ShockHound

Interview by Bryan Reesman

For those who remember when it first came out, it's hard to believe that Judas Priest's seminal British Steel is now 30 years old.
     The group's sixth studio album, the 1980 release was mostly written and fully recorded over a month-long span at the studio in Tittenhurst Park, the former John Lennon estate that was purchased by Ringo Starr. With UK punk in its death throes and metal on the rise, and with political and social upheaval creating conflict in England, Priest conjured a monster metal album that shed some of their darker predilections and epic compositional tendencies, and assaulted listeners with a straightforward musical manifesto encouraging individuality and questioning authority.     
      British Steel surged with intensity, complementing upbeat anthems like “Breaking the Law,” "United" and "Living After Midnight" with more ominous rockers like "Grinder" and "Metal Gods". One can also hear the speed/thrash metal juggernaut of the ‘80s beginning to pick up steam with the adrenalized "Rapid Fire" and "Steeler." In honor of the album’s 30th anniversary, Sony has reissued the record with a bonus live CD and DVD (in two- and three-disc editions) from last year's British Steel tour, in which the band energetically performed the entire album in its original UK running order, along with a mixture of tunes from throughout their career.
     Priest frontman Rob Halford recently sat down with ShockHound to discuss music, politics and Priest's Birmingham roots. As ever, Halford was contemplative, in good humor and quite comfortable in his role as the “Metal God.”

SHOCKHOUND: What's it like to be singing British Steel songs like "Don't Have To Be Old To Be Wise" and "Living After Midnight" after all these years?

ROB HALFORD: I would imagine it feels the same way as [singing] "I hope I die before get old" from "My Generation" by the Who. It doesn't really matter, does it? Because the song moves along with you in and with the generations that come up with the music, so the message hasn't changed. We've gotten older, but for anybody who relates to that empathy of "you don't have to be old to be wise," the theory was that that's just the way it is. You can have some kind of wisdom, but you don't have to be an old man to have it; although having said that it's an absolute fact that the older you get, the wiser you get. Things that I made a fuss about when I was in my twenties are just irrelevant now, they're immaterial. The older you get, the more practical you get, and for the most part life seems to be less complicated, which is great.

SHOCKHOUND: What do you remember from 1980? What were you so angry about on British Steel?

HALFORD: It is a strong record with the messages, that's true. We've always said that we just make metal music. We're not a band with a political message or a social message, but having said that…I think the fact that the music has that energy and that stance obviously drives a lyricist to find a message and convey words that fit in with the emotion of the instrumentation. 1980 was the start of a new decade, but there was a lot of crap going down in the UK. Margaret Thatcher had been in power for quite a number of years. The recession was going on — it's like history is repeating itself now 30 years later — and people had no jobs and no money. Everything that the government had said that they were going to try to do was just a crock of shit, and people were pushing back. There was all that going on 20 miles away in London, and we were in this gorgeous, historic Georgian manor, the former John Lennon house, with 100 acres of beautiful countryside, making this heavy metal music.
          I'm quite proud with the lyrics on British Steel. To start with the opening lyric — "Pounding the world like a battering ram/Forging the furnace for the final grand slam" — it is very ambiguous in what I'm talking about, [but] each one of those songs were self-empowering and trying to give the individual listener a feeling of self-empowerment. Each one had a kind of the statement attached to it, whether it was simple like "Don't Have To Be Old To Be Wise" or "Living After Midnight" [or] "Steeler" and "Rapid Fire," [the latter of which] had this underground stance of pushing back at authority and society and government and all of those elements. It was great that everybody accepted the ideas, because there could have been a discussion where we said, "I don't think we should talk about that." It didn't go that way. Everything was embraced. Then again, we didn't have a lot of time to think about this. We were in and out in 29 days, according to [producer] Tom Allom.

SHOCKHOUND: That's not a lot of time to write and record an album.

