JUDAS PRIEST's HALFORD, DOWNING Talk About 30th Anniversary Of 'British Steel'

Joel McIver of The Quietus recently conducted an interview with Rob Halford (vocals) and K.K. Downing (guitar) of British heavy metal legends JUDAS PRIEST. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

The Quietus: Thirty years since "British Steel", eh fellas? What does that feel like?

Rob Halford: It's hard to believe. Y'know, you're a different person in your teenage years, your 20s, your 30s, your 40s and your 50s, and whatever's to come. That has to have some kind of relation to how you treat your work. The older you get, funnily enough, things seem to get less cluttered. You've made sense of a lot of things: you don't sweat the small stuff.

K.K. Downing: It was 1980 when we did it, and we'd made a few albums by then. We weren't exactly floundering around, we were gaining momentum, but everything did lock in with "British Steel": the artwork, the songs, the stage clothes. Everything consolidated who we were and where we were going. It was almost like a rebel's almanac, for want of a better term. Audiences endeared themselves to it.

The Quietus: The New Wave Of British Heavy Metal was underway by the time "British Steel" was released. Did IRON MAIDEN make you feel that you'd better up your game?

K.K. Downing: I'd never heard of IRON MAIDEN until we were just finishing the mixes on the record, and someone told me that they were going to support us on the subsequent tour. I said, "OK, fine," and then they started to get mouthy in the press, saying they were going to blow the bollocks off JUDAS PRIEST and all this sort of stuff. I said, "I appreciate the attitude, like, but let's fuck 'em off and get somebody who appreciates us!" There was loads of bands who would have wanted that tour and appreciated it, and you just didn't need those sorts of vibes before you go out. Anyway, they did it and it was fine. I'm glad that they emerged and became a force to be reckoned with, and gained their own identity, musically, visually and in every way possible. All credit to them: they've done a fantastic job to be ambassadors of British metal all around the world.

The Quietus: Was it weird when Dave Holland, who played drums on the album, was imprisoned for the attempted rape of a teenage boy in 2004?

K.K. Downing: Yeah, it was, totally. I don't know the circumstances of everything that went on, but you know, a lot of innocent men have been hung and a lot of guilty men have gone free, and a lot in between, so I'm not gonna make any judgments at all.

The Quietus: A lot of PRIEST fans weren't keen on the operatic sound of your 2008 album "Nostradamus".

Rob Halford: It's a wonderful record, but it's a challenging record from the listener's point of view because it's an enormous amount of information. There are some fans that only want PRIEST to be "Painkiller" or "Turbo", and that's the passion that your fans have. We love our fans to death, but we're in control of our own destiny when it comes to music. That's the uniqueness of JUDAS PRIEST: we can be a band that does "Painkiller" one minute and "Nostradamus" the next. It's still PRIEST. We've never felt that being in a band was about staying in a box.

The Quietus: Will PRIEST ever spill the beans in a book?

Rob Halford: We talked about it. When people read a rock'n'roll book, they want all the stuff in it like MÖTLEY CRÜE's "The Dirt". It's perfect: it totally fits with that band and their image and their stage show. PRIEST has been nowhere near that type of lifestyle: we've certainly had our incidents, a lot of which have been documented and a lot of which have not. We're very, very private people in JUDAS PRIEST: we've always felt that anything outside of music is taboo and out of the public psyche. By the same token, in today's world, it's reality this, it's reality that, it's what's under the carpet and sniffing the laundry, and I don't think any of us in PRIEST are into it. It intrudes on the music, and the legacy and the merit and the value and the tradition and the history of the music. Why tarnish it? If everybody in the band wanted to do a warts-and-all autobiography, we'd all agree to do it. But we haven't agreed, and if we haven't agreed it's not going to happen. I think it's tremendous that we all value each other's opinions rather than just saying, "Let's do it and make some cash." That's the way PRIEST has always worked — there's no dominating force, it's all collective.

The Quietus: Are you in a position, financially, where you could retire?

Rob Halford: Yeah, and I think that's another indication of why we do what we do. We've got the best band in the world: it would be different if the fans were falling away, but they're not, they're consistently there. You walk on stage now and you see these teenage metalheads banging their heads to PRIEST: out of all the young bands that these metalheads could relate to, they choose JUDAS PRIEST. That's a tremendous honour that they're giving you, so there's a sense of responsibility.

The Quietus: Which metal bands are going to be playing stadiums after PRIEST, MAIDEN and METALLICA have all gone?

Rob Halford: Well, that's a really good question. There are a handful of bands that have been able to go on to the level that those are on, and can do these massive world tours and sell out major-capacity venues, but will there be another JUDAS PRIEST? Will there be another METALLICA? Will there be another IRON MAIDEN? Will there be another GUNS N' ROSES? AC/DC? KISS? I don't know. All of these are still giants in the world. We came close to it with bands like SLIPKNOT and LINKIN PARK or RAMMSTEIN — there's a handful — but will they be able to maintain it for 30 or 40 years? All of those other bands that I mentioned, even METALLICA's been around since 1981. Maybe it doesn't matter, I don't think it really does. The main thing is that heavy metal dominates completely in every part of the world, and it's reassuring. Heavy metal is everywhere and it will never die. You have to appreciate that the music is bigger than you are.

Read the entire interview from The Quietus.