The first thing you hear is the clattering of boots—clomps which break the relative silence of their manager's New York office. Then, an overpowering presence of leather fills the room as Judas Priest guitarists K.K. Downing and Glenn Tipton, and lead singer Rob Halford bustle in. In their arms are boxes of boots for the imminent Priest U.S. tour—but the leathery smells are mixing with something else, some indefinable scent not immediately associated with heavy metal rock 'n' roll bands. OMIGOD, it's salad dressing and quiche, fergodsakes, as the lads haul out their brown bag lunches. Rob Halford generously offers up some of his feta cheese and vegetable concoction. "I'm going Greek today," he announces, brightly, a warm smile cropping up, incongruous against his fierce getup.

Not to shatter anyone's expectations of Judas Priest being a rampaging quintet of metal marauders—they are exactly that, onstage—but when it comes to taking care of the offstage business, this band is about a different image, a thinking, professional one. Glenn Tipton relates on incident typical of what a band like Priest is perpetually up against when not surrounded by worshipful fans. "As we landed in Toronto, the customs guy was going through my stuff and he said, 'Do you realize what sort of scumbags listen to your music?' We meet a lot of our fans and we don't really think they're scumbags. But this is the sort of attitude that people have got when they don't know what the music involves. They say, 'Are you really into this shit?' because they haven't taken the time out to listen to it." "i couldn't believe my ears when they told me that," blurts Halford. "This is a customs official of Canada (who in no way is typical of the Canadians he meets, Rob quickly adds). It just goes to show you that there are those bigoted narrowminded attitudes. What can you say to someone who thinks that heavy metal's shit?" asks Rob, throwing up his hands in frustration. "Again, I've got no time for you."

This sort of disgusting episode doesn't really surprise me. After all, as a hipwith-it rock critic, who's expected to rave about the newest concatenation of noise so long as it's suitably avant garde and obscure, there's one standard comment I receive upon mentioning my admiration of Judas Priest: "How can you stqnd that shit?" Subtle, and to the point, my writer friends. Well, folks, Judas Priest know how to play and sing; they make their shows full of flash and fury, and don't resort to ponderous or boring, endless solos. In short, Priest concerts have always been entertaining, kinda like a heavy metal day at the circus. And even though the band takes their music quite seriously, they don't seem to be consumed with ego, the way certain other HM-ers-come-lately strut around.

"I'm going Greek todat!" -Rob Halford

Says Rob thoughtfully, "To a lot of our fans, I'm sure we mean more to them than we do to ourselves. Because we never really think about it tKat way; we just do what we do the best we can. But I do know there's a percentage of our fans who look to us in a very special way. Although we're aware of that, it's not the be-all and end-all of everything for us. There's no way we could sit in our hotel rooms before we go onstage and say, 'Do you realize what this means to those people in the audience? It's going to be the greatest thing in their lives to experience...?' It must be terrible to have that in the back of your mind all the time," Halford says with great feeling. "It does exist, but you can't let that thing play too much on your emotions, 'cause I think it can be very damaging. And that's where the ego problem starts—you think, 'I'm really an important person.' " "Some people never come offstage," Glenn offers quietly, with determination that such an attitude not be Judas Priest's stock in trade.

According to Halford and Tipton, the band's lack of ego clashes is the main reason why Judas Priest are still together, well into their second decade. Because the band members consider themselves close friends, onstage and off, they've been able to iron out problems without tossing personalities into the broth. You can bet that their cooperative attitude seems like manna from heaven to Priest manager Bill Curbishley, whose previous responsibility, the Who, were at each other's throats around the clock. Rob Halford proudly lists the group's friendship and respect for one another, not only as musicians, but as individuals, as the main foundation of it all. "I know in some instances bands exist simply because of the musical thing. Outside of that, they go their own ways. We've heard of bands where people travel in separate coaches! We've been lucky in that area, in that we've never had any trouble. As we've grown and become more successful, our egos haven't grown with our bank balances."

Glenn raises another point about intergroup rivalry which Judas Priest has also managed to avoid. "I think the critical point of the danger is when you have a certain amount of success. A lot of bands—when one or two members start to get pinpointed as the stars, the women go for them, the others get annoyed about it. It never even happened with us. Who's ever in demand publicly, that's great. Helps the band, is what we think." Adds Rob, "Some people say that because me and Ken (K.K.) and Glenn get focused with most of the attention, they wonder about what Dave (Holland, drummer) and Ian's (Hill, bass) role is. But there's absolutely no difference between any of the members. When you're talking about Judas Priest, you're talking about five people."

