Dennis Dread: Thank you for taking time away from the ongoing worldwide Invincible Shield campaign to speak with me today. It is truly an honor. 2024 marks the 50th anniversary of the debut JUDAS PRIEST album Rocka Rolla, which was released in September 1974, and just last week the band finally released a newly remixed and remastered version of the album.
Ian Hill: Thank you, mate. It’s my pleasure. Right. 50 years. Hard to believe. Y’know, we had no money back when we recorded this record. The band had severe budget restrictions. We threw the whole thing together in about three weeks, for about the equivalent of $3,000.00 US dollars, and we booked the studio overnight and recorded the entire thing after hours. We worked from dusk to dawn. Very, very quickly and very, very cheaply.
Before the Dawn, as the song goes.
Yes, right! We recorded overnight because we had no money and it was cheaper to have the studio overnight, so we were able to get more studio time for our money that way. But we were never happy with the production. It never really did the songs any justice.
Rob Halford once notoriously suggested that fans should burn their copies of Rocka Rolla because the band was so unhappy with the production.
Well, y’know, Gull Records was a very small company and they didn’t have much in the way of financing, and of course they retained the rights to all the songs all these years. We would’ve gone in and done this remix a long time ago, but we didn’t have the rights to do it. But since Reach Music bought the rights to the songs and have taken over now, we finally had the chance to go in and do it right. Tom Allom really did a fantastic job with it. It’s absolutely tremendous. Tom Allom has been with us since 1979, since Unleashed in the East actually, and he knows the band better than anyone. If Tom doesn’t know something about the band, it isn’t worth knowing. He made it brighter and cleaner and changed about as much as he could with the source material he had to work with, but, I have to say, the original 2” tape was in remarkably good shape.
You can really hear the difference in some of the vocal effects on Deep Freeze, and the rhythm section in general sounds much crisper and more to the front of the mix.
Despite our frustration with the original production, I’ll tell you, one of the greatest moments in my entire career was walking down to the record shop and seeing the album on the shelf next to The Beatles and The Stones and The Kinks. Seeing it there amongst all of those greats, I thought to myself, ‘Well, that’s it. Nothing can take that away now. It’s there for good. For better or worse.’ It was one of the greatest moments of my career just to see it up there on the shelf. You have to realize that the recording process was a lot more primitive back then as well, the whole lot was put down on 16 tracks. Eventually it went up to 48 tracks I think. And then of course digital came in and the number of tracks available depended on how big your computer was. So, like I say, Tom had to work with what he got, but he has my tremendous deference.
One of the things that fascinates me about this record is that it seemed like Judas Priest emerged as this fully formed creative force and, in some ways, it’s an experimental record with songs like Deep Freeze, and Winter and Caviar and Meths, which is a song that you composed that was part of the band’s very early live sets.
I think it showed everyone’s influences. I think we all had various influences. Ken [K.K. Downing] with Hendrix. Myself was Jack Bruce and Cream. Glenn [Tipton] also Cream, and he loved ZZ Top. They were a blues band back then, you know? Rob was always eclectic in his taste, he loved all progressive rock. You can see the various styles. We didn’t call it heavy metal yet, that term didn’t really exist back then. It is something that evolved in five or six years. It wasn’t until probably Sin After Sin, or maybe Stained Class, and everything gelled really around British Steel. That was when the musical direction was there and the image was there. Everything sort of came together for that album and it was really a progression from then. But in the earlier days, the music might have been there, but the image...we were still wearing velvet, satin and flowing scarves and Ken was wearing big hats and things [laughs].
I love The Old Grey Whistle Test recordings of Dreamer Deceiver and Deceiver when the band looked like that! I don’t know if the world widely knows how much you influenced the early evolution of Judas Priest by introducing Rob Halford to the band.
