozzfest was what re-established them in America. Halford calls the line-up phenomenal: Sabbath, Priest, Slayer, Slipknot. Ian Hill notes that the Ripper albums took a lot of flak and that people blamed them for the band no longer filling the biggest venues, but says everyone suffered a bit through the 90s — and that Halford's return lifted them back to where they probably should have been within the genre.
The scale of Nostradamus is summed up by K.K. Downing. After the Angel Of Retribution tour, he says, people asked what they were going to do now, as if the band had nothing left to offer. The answer was a concept album running over a hundred minutes across two CDs and three vinyl records — his description of it is a reply to everyone who thought Priest were past it.
Glenn Tipton is clear that the concept is not original — records had been made about Nostradamus before — but that those dealt with his prophecies. What Priest concentrated on was the man's life, which is less well known and includes the loss of his wife and daughter to the plague. The more they found out, he says, the more they thought that was the way to go.
Ian Hill is candid about how Nostradamus began: when their manager put the idea forward, they all laughed at first. Then K.K., Glenn and Rob got properly stuck in, and Hill says watching them was like watching them go back to school — the research was exhaustive. He is careful to add that none of them came out of it as devotees, but that as the story of a man it is an immense one, and musically it was a genuine challenge and a step forward.
Asked why Nostradamus, Halford told MTV that he was an alchemist as well as a seer, a person of extraordinary talent, with a life full of trial and tribulation and joy and sorrow — a very human character and a world-famous one. You can translate his name into any language and everybody knows it, which mattered because the band were dealing with a worldwide audience.
The number 6 placing Redeemer Of Souls reached on the US Billboard 200 was also the band's first American Top 10. Their previous best had been number 11, for Nostradamus in 2008. Forty years after Rocka Rolla, they set a new high on the US chart.
The figure Rob Halford invented for the title track of Redeemer Of Souls is the one on the album cover. He describes it as another song of empowerment with a fantasy element: not a destructive figure but one bringing redemption through metal. There is an Old West streak running through the lyric alongside the extraterrestrial idea, drawn partly from the 2011 film Cowboys & Aliens, and Glenn Tipton says the reference to high noon conjures for him a half-molten, half-human figure walking through a deserted cowboy town of dust and tumbleweeds.
Halls Of Valhalla draws on Norse mythology, where Valhalla is the great hall to which Valkyries carry the souls of warriors slain in battle. Rob Halford has spoken of his attraction to Scandinavia and its history and culture, and describes waking at about four in the morning wondering what he could write to go with the music when the word Valhalla surfaced. He treated it as the bullet word and built the lyric out from it.
Never Forget, on the bonus disc of the deluxe edition of Redeemer Of Souls, came out of a day during writing when the band were feeling retrospective. Halford heard an acoustic figure Glenn Tipton had going, thought of their fans and everyone who had supported them, and the song followed. He says that while writing the lyric he was thinking of Priest fans and of military families, and that taking the band out of the equation the words still stand on their own.
Glenn Tipton calls March Of The Damned, the first official single from Redeemer Of Souls, one of his favourites: simple and straight to the point, and not a song about zombies or The Walking Dead. He says it also refers to all the kids who come to their concerts and march along and cannot be stopped — not Judas Priest and the audience as two things, but one and the same.
Glenn Tipton describes Snakebite as a song written to be played live. He says it has something of the same vibe as You Don't Have To Be Old To Be Wise — a track written for the audience, and one that does the job.
Sword Of Damocles was given its live debut on 15 March 2024 at the 3Arena in Dublin, on the European leg of the Invincible Shield tour. The story behind it concerns Damocles, a flatterer at the court of the 4th-century BC tyrant Dionysius II of Syracuse, who was invited to take the throne and found a sword suspended above it by a single horse hair.
Rob Halford's summary of Sword Of Damocles is straightforward. The king who has everything also has a sword hanging above him by a thread that could break at any moment, and all of it could be gone. The message, he says, is that you need to live the life you have as well as you can every day, because it is all you have got.
Richie Faulkner's first appearance with Judas Priest came on 25 May 2011, when the band played Living After Midnight on American Idol with James Durbin, one of the show's rare metalhead contestants.
Richie Faulkner's move into writing happened by itself. He carried a laptop on tour and recorded whatever came to him between shows; Rob Halford and Glenn Tipton heard what he was making and said it might work as material for Priest songs. He describes the challenge as having to respect a legacy created before he arrived while at the same time respecting himself and building a voice of his own.
The choice of Lightning Strike as the lead single from Firepower was the label's, not the band's. Richie Faulkner says it was the idea of a man called Mark at Sony, out of several candidates the one they liked most: short and contained, carrying elements of the past, neither a ballad nor too progressive, and straightforwardly Priest.
Guardians, the instrumental in the middle of Firepower, started life as a piano piece Richie Faulkner had been working on for some time. He was not sure it suited Judas Priest but presented it anyway, and Rising From Ruins grew out of it: the introduction to Guardians is reprised inside the later song, and fragments of its structure recur through it.
Firepower debuted at number 5 on the Billboard 200, eclipsing the number 6 achieved by Redeemer Of Souls in 2014. It also entered the UK album chart at number 5 — their highest placing, and first Top 10, since British Steel reached number 4 in 1980 — and gave them their first ever number one in Sweden.
Richie Faulkner has suggested Firepower might be the fastest Priest song, particularly in the drum approach; a friend of his described it as sounding like Painkiller, only faster. If you define heavy in terms of speed, he says, it is a pretty heavy track.