In fact, though Dave might hot be the most prominent member of Judas Priest to the public's eye, he was largely responsible for reactivating the studio where the band recorded Point Of Entry and the platinum Screaming For Vengeance, and eventually created Defenders Of The Truth earlier this year. After Priest's one-off appearance last May at the US Festival, "where we annihilated the whole of California," laughs modest Rob, the group took off for a holiday in Ibiza. Turning their thoughts to the next album, the group wondered whether they could again enjoy the wonderfully stimulating recording atmosphere which had given them two previous LP successes. As Halford dryly recalls, that location had gone out of business in the interim. Left with little more than a shell, Dave had made an investment and was determined to rebuild the studio, and asked his fellow band members for assistance.

That turned out to revive more than a few memories of Priest's early years, when the group built up their muscles by hauling all their equipment from gig to gig.

"When you think about it," says Rob with amazement, "here we were, we just had this incredible American success with a platinum album and the big US Festival show, and we went to an island that had a studio with nothing in it! Can you imagine that?" he practically roars. "Any other band, any other manager— Curbishley must have put a great deal of faith and trust in the fact that we knew what we were doing. There wasn't even recording tape on the island!

"Although none of us are superstitious in the band, I think we saw there was a bit of magic in that place. With Dave's involvement, I suppose that was the prime factor in making us decide to do it. During the day I'd go with Dave and we'd paint the walls, and put the bedroom furniture back in. It was really bizarre. The first time I went there, Dave warned me, 'You'll really be surpised,' and I said, 'No, I can handle anything; I'm shock-proof.' So I went up there— and I nearly fell through the floor! I got there as it was dusk and there wasn't even any electricity. So for the next few weeks we put the place together again. The board came back over from Barcelona and there were about 20 of us struggling to get this humongous board back into the studio—rolling it on logs—you wouldn't have believed it if you'd seen it," he says decisively.

"Here we were, the metal gods, sweating our buns off trying to put the studio back together. And then the place was livable again," Rob concludes with a storyteller's relish, "that's when we really did sit down and start to write."

"I think when heavy metal freaks have sex it's more.. .wilder than the usual way." —Rob

Defenders Of The Faith was the hardearned result of Judas Priest's dedication to their little island studio, and the band enthusiastically believes the end product justifies their labors. Crammed with enough fire and fury to satisfy even the most crazed metal head, the album typifies Judas Priest's concern with crisp, distinctive leads, thundering rhythms and even—never woulda thunk it—melody lines. Says Rob: "I guess the initial approach for this album was wanting to come up with 10 killer tracks, and at the time not really having a positive theme. Just knowing that we wanted the usual series of rhythms, beats across the sections, and metal music from the fast, mad ones like 'Jawbreaker' and 'Freewheel Burning' to the real slogging ones like 'Heavy Duty' and 'Defenders Of The Faith.' Although it's probably taken us longer to write this album than anything else, the songs did seem to come together reasonably easy. It's always a struggle to come up with good follow-up tunes (in this case, to the unexpected hit of "Another Thing Coming"), but I think that we got more of an incentive going for us on the strength of the success in the States.

The pressure was there, but it was a good pressure."

Halford maintains that "Some Heads Are Gonna Roll," written specifically for Priest by the New York-based songwriter named Bob Halligan, Jr. will be Defenders' first single. Admitting that the song also struck me as a likely 45, I tentatively wonder if the band might ever be tempted to opt for a more commercial single, Van Halen's "Jump" coming immediately to mind. Obviously, the guys are aware of David Lee &

Co.'s major break-through, but are prepared to live without the resulting multi-million sales, if it means compromising their chosen audience.

"I know we wouldn't (do a single like 'Jump')," says Glenn without a moment's pause. "I'm not saying we wouldn't release a single like 'Night Coming Down'; it's well within our limits. But Van Halen, and I'm sure they'd be the first to admit it, aren't a heavy metal band. They're a pop-rock band, and there's nothing wrong with that; I think they're great. But we are heavy metal and there's no way we'd stray from those margins. Otherwise, we'd have already done it."

Rob: "We've never really looked at the single charts and said, 'Oooh, we want a hit single.' We'd be hypocritical to say that we wouldn't like it some day. I'd love to see this band get a Top Ten single in the States. But we've never consciously gone and contrived to write a song in the studio, although I'm pretty certain this band could do it. We've certainly got the ability as musicians to do it, but we'ye never had the desire. It would be a cheap shot for us."

Glenn: "We've cast off a lot of songs we've written because we felt they were too middle-of-the-road, even though some of them sounded very commercial. But our fans would feel some kind of disrespect if we did them. You have to stick to your morals within your musical margins—you really do. You have to believe in what you’re doing. If you stray from it for one second, it’s a sign that you’re not genuine. And we are genuine. We believe in heavy metal, we’ve played it for 10 years, we’ve never strayed from it.” Tipton’s voice rarely rises above a soft conversational tone, yet there is no mistaking the steel which underlies his message.