Oh yeah, we got lucky with that. Alan Atkins, the original vocalist, he’s a good vocalist, he’s still doing it, you know. But his wife became pregnant. And we simply weren’t earning enough money to support the family. That’s why he left. And I was dating Rob’s sister at the time and she said, ‘Why don’t you give Rob a call?’ We’d heard the band, nobody’d seen him, but we’d heard the band he was playing with called Hiroshima, and we went to meet him, and the rest is history. Chris Campbell, our drummer at the time, he left at the same time, and Rob brought John Hinch from Hiroshima with him. It took a bit of time to whack out a setlist, and then we set out on the road again. It wasn’t until early 1974, I think it was, that Glenn joined. We’d already had a record contract by that point, but we hadn’t put anything down yet. And when Glenn joined, that was it. We had the trademark lineup.
Off and running!
Yeah, that’s right. It all evolved from there. It wasn’t until the late 70s really until somebody said, 'Ah, they're a heavy metal band!' It was heavy rock or progressive rock up to that point. The music was there, but the image wasn’t [laughs]...the image came a bit later on.
I’m glad you mentioned Chris Campbell, I love those early promo photos of the band with you and Chris Campbell. I can’t imagine there were many black men playing hard rock in Birmingham, England in 1970.
I think he was quite possibly unique, yeah. He was a great bloke as well, Chris, he was a great bloke.
You’re going to be performing two shows in Nevada so I feel like I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the band’s storied history with the state of Nevada, and the tragedy that occurred in Sparks in 1985 and the subsequent trial in 1990. The whole world paid attention to this trial where the prosecutors attempted to find subliminal messages in your cover of the Spooky Tooth song Better by You, Better Than Me. What impact did the Reno trial have on the band’s creative processes?
It didn’t have any impact at all really. We’d already done Painkiller, it was ready to go. So, it didn’t make any difference to us. But it was just one of those...there were political reasons there, and religious reasons. It was a quagmire really. In a nutshell, people were saying there’s a subliminal message on that song, and if you said, ‘Ah, I can’t here anything.’ Well, they said, ‘That’s because it’s subliminal!’ And then it was up to you then to prove that something you couldn’t hear wasn’t there [laughs]! I mean that’s just a conundrum, isn’t it? I think after about the third day the judge was thinking, ‘Oh I made a terrible mistake here.’ Because everything that they said was, ‘Oh, you can hear that.’ Well, if you can hear it, then it’s not subliminal. If you can hear it, it’s part of free speech, part of your amendment, you know. And from there they started to try us on backward messages, so we actually went into a studio and played the whole thing backwards and wrote down all the things we came up with. ‘I need a peppermint’ and ‘Can I sit in the chair,' stuff like that. And the judge thought, ‘Yeah, this is bullshit.’
The world seems to be very interested in revisiting the Satanic Panic era and reexamining the damage that it did to so many people and exploring the fallacies that it brought forward into popular culture. In fact, there’s a new horror movie called MaXXXine (2024) that features the Judas Priest song Prisoner of Your Eyes. It’s set in the 80’s Satanic Panic era and it features a song of the era, and I think of it as sort of a validation of the band’s triumph over that whole media circus.
Yeah, and a circus it was! I mean, you’re talking about something that was recorded in 1978. I mean, subliminal messages in 1978? Give me a break! Nobody knew what it was back then! I think Coca Cola tried it in cinemas, in theaters, flashing Coca Colas for a split second on the screen, just to see the effect. And it didn’t make any bloody difference to sales of Coca Cola. And anyway you could see it, it wasn’t subliminal, was it? It was right there! The whole thing was a ruse. I think there’s a lot of political movement behind there, it was a time of Washington wives and things like that. Tipper Gore was just trying to get rid of rock music in general. I mean, what a stupid thing to do. You know, everybody should be listening to the Monkees or something like that. So yeah, there was only ever one outcome, they awarded the defendants, I think it was $60,000 or something like that, because we were late getting some evidence to court.
Right, the band was late to deliver the master recordings for examination.