HALFORD: It isn't. We only had three or four songs when we went in, so there wasn't really a lot of time to ponder, and that surely has to be part of the magic of the record, that it was so immediate and instant. Once we all agreed that we had a good song, we recorded it. We didn't have forever to think about it, put it aside and come back a month later to check it out. We didn't have time to do that. We just had to get on with the work and deliver it to the label on a certain day.

SHOCKHOUND: Were you listening at the time to bands like Accept, Saxon and Motorhead, who were also sowing the seeds of thrash metal?

HALFORD: It would be easy to do it now in 2010 rather than in 1980, because we had no access to anything. The only thing you could do was buy a record or cassette. We didn't have the Internet to check out what anybody else was doing or what anybody else's ideas were for inspiration. We were just locked away. We didn't really have any time to think or do anything other than the work that we had in hand, and of course 1980 saw the demise and fracture of the punk movement. But if you also look at what happened in 1980, all of these great records were made, both from the UK and America. It was the beginning of a very exciting decade, I would say. The ‘80s were the definitive metal years in terms of making a global stamp, and then it started to morph and shape and twist and become all of these different genres. But in that short ten-year period — just as much as the blues was invented or jazz was invented in a specific time — metal was invented and took hold.

SHOCKHOUND: British Steel isn't actually a very bluesy album at all, unlike earlier Priest albums that had a bit more of that influence.

HALFORD: No, it isn't. But if you listen to Glenn [Tipton]'s lead break on "Grinder," for example, it's got a lot of blues and twists and pulls, and it's really cool. As we've discussed in the past, the roots of metal come from blues, progressive and electric rock, all mashed up.

SHOCKHOUND: Do you still have a residence in your hometown in England?

HALFORD: Yes, I still have my place in Walsall.

SHOCKHOUND: Have you been back to the house where you grew up?

HALFORD: When VH1 Classic did Behind The Music on Priest, they actually went back to the house where I spent most of my childhood, and it's still there. Someone else is living in the house now, but my neighbors are still the same neighbors and are both in their eighties. So when I go down that street, all the memories flood back. That was the street where I would walk about five miles to school and back each day, past the steel factories and the ironworks, breathing it in and seeing the pouring metal and all that, when I was about 10 or 11 years of age. And Holy Joe's in Wednesbury. It's all there still. It hasn't changed a lick, it's great.

SHOCKHOUND: Holy Joe's was where Priest first rehearsed, right?

HALFORD: It was named after Father Joe, who was the local Roman Catholic priest who rented this room out for five quid at night.

SHOCKHOUND: And he had no clue who he was renting out to.

HALFORD: It was Priest and Slade.

SHOCKHOUND: What were Slade like?

HALFORD: Just a great bunch of guys. In fact, Noddy Holder — which I didn't find out until a little bit later on — lived a 10-minute walk away from on the same council estate, public housing. He was around the corner from me. So that's the town's claim to fame.

SHOCKHOUND: What is Birmingham like now?

HALFORD: It's completely different. I was talking Ozzy about it last week in Hollywood. He said, "Have you been to Birmingham recently?" I said I had been there about a year ago. I had not actually been in the city center for as long as I can remember, and I hardly recognized anything. It's all new buildings. I remember that, when we were in our twenties, there were only two clubs. One was called Barbarella's, which was a nightclub owned by a couple of crooks, and the other was Mothers in Erdington, where everybody used to play — Floyd, Zeppelin, Free. There was another place called Henry's Blues House, which was above a pub, and you would get American blues people like Leadbelly, Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters. Unbelievable. Now it's a major capital city. There are tons of places to eat and drink and clubs, movie theaters and everything. In our day, it was like a ghost town at 6pm every night. There was nothing going on. So it's a completely different city now, which I find really exciting.

SHOCKHOUND: Is Birmingham gentrified now?

ROB HALFORD: Some parts of it are. I mean, the big disaster was when they put the motorway through the city. In the ‘60s it was this great idea: "We are the modern city, and the heart of Birmingham is the motorway." Yeah, people just drove straight through it. They didn't bother stopping. They didn't pull off. It was straight through the middle of Birmingham. They don't do it now. It's been rerouted. It's interesting to go back and reminisce.

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