Revealing New Interview: Rob Halford Talks Opening for Zeppelin, Living at The Beatles’ House

By Ellen Mallarnee

Rob Halford has plenty on his plate these days — a live album due out July 14 and a tour with Whitesnake — but it’s his revelations about Judas Priest’s heyday that are particularly interesting in a new Rolling Stone Q&A. Not only does the singer discuss Priest having written an album at John Lennon and Ringo Starr’s pad but he also talks about opening up for Led Zeppelin during the band’s last U.S. tour.

Halford isn’t just bringing up all this stuff for the heck of it. He’s got good reason to be dishing about 30 years ago. It’s been three decades since Judas Priest unleashed its pièce de résistance British Steel, and the band is set to commemorate the occasion by performing the album in its entirety on their upcoming tour. Besides delighting their fans, the performances will add up to a live DVD in the future.

Halford is now aged 58, but don’t think for a minute that he’s relegated his hard rockin’ ways — or his smokin’ leather outfits — to the back of the closet. During RS’s chat, he dishes out shopping advice (“There’s a place called the Crypt in San Diego, which has all of your Halloween S&M needs,” he says) and more. Here are the sweetest morsels:

On Writing British Steel at Ringo’s House in England:

“It was a very interesting time for us. I’ve always believed that most times, the best material from any band is their first two releases. Priest is a little unusually different in that manner, because this was our sixth studio release. Suddenly, the band seemed to change shape, and you get a very distinctive moment coming from Priest, in terms of the way the songs were written and the production … Quite a bit of the writing took place at a house that was the former home of John Lennon — Ringo was living there at the time. There was a lot of stuff going on in the U.K. — socially/politically, it was in turmoil with the Thatcher government and the unions, street fights with coal miners and the police. It was a really volatile bit of a revolution around the late ’70s. I think some of that went into my writing as a lyricist. If you listen to the words and messages on British Steel, it’s full of that angst.”

On John Lennon and ‘Living After Midnight’

“Ringo was in Barbados or Bermuda — he has a second house there — so we didn’t see him. But the house was full of Lennon, as far as the white room he’d made Imagine. That’s the room where Glenn [Tipton] woke me up, because my bedroom was above that room, and Glenn was clanging out the chords to ‘Living After Midnight’ at 4 in the morning. He woke me up, I came downstairs, and said, ‘Glenn, it seems like you’re living after midnight down here.’ And he said, ‘That’s a great title for this song!’ It’s full of memories like that — walking around the lake where Lennon was rowing across in that Imagine video.”

On Opening for Led Zeppelin:

“We had just come to the end of our first massive American tour. We were ready to go back home, and then we got a call from management that Robert Plant knew we were over here, and said, ‘We’d love Priest to open for Zeppelin.’ We had to park our carcasses in a Motel 6 for about a week, and wait for the moment to happen. Without a doubt, those two shows [at Oakland Stadium] helped break Priest on the West Coast. We went on very early in the morning, because it was a 4 p.m. curfew. When we went on, there was still a lot of that fog that you get in the Oakland/Bay Area. You could see a few thousand people on the floor. But while we were performing, the sun broke through, the fog lifted, and the place was absolutely full. It was mind-blowing.”