LEATHERED, STUDDED DUDES OR... JUDAS PRIEST?

LEATHERED, STUDDED DUDES OR... JUDAS PRIEST?

FEATURES

Sylvie Simmons

Cows are very useful except in India. There are varying degrees of cow-use— milk, cheese, burgers, cheeseburgers—' but none so useful as the concealment and adornment of the puny human form with the bag the cow comes wrapped in. Shiny, tough, black, reflective, clinging, erotic leather. The stuff of Brando, Vicious, Faithfull, German bomber-pilots and Heavy Metal. There are varying degrees of metal, but none so abbatoired and leathered and heavy as Judas Priest.

But heck, you know them. No need to introduce them. On with this interview business.

“Rob,” I ask—this being Rob Halford, frontman, High Priest of Cow-use and Supreme Screamer. “Are you a gay rightwing biker into S&M?”

“Well,” chuckle the well-modulated Midland tones. “Well—that’s pretty much the way Judas Priest has looked for a number of years, isn’t it?”

Like anorexic bullocks romping through Nazi department store kitchenware sections, like bath-house Hell’s Angels, like—

“In actual fact we are changing the image somewhat on this world tour. We’ve decided,” says Rob, “to drop all the studs and the chains and the whips and the S&M things.”

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But Priest without studs and stuff is like whiskey without alcohol; what “new image” are they going to go for?

“Please don’t get the impression we’re going to come out looking like Motley Crue,” is the tentative preface. Highheels and hairspray, I choke?

“No, not all the make-up and the hairdos. What we’ve done is take the strong parts of our image—the leather and the tough, aggressive look—and we’ve tried

to make it a bit more stylish, if that’s the right word. The way this album was developing, we went to our costume designer in L.A. and said: ‘Look, Ray, we feel it’s time for a change. We don’t want you to givd us a wimpy image by any means, but can you take the essential ingredients of what we’re about—the power and the strength—and incorporate this into a new look?’ So he went away and thought about it for months and months, and we put together a whole new bunch of outfits. It’s difficult to describe them actually, but I think it’s a step in the right direction. The sound, the album cover and the look of the band is now very 1986.”

But there’s still some leather—not all black and a little bit tarted up, but leather for all that. “God forbid we should ever say goodbye to leather!” Rob is shocked: “We’ve just incorporated a few more colors. The style is very, very modern.”

What about the Harley Davidson—has that been put out to grass?

“No, we’ve still got the Harley. I don’t know how we’re going to use it onstage—we’re going to have to try and update it somewhat too, give it a futuristic look. They’re working on that right now.”

And Malice and all these other bands who’ve copied Priest down to the last stud are having to work on buying whole new wardrobes?

“Quite honestly,” Rob laughs, “that was one of the reasons for the change. Although we’ve been flattered by people who’ve come out and adopted something of the Judas Priest look, we felt we wanted to step forward and redefine what we think Heavy Metal looks like in the ’80s, and I think we accomplished that.

“There have been a lot of bands looking and sounding similar to Priest and I’m noticing it more and more. In America there are bands with Priest songs names,” says Rob, “bands called Tyrant and Grinder and Steeler and Running Wild. Nice and flattering as that may be, I tell any new band who asks me that originality is important. That’s what put us where we are—being one of the first at what we were doing.”

Diplomatic man is Rob. Unlike guitarist K.K. Downing who used to moan that he had to look twice at Iron Maiden to make sure Dave Murray wasn’t really him. And a hard man to get a straight answer from; he writhed out of the gay biker business pretty well. So let’s break it down to: does he wear leather and ride a motorcycle offstage and hang around in dubious bars?

“Well, I do ride my motorbike. I’ve got a great 78 Harley at my home in Phoenix, Arizona, and most of the time I’m cruising around on that. So quite honestly there’s not a great deal of difference in how I am offstage. You’ll still find me in all the bars over there—the rock ’n’ roll bars! I don’t go around with a bodyguard, I don’t ponce around like certain rock stars do at all the ‘in’ places.

“I think that’s basically down to the fact that our background’s working-class and normal. I’m not giving you that ‘Oh, we’re from a working-class background’ routine, but essentially that’s the kind of people we are. We haven’t changed, really. We do pretty much in our free time now as we used to do all those years ago when we were struggling to make a living out.of it. You’ll still find us having a drink and checking out bands and talking about music, and not much else.

“To this day I don’t really have anything in the form of hobbies. I don’t play golf!” he laughs, even though he lives just down the road from the aging rocker who’s given a whole new meaning to iron man, Alice Cooper. “And I don’t play tennis— I’m a pretty inactive sort of person in that respect.

“All I ever wanted to do was be in a rock ’n’ roll band and live that lifestyle. Admittedly these days it’s nice to have money in the bank, but I think everyone's striving for that, no matter what their walk of life. Everyone wants to better themselves.

“I think,” thinks Rob, “that’s why there are so many good bands from Birmingham, why heavy metal came from the Midlands. If you live in a council house (housing project) on a really bleak estate—where I’m from—and you look out of the window every morning, you think ‘God, there must be something better than this!’ And you just take whatever God-given talents and abilities you’ve got and you use them to get out.