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In keeping with their dedication to the music, Judas Priest want it known that “the faith” in question on this record is nothing other than HM, despite whatever lurking religious fanatics choose to make of it. Well aware that certain so-called people of the cloth will immediately look at the fantasy artwork on the LP cover, see an animal with horns and assume, “Oh God, Satan’s on the run again,” Halford admits that the band did have a, well, devilish prank in mind. “We were thinking of putting a backwards message on this album, and what it was really going to say was, ‘Drink a lot of milk.’

Sad to say, that bit of well-deserved turnabout never made it onto vinyl. However, Defenders doe's offer an abundance of speeding motorcycles, lustful ravages and raw rock power. Halford once told me that he could never imagine himself writing about petals.and daisies. You said it, bub. What we do get are the gentle pleasures of “Eat Me Alive”—so tasteful—like “Squealing in passion as the rod of steel injects...” Rough day at the office, huh, Rob?

Tipton mentions a telephone interview he’d recently done in which the caller opined, “A lot of people would say that your lyrics incite violence and sexual debauchery and stuff like that.” “And I said, ‘Don’t be silly—our lyrics have never incited violence!’ And he said, ‘Let me quote you a line from “Eat Me Alive”—I’m gonna force you to eat me at gunpoint!’ I passed the buck to Rob,” admits Glenn, casting a jaundiced eye at Halford, who’s slowly becoming hysterical with laughter.

“I just wanted to write a really sexy heavy metal lyric,” says Rob, though he’s starting to squirm about in his seat. “1 think...when heavy metal freaks have sex it’s more...wilder than the usual way.” He’s giggling now. “The smell of burning leather,” he cackles, catching Tipton up in the comedy. Remind me, boys, not to drop in without warning, or at least not without a whip. “I was drunk when I wrote the lyrics to ‘Eat Me Alive,”’ Rob finally admits, settling down. “I was hysterical in a bar in Ibiza and I showed the lyrics to Ken and said, check these out. A lot of the verses we couldn’t use ’cause they were really obscene! We cooled it down a bit.” “That’s what I should’ve said to that guy on the phone,” exclaims Tipton. “You should’ve seen the original lyrics!”

“So it is unfortunate when it happens,” agrees Halford, “’cause we’ve never put ourselves in that situation. We never want to promote violence or instill that sort of attitude in our songs, and I’ve said that countless times. Occasionally, you end up sounding like a hypocrite when somebody comes back with, ‘I’m gonna force you to eat me at gunpoint.’ It’s tongue-in-cheek.” (Whose tongue in whose cheek, we won’t venture to guess.)

“Also,” says Glenn, “we are heavy metal and our lyrics are unashamedly so. We’re not angels by any standards. We’re rock ’n’ roll people.” “Get it out in the open,” shouts Rob, starting up again, “and let everybody have a good look at it! Subtlety has never been a trademark of this band.”

So once again, Judas Priest have set out on the road, bringing their heavy metal faith to millions of yearning, leather-obsessed souls. Truth is that these guys are no longer of tender years— everyone in the group has long since waved age 30 a fond farewell. And simply because of their longevity in the business—to the point where newer groups indicate Priest as among their “early” influences—it seems logical to ask if Judas Priest are by now thinking of closing down shop, quitting while they’re ahead. Far from it, is Tipton and Halford’s prompt reply. With manager Bill Curbishley in full charge of their business affairs, leaving them free to create, Judas Priest’s members lately feel like they’ve been given a new lease on life. Encouraged by the fact that heavy metal music is a substantial part of MTV’s rotation and is making its presence felt on Top 40 radio, the group is quite willing to spend at least the next six months on the road, taking younger challengers in stride.

Notes Rob Halford, “When I see the success of those bands that you mentioned (Quiet Riot, Def Leppard), it really doesn’t concern me a great deal,’because I see what Priest is all about. And I’ve said so many times, we’ve always gone slow and steady, and taken things as they happen. Sure, we would’ve liked things to happen maybe a little bit sooner, we would’ve wished to have sold seven million copies of British Steel. But you’ve got to be realistic; if it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. We’ve been lucky in that we still have this potential growth. You never know— by the time Priest finish and you add up all the albums, you could probably put down a lot of these bands that do four to five million copies of one album. I’m always glad when somebody makes it irt this business—because it’s such a tough game, anyway.

“It’s obvious that heavy metal music now sells magazines. The same attitude exists from record companies; they’re signing up a lot of heavy metal bands. But the respect—it’s been a long time coming and we’ve had our share of being knocked over the years, as much as the previous HM bands have had. But I think that people are now realizing that what we do is a very fine craft. It’s very classy almost,” says Rob Halford, and I’d swear I saw a hint of a bluSh appear on the motorcycle menace’s well-scrubbed cheeks.