Rob Halford: A metal legend unleashed in a new autobiography
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA - JUNE 29: Singer Rob Halford of Judas Priest performs on the final night of the band's Firepower World Tour at The Joint inside the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino on June 29, 2019 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
“Woah! I’m not in Walsall now!” When Rob Halford pitched up in Times Square in New York for the first time in 1977 and drunk it all in, these were the words that sprung into his mind. As a son of the Black Country in the west midlands of England, this was close to life on another planet. But as the lead singer of Judas Priest, then an up and coming heavy metal band on their first US tour, this was destiny.
There is already a Black Country sonic boom rising from the very first pages of Confess where Halford reminisces about walking to and from school through the noise and smoke emanating from a huge pig iron foundry. This corner of England was a hotbed of the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century and became a hotbed of hard rock in the late twentieth century. Indeed, some have argued that the two facts are not unconnected.
Early on in Confess, all of the familiar minutiae of 20th century English working class life snap into place: neighbours popping in and out of each other’s houses; a mother who stayed at home and kept the place spotless and who managed the family finances with a pay packet her husband put on the table every Friday night; and so on. When the future arrived, it came in the form of an immersion heater.
Halford’s parents’ marriage, however, was not always happy. He attributes his avoidance of confrontation in later life, and his terror of arguments, to nights in the family home listening, with his sister, to the fights erupting downstairs. He is at pains to make clear, though, that he is not in the business of writing a ‘misery memoir’.
The rows died away and his parents were loving and protective: “never in a million years would I describe my childhood as abusive or unhappy.” Instead, of a misery memoir then, we get a fairly upbeat story of school, masturbation, early jobs, some dabbling in the world of theatre, the author’s realisation that he was homosexual, and then bands: Lord Lucifer, Hiroshima, and eventually Judas Priest. Halford found that “prancing around a stage and wailing at strangers came pretty easily”.
And Judas Priest muscled their way into this category. Halford’s language gets quite florid about the mission of his band, writing of an “imperial period” when Judas Priest were conquering America for the Black Country and British heavy metal.
But the rock’n’roll lifestyle, notoriously, comes at a cost. Halford reached a point where he hated being sober and then proceeded to pile heavy cocaine use on top of his drinking. He ties these habits to his secret life: the “sheer torture of being a gay man fronting a straight band in a macho world”.
There is a lot of sex in Confess – in toilets, hotels, army bases and elsewhere – with Halford getting more “rampant” as he headed into his forties, turning up the dial on various forms of sexual adventurism. He maintains that “being faithful in the gay world is not the same as for straights: gay men are more promiscuous”.
On the other hand, “we often tell our partners about our little dalliances.” Halford dated a succession of men whom, in the end, he judges to have been straight all along, before eventually finding true love with Thomas, an ex-US Marine. In 1998, he came out publicly in an MTV interview (though there were already plenty of clues in his Judas Priest lyrics and stage persona). Halford had never felt “stronger or more at peace”, a feeling that “has lasted to this day”.
By 1985, Judas Priest were so successful, but also so knackered, that they decided they would take a whole year off from touring. It was meant to recharge the batteries, but for Halford, the year turned into a horror show of hepatitis, a drink driving ban, the consumption of lakes of alcohol and mountains of cocaine, a vicious fight with Brad, his then boyfriend, a sleeping pill overdose, and, finally, rehab. It has now been 34 years since Rob Halford last had a drink or took drugs. What has saved him, he believes, is “that old Black Country stubbornness”. His former lover Brad didn’t make it, “blowing his brains out” in January 1987.
The rollercoaster took another plunge when Judas Priest ended up in court in Reno having to defend themselves from allegations that subliminal messages on their Stained Class album had inspired two troubled young men to form a suicide pact.
And in 1992, in circumstances that don’t quite make sense, even in his own first-hand account, Halford left Judas Priest under a cloud and pursued various adventures in trash metal, speed metal, and industrial electronic music. The band eventually got back together, of course, and the extraordinary highs and lows kept coming.
Anyone picking up this book will, I suspect, be anticipating, even hoping for some moments in the spirit of Spinal Tap. It doesn’t disappoint. You can take your pick of Tap-worthy anecdotes, but my favourite is the story of the band waiting in a hotel lobby for the limo booked by CBS to take them to the venue for that night’s gig. The limo didn’t turn up, there were no taxis to be found, and so the studs-and-leather clad rockers clambered onto a bus packed with nonplussed New Yorkers, muttering “We’m never gonna mek it” in thick Black Country accents.
Halford is a firm believer in the supernatural and the afterlife, thanks to encounters with a bed-shaking poltergeist in a Belgian boarding house and a clairvoyant in a New York nightclub who was in touch with his late lover Brad. Confess, in fact, is a good primer in the dichotomy found in a lot of heavy metal culture. On the one hand, there is the full-on hedonism, the whiff of blasphemy and the occult, the over-the-top violent imagery, and, in Halford’s unique case, life as a “gay metal pop tart” (with a penchant for lame innuendos). On the other hand, there are the often quite conventional world views, a strong belief in staying grounded and old-fashioned camaraderie, and a certain sentimentalism, even homeliness. Halford, for example, is an arch royalist with a very soft spot for the current queen.
Amid stiff competition, perhaps the oddest anecdote in the book comes from Halford’s late teens when he was working in a theatre in Wolverhampton. The musical director of the latest pantomime was hitting on him continuously. At his wits’ end, Halford wandered into a Catholic church in the city centre where he walked up to a statue of the Virgin Mary and, in his own words, “communicated with her”. He felt a wave of peace and smelled the fragrance of roses, even though there no flowers to be seen. Fifty years later, the incident still gives him the shivers. Make of that what you can or will.
Confess can’t fail to grip as a heavy metal behind-the-scenes tell-all - or nearly all. I came away feeling that despite all the frank accounts of life on the road, Halford had been quite guarded in certain respects. He finishes the book in reflective mood. Heavy metal will never die, he concludes, but, looking at contemporary Walsall, he realises that “the landscape that gave birth to it has perished”. The foundries are gone. His niece does not know what a lump of coal is.
He is glad he has taken the time to re-examine his life and his innate religiosity makes one last surge: “sometimes”, he decides, “it does your soul a power of good to Confess”.
