JUDAS PRIEST Singer Talks 'Nostradamus'

Simon Milburn of Australia's The Metal Forge recently conducted an interview with JUDAS PRIEST frontman Rob Halford. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow.

On the group's just-launched world tour:

"I'm in the rehearsal facility just outside of Birmingham. We're playing every day and just putting the set list together and getting the metal order together because we really haven't played for a couple of years obviously having been in the studio making 'Nostradamus'. We're just kicking the tires and everything and getting everything in shape and it's sounding brilliant."

On "Nostradamus":

"I think there are probably a number of our fans that have known of our talk of wanting to make a concept record for many, many years and there was probably a feeling that it was never going to happen. But lo and behold, here it is. Some three decades later, we've finally got around to doing it. For any concept record, you need a very strong base of ideas to launch your quest on, and having a bloke like Nostradamus to talk about was just an absolutely brilliant moment for us. I mean, concept records have been done on many different subjects, haven't they, over the years. So, we really, when our manager Bill who came up with the idea, we really thought, 'This is fantastic!' because everybody knows about the man and everybody knows about his prophecies and some of the other things they may not be very familiar with we've been able to talk about them with the music. So it's been a fantastic adventure trying to get the story of his life put out by PRIEST style of metal. . . He's just a fascinating guy really apart from his prophecies. There's an enormous amount of information that anybody can find on the Internet, in books, in movies, in documentaries and everything and I think, for me personally, he's a very intriguing man. To be able to have that ability to do what he did, and for his prophecies to still be talked about 500 years later all around the world, is just quite remarkable. There are very few historical figures that can do that. So overall, he's just a controversial people know of him all over the planet which is another important aspect because he's been researched and people have been trying to find out things about him in many, many different countries. That was also another cool thing that we realized that we got that people in Australia know about him, South America, North America, everywhere people know about this guy. That was another important issue that we weren't dealing with something that was a bit remote or that people were not very familiar with him. Everybody knows about this man."

On early reactions to the "Nostradamus":

"Well, so far, as you know, we've had a couple of songs that were released recently on LiveNation and JudasPriest.com and it's been fantastic. I mean, you've only got to look at what people have been saying about it on the message boards on the Internet and everybody's just waiting for it. They can't wait to get an earful. I think it's gonna be really well received. I mean, from our perspective it's thirteen major tracks and it's all linked together seamlessly and flows through and it's still thirteen solid PRIEST tracks that are very typical of the kind of thing we do. There are a lot of cool things going on in terms of the embellishments that we've used but essentially, we can take that and put it into the live performance like we do in here. We're rehearsing some of the 'Nostradamus' material that we'll put into the set list and it sounds absolutely colossal when it's played live."

On the challenges of making a double-disc album with a total running time of just over 100 minutes:

"I suppose it's just the dimension of the work really and to do it justice. I mean, I think it's very easy to get confused and lost and to maybe dilute things if you're not really able to focus and concentrate on the job at hand. We've had 35 years of practice to be able to do this and get this right. I think if it had happened any earlier, it may have turned out differently. It just seems as though everything has been slowly directing itself to this moment. It was a strong record to make. I don't recall any major, major problems getting lost or confused or getting stuck. The material, when it was being written, was very constant and flowing. We've got the chronological thing for us as well. The music was somewhat dictated by the things that he went through. It wasn't as though we were having to invent something out of thing air. We were just trying to follow the significant things that happened to him in his life. So that did make it a little bit easier, because you could look at a section of his life and go, 'OK, well, how would you be feeling at that point?' and that relates to the style of the music you're gonna create the tempo, the emotion, all the other things. Those were almost predetermined by what he was going through at that certain point when he was alive. Having said that, it is hard work. You have to work really hard to get it right and make every moment important and have a degree of separation so you get distinctive tracks coming out and nothing's bumping into each other."

Read the entire interview at www.themetalforge.com.

JUDAS PRIEST performing "Dissident Aggressor" live in Helsinki, Finland June 3, 2008 (uploaded by YouTube user "RockNRomeo").