JUDAS PRIEST To Tour North America With THIN LIZZY, BLACK LABEL SOCIETY

JUDAS PRIEST will embark on a North American tour in the fall with support from THIN LIZZY and BLACK LABEL SOCIETY. The trek which was just announced during a press conference at the Renaissance Hotel at Highland and Hollywood in Los Angeles, California will kick off on October 12 in San Antonio, Texas and conclude on November 18 in East Rutherford, New Jersey.

The complete list of dates (courtesy of Aniruddh "Andrew" Bansal of Metal Assault):

Oct. 12 - San Antonio, TX - AT&T Center
Oct. 14 - Corpus Christi, TX - Concrete Street Ampitheater
Oct. 15 - Houston, TX - Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion
Oct. 16 - Allen, TX - Allen Event Center
Oct. 18 - Tucson, AZ - Ava Ampitheater
Oct. 19 - San Diego, CA - Cricket Wireless Ampitheater
Oct. 21 - Phoenix, AZ - AZ State Fair
Oct. 22 - San Bernardino, CA - San Manuel Ampitheater
Oct. 23 - Las Vegas, NV - Hard Rock
Oct. 25 - Los Angeles, CA - Gibson Ampitheater
Oct. 26 - Oakland, CA - Oracle Arena
Oct. 29 - Seattle, WA - WaMu Theater
Oct. 30 - Vancouver, BC - Rogers Arena
Nov. 01 - Edmonton, AB - Shaw Conference Center
Nov. 02 - Calgary, AB - Scotiabank Saddledome
Nov. 04 - Salt Lake City, UT - Maverik Center
Nov. 05 - Denver, CO - 1st Bank Center
Nov. 12 - Chicago, IL - The Venue At Horeshoe Casino
Nov. 13 - Detroit, MI - Joe Louis Arena
Nov. 18 - East Rutherford, NJ - Izod Center

Greg Prato of RollingStone.com conducted an interview with JUDAS PRIEST earlier today. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

On JUDAS PRIEST's forthcoming farewell tour, the band's first to feature 31-year-old British guitarist Richie Faulkner following the departure of Kenneth "K.K." Downing:

Glenn Tipton (guitar): "It's not exactly the end of the band, it's just the fact that we won't really be doing any more world tours. It takes a big chunk out of your life. We've been doing it for 40 years now or close to it, and we all love that moment on stage, but it's difficult to be away from home and all the traveling involved. Now, if somebody came along and said, 'Would you do a small string of dates,' we wouldnt automatically say no to that. But in general, this is probably the last chance you'll get to see PRIEST live."

Rob Halford (vocals): "We're pulling out all the stops. We've built a brand new stage set, we've got all the effects that people love us for the lasers, the fire, the bombs, the smoke, new costumes, and the bike. It's just a full-on metal extravaganza."

On his playing approach for the forthcoming tour:

Richie Faulkner: "My take on K.K.'s playing was he improvised quite a lot live. It was kind of a basic framework around the solo that was on the record, and then he would go off a bit on that. So my style is kind of the same as that I normally take what's in the solo and just play around with it a bit. But it keeps the essence of the solo there."

On new material:

Rob Halford: "We do have some completed tracks that we've been talking about in the last few days, as to how we can feed those out to our fans. We wanted to make at least one more great metal album that really represents all the wonderful things we've tried to do. If things go as planned, we want to get this out by the summer of next year."

JUDAS PRIEST's "Epitaph" world tour will kick off on June 7 in Tilburg, Holland.

Photo credit: Andrew Ogilvy