JUDAS PRIEST's RICHIE FAULKNER And WITHIN TEMPTATION's RUUD JOLIE Open Up About Their Love For 'Star Wars'

JUDAS PRIEST's Richie Faulkner and WITHIN TEMPTATION's Ruud Jolie recently went on Side Jams With Bryan Reesman to talk about their love for "Star Wars". Richie also spoke about his and PRIEST's connection to Lucasfilm and working with Christopher Lee. Richie and Ruud became friends on the 2007 WITHIN TEMPTATION tour when Richie was the guitarist in the backing group for Lauren Harris, daughter of IRON MAIDEN bassist Steve Harris, and they bonded over the franchise.

Ruud, who is part of the 501st Legion, a global costuming organization where members need screen accurate costumes for membership, said: "We have about more than 100 members in the Netherlands. Every country in every state has its outpost or garrison. So I'm a member of the Dutch Garrison, which is a part of the 501st Legion. And every state in the U.S. has its own garrison. And yeah, it's fun. It's nerds galore. Nerds everywhere."

He added, "I had a new costume approved last week or two weeks ago. So I have a TK, which is a code name for Stormtrooper, for the people who don't know. And now I am also a TB, which means [Return Of The Jedi] Biker Scout. That costume is much more comfortable because you can actually sit down in it. So during a long Comic Con visit, it's very convenient to sit down and there's a zipper [so you can pee]."

Richie said that some of his past guitar picks included Millennium Falcon and bounty hunter imagery.

"I remember when I was out with Lauren, I used to have 'Star Wars' stuff," he said. "And it was really for… I used to throw it to people. I had a Gamorrean guard on the amplifier. It was really for people to not throw stuff at me, because it was like: like me, I like 'Star Wars'. We made some picks and [that] went into PRIEST as well. We actually had to get them licensed by Lucasfilm. I think we had to send five of each to Lucasfilm or LucasArts. Which one it was, I don't remember, and we could only make a certain amount of each one."

Richie continued: "Our manager [Jayne] used to work for Lucasfilm back in the day. She had a contact in there. She reached out to them and they said, 'Yeah, you can do it, but you've got to follow these parameters.' So we did. It was super limited. I don't have any, but we did a bounty hunter edition and a ship edition. I think there were six of each."

The name of Faulkner's other band, ELEGANT WEAPONS, derives from "Star Wars".

"I wanted to use the [Obi-Wan Kenobi] speech for an intro," Richie said. "RAINBOW used to have the 'Wizard Of Oz' intro [for their concerts]. It was Dorothy talking to Toto. 'We're over the rainbow.' I can't remember exactly what it was. I wanted to have Obi-Wan Kenobi talking about [imitating the voice of Sir Alec Guinness] the elegant weapons for a more civilized age, before the dark times, before the Empire, and then the song will start. But it was going to be like 100 grand or something like that to license this piece of monologue."

Richie added with a laugh: "I wonder if you could do it with A.I. now, with a similar voice, and it won't cost anything. I don't know the technicalities of that. So 'elegant weapons' is about the instruments that we play, but it's also an excuse for me to reference 'Star Wars' and the lightsaber."

Richie also recalled working with Christopher Lee (a.k.a. Count Dooku in the prequel trilogy) on the latter's final album, "Charlemagne: The Omens Of Death".

"It was his last one. It was a cool thing. They had some songs that were very orchestra driven, and they wanted them arranged for a metal band to play. So I had to take these songs and make guitar parts and drum parts. I came up with riffs and stuff, made songs out of them. The vocals were the same, the structures were kind of the same, but it was like a metal band. I sent them about seven or eight songs, and they sent me an e-mail back and said, 'We want them more metal.' So I made them even more metal, and they went with that which is cool. But I never played on the record or anything like that. I just did the writing and arranging part of it."

Faulkner did get to meet the legendary actor.

"He was great," Richie said. "Talking to a guy like that was from a different era. He had different ideas about stuff and different points of view, as you would I think. There was a war going on in Syria at the time, and he had some opinions on that, you know. He was just a lovely, sweet guy that had been through so much — not only the acting, but his personal life as well. It was an honor to meet him."

Back in 2018, Faulkner and PRIEST singer Rob Halford drew parallels between the universal themes of "Star Wars" and the music of PRIEST in an interview with Billboard, with Halford proclaiming at the time: "JUDAS PRIEST is 'Star Wars' — there's a title — because we're always battling against evil. We're giving you hope."

"It's going back to that perfect blend of fantasy and reality," Faulkner added, noting fantasy lyrics in songs like "Painkiller" and "The Sentinel" and more social topics in tunes like "Breaking The Law" and "Children Of The Sun". "It's 'Evil Never Dies', those universal messages portrayed in a fantastical way," he explained. "Which is 'Star Wars' — the same messages, but it's on another planet far, far away."