“Please don’t get the ession we’re going to ok like Motley Crue. ” —Rob Halford

“Fortunately for me I could sing and write songs. It took a while, but I’m glad to say I made it.”

It’s taken me a long time, but you’re glad to see we’ve made it to talking about the new album. It’s called Turbo, and all of you with taste have already bought it, stolen it or taped it off the radio. Written in Spain, recorded in the Caribbean and remixed in L.A.—a Holy Trinity of hot places—it’s magnificent. Ah, when you only think of all the plastic out there that’s been used to make spatulas or frisbees or artifical limbs that could have far better been used making albums like this one! There’s some great tunes, even some great singing. Has the screaming gone the way of the whips-and-blackleather?

“It’s been my first real opportunity, given our type of songs, to sound a little bit less hysterical,” says Rob. “Not just yelling at the top of my voice. With songs like ‘Private Property’ or ‘Out In The Cold,’ stuff like that, I’ve been able to expand a little bit in my style.”

They originally wanted a live album, what with having so many songs. Rob, Glenn Tipton and K.K set off for Spain in October ’84, rented a villa on the beach from some German princess or other, with “the Rothchilds on one side of us and some other financial whiz-people on the other,” prepared to be tempted from their rightful task, “but the weather was dreadful, so we didn’t get much time to languish in the sun, which was a bit of a blessing, really.” And with the usual timepressures off, “songs just seemed to pour out of us.

“So we approached the record company with the suggestion of trying to put out two albums for the price of one—we were going to sway our publishing royalties to help keep the price down.” But the record company, being a record company, wouldn’t go for the idea, so you got the nine best tracks. The rest— already recorded—should appear at some later date as part of the live album they’re going to record on this tour, which started in America.

Rob likes America. It helps, what with living there. “The best thing I like about living where I live is the weather. Where else can you go for a swim on Christmas Day while your turkey’s in the oven?” Answer that one if you can! “The worst thing about America is the conservatism, the restrictions on TV and radio, which are very severe. Apart from that it’s a great place to live, especially for a musician, because there’s so much musical activity going on.”

Still, he stands by his statement that there’s no such thing as a true American heavy metal band.

“I’m sure that all the Motley Crues and Ratts and everybody else believe in what they’re doing and are where they want to be. But to me, the true definition of heavy metal comes from England. There are some good imitators elsewhere, but there’s no way they can sound like an English heavy metal band! The whole approach to the instruments is a lot more aggressive and a lot more powerful.

“I’m not saying that the actual background of someone who comes from a steel town in Pittsburgh is any easier than someone who comes from Birmingham or Sheffield, but it’s the difference between being an Englishman and an American, between playing tough real metal and playing a million notes a minute...”

What’s the biggest misconception about Priest these days?

“I would say it’s still that we’re not very intelligent people—something that’s directed at the whole heavy metal world—and that we spend all our time going around doing the rape-and-pillage scene, getting smashed-drunk every night and taking drugs, and going home and burning the black candles. Which is a complete load of rubbish!

“We’re all musicians in our middle and late 30s, and surviving as well as we have done, I think there’s a clear indication that we’re five very mature, level-headed, professional musicians with—dare I say it?—considerable talent, who enjoy what we’re doing and hope to share that enjoyment with as many people as possible.

“It’s unfortunate that ‘Judas Priest’ as a name creates a certain image immediately, like the name ‘Black Sabbath’ does, without people getting a chance to listen to the music. But I think that we’ve got that name in the musical history books already, so I’m proud to go out under it. I expect we’ll have the Biblethumpers picketing this tour as always, though. It’s getting worse instead of better in America.” An issue they address directly in the new song ‘‘Parental Guidance.”

‘‘We were targeted when the PMRC launched their campaign as being one of the so-called culprita responsible for undermining the Youth of America with a song called ‘Eat Me Alive.’” A ditty about having oral sex at gunpoint. Even / shuddered at that one, I tell Rob, who laughs that laugh again.

“I’m not going to go off into a tirade of self-defence here, but suffice to say I wrote that song one night when I was smashed out of my mind in Ibitha, where we recorded that album. I was given the rough idea of the music from Ken (K.K) and Glenn and I got drunk and went off in a tirade of verse after verse.

“It was one of those cases of waking up next morning with a hangover and saying, ‘My God, did I write that?\’ If you’d have seen some of the verses you would have died! We censored them ourselves!

“We did it very tongue-in-cheek, a real spoof, a total send-up. Of course, people take it too seriously.”

And they’ve moved on from that sort of stuff, he says, same as they’ve moved on from “the doom and gloom stuff” of yesteryear. He’s talking about “expanding” the stalwart Priest audience, and there’s even talk of individual solo albums somewhere in the future. Behind all those leather and studs—sorry, scratch the studs—does there lurk a secret crooner dying to burst out?

“Well, I’m looking forward to that part of my career when people will hear that I can do a little bit more than just yell at the top of my voice!”

And he’s probably looking even more forward to a final question. Like this one. As he knows he’s already made the rock history books, what would he like them to say about Judas Priest?

“You can’t ask for more than to be remembered as one of the greatest British heavy metal bands of all time.” E