![]() ![]() In your mind you’re seeing these robots, but it’s actually Ringo’s cutlery clattering about. I just shook them up and down, and then we multi-tracked the sound. The metallic crunching sound you hear in the song is actually me holding a tray of knives and forks from Ringo’s kitchen. If you’re a lifelong metalhead too, you qualify. I think we’re all metal gods I’m not the only one. It has a sledgehammer riff and then it creates this great imagery in the mind ‘ marching in the streets, dragging iron feet’. I’m proud that Metal Gods was recorded in the UK, kind of exemplifying our love for British metal. It was they that bestowed me with that moniker, and I loved it so much that I trademarked it! It’s a wonderful part of the relationship Priest that has with our fans. “I still love the fact that fans call me the ‘metal god’. Recorded at former Beatle Ringo Starr’s place, Rob recalls the surprisingly simple methods he used to make this song sound like a prologue to Armageddon. You can’t beat a song that’s successful across all platforms including radio in our own country, because it spreads the British heavy metal gospel.” He said, ‘Let’s not have loads of verses and long guitar solos let’s really cut and slice these songs down to get the maximum impact.’ That’s what we did. He wanted to strip everything down to the bare bones. All those songs on British Steel took us into a different place, and a lot of that is thanks to Tom Allom. It’s lashing out against ‘the man’ and the machine. ![]() But that riff! Not just that but the message, which is an attack against society from the perspective of someone who’s really up against it – that’s probably even more relevant today than it was at the time. That was such a compact and pounding song – it’s not even three minutes long, so it’s among the shortest songs we’ve ever written – but it obviously really connected. “You never know where your music is going to take you, especially when it comes to the reach it’s going to gain. We sure do now, thanks to this seminal classic. ‘You don’t know what it’s like ,’ he screamed. Rob’s life changed forever when Priest unleashed this famous hit. It is a pure metal message – all the qualities that we love about this genre are embodied within the lyrics, along with that specific look and that sound.” I love the message that both the bike and that song send out. And that bike – a different one now of course – that you’ll have seen if you were at Bloodstock, it’s all about metal, isn’t it? It smells, it’s noisy, it pisses people off and it’s got all the great metal attributes about it. It just felt perfect it felt like the right thing to do. The song in question was Hellbent For Leather, and the rest is history. We were playing a venue in Derby I think, and I got talking to this biker and asked him if I could borrow his bike and take it out onstage. We were finding out who we were visually as well as in terms of our sound. “This was the time when everything was coming together and coalescing. And it all started at a biker bar in Derby… This song helped to cement the leather-bound, biker-inspired look that Priest have made their own. That would be super-heavy if we ever did it now, and we may do.” I’ve always wanted to do Dying To Meet You live, for example. We’d played Never Satisfied before and there are always opportunities for others. When we were putting our setlist together for Bloodstock this year I said to the guys, ‘What do you think about doing Rocka Rolla?’ The first reaction was, ‘Are you mad?’ When it came to it, though, we understood the importance of referencing that first album. It shows that we’ll take on and tackle any opportunity. ![]() Then there’s ‘ definite 99’ – I don’t even know what that means! I think Glenn might even have had this song written before he joined the band, and it’s one song in the vast catalogue of Priest that really shows our diversity. The lyrics are, shall we say, spectacular – stuff like ‘ 10-pint-a-nighter’ and ‘ all-in wrestling is one of her pride and joys’. “It’s one of our first songs and we’ve never written one like it since! Glenn put it together and I immediately jumped in because I thought it had such a great groove. Judas Priest barely sounded like the Priest we know and love when they recorded their debut, but title-track Rocka Rolla is nevertheless where it all begun for a 22-year-old Rob Halford… ![]()
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