Yeah, something like that. That’s the only thing that they could do. Because there was nothing else there. It was just a month out of everybody’s time wasted really.
Well the data is in now. There are actually reports from the last few years that suggest that lifelong listeners of heavy metal are happier in general than people who do not listen to heavy metal music. Research indicates everything from lower cortisol levels [the stress hormone] to lower levels of truancy at work in adulthood. Heavy metal fans tend to report happier childhood experiences. They’ve done research on it now and I feel like unintentionally we’ve come full circle to what we have known all along. And the title song on the new album, Invincible Shield, fits into a lineage of Judas Priest songs like Take On the World and United. There’s something in the lyrics that suggests a calling to arms of the international heavy metal community, there’s something of a positive message behind Invincible Shield, is there not?
Yeah, it is that sort of thing. We get things thrown at us all the time, especially in Bible Belt places, and there being people outside with banners, calling us evil and Satanic and all the rest of it. It’s just a style of music. It’s one of those things that, you know, you have these people who are going, ‘Well, heavy metal’s dead.’ Oh really? Well, what are you going to replace it with? It’s not the music, it’s the people themselves. You’ve got pop music, it’s up there, way up there in the stratosphere. You listen to it when you’re going to work, you listen to it at work, it's rammed down your throat on TV and radio. But there’s always a certain amount of people who want more than that. They care if there’s an interesting bassline or a drum pattern, or they’re interested in the lead breaks, or whether the vocalist really can sing. And those people will always be there. And they'll always demand more. And they’ll get off more on the music rather than just singing along to the chorus of some pop song. There’s nothing wrong with that. I mean, I suppose that's why they call it the opiate of the masses or what have you. But there's more. You’ve got to have that certain mentality to even think about listening to it. You've got to be into the musical part of it, not just the singalong. And those people will always exist. They'll always be there. So if you do take heavy metal away, you’re gonna have to replace it with something else because those people will demand it. It’ll probably come in the shape of heavy metal. The people who say ‘heavy metal is dead' do probably want it so rather than it being any sort of sensible prediction.
One of the first times I became aware of the power of a bassline was in the song The Rage, probably around 1980, when British Steel was released. The beginning of that song was so unusual for a heavy metal song at the time.
Ah, yeah. We were writing the start of the song, and then Glenn said, ‘Can you try something a bit offbeat over there?’ so I just took the chords and messed the time up a little bit [laughs].
It’s one of the gems in the catalog. It makes me wonder, with something like 19 full length albums, on the Invincible Shield tour, how does the band decide what the set list will be comprised of.
Yeah, I know it gets more difficult with each album. You gotta make room for new stuff, so whatever songs you drop you’re probably dropping somebody’s favorite. So it just gets more difficult. But you've got room for maybe three new songs, four in a pinch, and I think we’re doing three at the moment. And then of course you got the fan favorites and you have to play those. And then you have to pick out the rest from about 300 other songs. And you have to try to keep them familiar. People have got to know them. I mean we’ll throw a deep track in every now and again, but there’s nothing worse than that tumbleweed moment when you finish playing a song and people are like, ‘Well what the hell was that?’ and it’s one of our songs that we’ve never played before or haven’t played in a long time. So you have to keep it sorta familiar just to keep the vibe going, you know.
What can fans expect from the show coming up?
Well, there are seven articulated lorries worth of gear that’s getting plowed in there. So it’s got big sound, big lights. Pieces of set that move around. Motorcycles. The usual Priest sort of thing, you know.
I want to end with the very first question that Judas Priest posed to the world in 1974 on the opening track of Rocka Rolla: where would you be without music?
Yeah, really. People forget how important it is sometimes. It is very, very important. Any art form is important, but music especially because it is so accessible.
I can tell you, on behalf of headbangers around the world, without your bass playing and without your incredible contributions to heavy metal, we would be nowhere at all, Mr. Hill.
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