JUDAS PRIEST Guitarist K.K. DOWNING: 'We'll Play A Whole New Set' On Next Tour

Garry Sharpe-Young of Rockdetector.com recently conducted an interview with JUDAS PRIEST guitarist K.K. Downing. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

Rockdetector.com: Tony Iommi told me he has hundreds of tapes of riffs that haven't been used yet. Are you the same?

K.K. Downing: "There are great riffs you sometimes can't put into a song. You have to remember that the singer has to do his thing on top of it too."

Rockdetector.com: Can you ever see the Tipton / Downing well of riffs running dry?

K.K. Downing: "No. They are getting harder to come by though. A lot of bands took what we did in the '70s and have produced thousands more riffs over the years so to find something special just gets harder. If we had released 'Angel Of Retribution' in 1977 it would have been a huge album. It's just time. Some of the classic riffs from the 70s would not even get noticed today I think."

Rockdetector.com: Do you understand the passion that JUDAS PRIEST generates in its fans?

K.K. Downing: "I think I do now. More so than before. Especially with the Internet because you can really get to see what people think. There's some surprising stuff and most of it is totally positive."

Rockdetector.com: Although "Angel Of Retribution" has been a major success for you there was quite a lot of criticism about the set list on the last tour. You didn't really deviate too much from a "greatest hits"-type set and that didn't go down too well with a lot of your hardcore fans.

K.K. Downing: "Yeah, and I agree. When we do the next round I would really like to not play 'Victim Of Changes' and 'Breaking The Law' again. We're going to play a completely different set, play a lot of stuff we've not played in a long time or stuff we've never played. I mean, we can play it all so I think that's what we'll do next time. A completely new set would be a very cool thing to do. We nearly did it on the 'Turbo' tour, I remember, we played so much stuff then we had not played before and we should do that again."

Rockdetector.com: I think a lot of your fans would like to vote on a set list. I think some interaction like that could be very beneficial to the band.

K.K. Downing: "That's an idea we've thought of too. Yeah, next time round we'll play a whole new set."

Rockdetector.com: What kind of songs would you like to play?

K.K. Downing: "Oh, lots of songs from all the albums really. I think it might be good to have a look at every album, even 'Rocka Rolla'. Rob did 'Never Satisfied', didn't he? I like 'Starbreaker'. We've got so many songs that we could put together a whole new show and still make it really interesting. There are some songs from the new album we still need to play as well. Which songs do you want us to play?"

Rockdetector.com: Things like "Dissident Aggressor", "Blood Red Skies", "Starbreaker", "Steeler". I think those kind of songs are what the faithful want to hear. I think you should let "Living After Midnight" have a well-earned rest. You should play "Take On The World" because that was your first hit single and it's a great sing-a-long arena type song. Wouldn't Scott Travis do an amazing job with that song?

K.K. Downing: "Yeah. That's what I mean. We can play everything we've ever done. 'Take On The World' was really good for us because we had a hit with one of songs. I was talking about the record company always asking us for cover versions, which we kept doing but our first hit was a song we wrote. We did that on 'Top Of The Pops' and then we had another three hit singles and they were all our songs too so the record company was wrong and we were right. That was very important for us. We tried to do something similar to 'Take On The World' with 'United'. We thought that song was going to be huge."

Read the entire interview at Rockdetector.com.