The title Sea Of Red comes from the red poppies that bloomed between the trench lines on the Western Front after the First World War, and from John McCrae's poem In Flanders Fields, which Rob Halford says has stayed with him since childhood. Richie Faulkner recalls the music being more or less finished when Halford came in and sang the words: he says he could see the film in his mind and that it was goosebump territory on first hearing.
For Firepower the band went back to an older way of recording. Ian Hill told Revolver that Tom Allom had been with them since 1979 and that his knowledge of the band and of the music is immense, and that they returned to the organic method of putting everyone in a room to play together. Halford describes the balance between Allom's classic metal instincts and Andy Sneap's more modern thinking as a remarkable coalescence.
The packaging was designed by Mark Wilkinson and includes signed photographs of Rob Halford, Glenn Tipton, Ian Hill, Richie Faulkner and Scott Travis taken by Ross Halfin, plus a numbered blunted British Steel razor blade. There is also a book of memorabilia gathering photos, posters, adverts and tour passes, a replica British Steel tour programme, and replicas of two tour posters — the 1980 German dates and the 1984 European Defenders Of The Faith run.
Until that ceremony Richie Faulkner had never actually met K.K. Downing. They had exchanged messages online, but that night was the first time face to face. Les Binks, by contrast, he already knew well: the two had been in a band together, playing Judas Priest covers.
Richie Faulkner suffered an aortic aneurysm rupture on stage at the Louder Than Life festival in 2021 and was hospitalised. Speaking in 2024 he said he thought he was all right now, crediting his doctors and family and the enormous number of get-well messages and videos he received from fans with getting him through that period.
On Invincible Shield, Tom Allom is credited as Priest Metal Insight. Richie Faulkner explains that Andy Sneap was the main producer this time and would send tracks over to Allom for advice and opinions. He says the contribution of both men was immeasurable — not only technically, but in drawing the best performances out of the band.
Asked whether Invincible Shield was a deliberate echo of Defenders Of The Faith, Richie Faulkner was surprised: the thought had never occurred to him. A shield is defensive, he agreed, but it is also a banner — something you hold up to declare that this is our music and it will never disappear. Told that Screaming For Vengeance had been followed by Defenders Of The Faith in just the same way, he said he found the parallel genuinely interesting.
Giants In The Sky, which closes the main body of Invincible Shield, is a tribute to the departed. Richie Faulkner says he loves that the riff comes out of the blues and that the middle section carries a Spanish classical guitar solo. Rob Halford wrote the words with figures such as Lemmy Kilmister, Jimi Hendrix, Randy Rhoads and Tina Turner, who had died the previous year, in mind. The song ends on a high scream: you won't ever die.
By the time they reached Japan in 2024, the band had played more than eighty shows since starting the tour in Glasgow that March, including large festivals across Europe and North America. Before each set the stage was hidden behind a curtain carrying the psalm-like text also used in the Invincible Shield artwork; Rob Halford had previously explained that he wanted to create a statement for heavy metal.
Electric Eye was never released as a single, yet it picked up rock radio play in America and has been a live fixture ever since — carried in on the back of You've Got Another Thing Comin', the song from the same album that gave Priest their foothold there. Ian Hill says the band have played almost everything from Screaming For Vengeance live, and that the one they have never been able to leave off the setlist is Electric Eye.
The video for Turbo Lover, directed by Wayne Isham, combines animated skeletons with footage of the band and motorcycles composited over a desert landscape, all washed with the solarised effect that was fashionable at the time. It got some MTV airplay, and rather more once the channel's metal show Headbangers Ball went on the air in 1987.
Motorcycles had been part of the band's iconography since 1979, and the Turbo Lover lyric extends it. Rob Halford says he simply liked the analogy of the motorcycle as a euphemism for love, allows that it carries a sexual undertone, and notes that using a machine, a car or a bike this way has been done many times in rock and roll. Mostly, he says, it is a bit of fun and escapism.
Revolution, from Angel Of Retribution, peaked at number 23 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock Tracks — the first Judas Priest single to enter a US chart since Night Crawler in 1992. Its intro was built around a riff dating back to the 1970s, found on a cassette of old band demos.
The band issued a statement about Never The Heroes: it is about the courageous men and women who go to war, never trained to be heroes but becoming heroic through their actions and sacrifices in doing their duty. There is a hero in all of us, the statement says, and in times of struggle we can be strong and united, overcoming our own challenges and helping others.
Speaking about No Surrender, Rob Halford described the band's music as a beacon of hope: whatever you may be going through, there is always a sense of overcoming difficulties, of winning, of coming out on top. He calls the song a statement and a simple fact — that whatever you are up against, the greatest thing you can do is face the challenge, overcome it, win, and never surrender.
Breaking The Law has even been parodied by the band themselves. In the season 25 Simpsons episode Steal This Episode, Judas Priest perform a spoof version of the song to lure Homer out of hiding after he starts illegally downloading films. It also soundtracks a State Farm commercial in which NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers is being told he will save money by driving safely, only for his agent to crank the song up and assert that Rodgers does not know how to play it safe.
Glenn Tipton told Billboard how quickly Breaking The Law came together: they used to meet at various houses to write, broke into that riff one day, and the song wrote itself in about an hour — Rob started singing the line and before they knew it they had a classic Priest song. It runs 2:33, with the propulsive drive and anarchic attitude you might find in a punk record, and Halford admits to putting some punk attitude into it.
Rob Halford's account of Lightning Strike is that it is about how you are able to react to confrontation: lightning strikes because it is the light that pulls you out of darkness. The song turns that image on whatever is leading you — an individual, a body of people, an organisation, an administration — towards a destructive place, and asserts your right to react and do something about it. He adds that Priest are not a political band, but that they find ways to put their feelings and ideas into songs from which fans can extrapolate their own views.