Rob Halford may be the self-anointed Metal God, but backstage at Rock and Roll Fantasy Camp he’s more likely to be giving back massages. “I do a good one,” he says with a laugh, and there’s footage to prove it. The Judas Priest frontman appears in the recent Rock and Roll Fantasy Camp documentary, where weekend warriors pay to jam with their idols, and he swears the thing is less about shredding licks than it is about crying, hugging, and somehow forming a functional band in 72 hours. “Music unifies,” Halford insists. “You can’t play? We’ll teach you. But what really happens is this bond—stories, tears, emotions—and suddenly you’re at the Whisky a Go Go onstage like you belong there.”
For Halford, the camp isn’t a break from the grind so much as a strange reminder of how he started. He remembers being terrified as a kid, dry mouth and stomach aches before getting onstage, and admits that teaching campers to sing is harder than teaching guitar. “Sometimes I wish I could be Richie or Ian,” he says of his bandmates. “It’s tough to tell someone how to sing. ‘From the chest, from the throat, throw in some vibrato.’ But you figure it out. You drop the mystique, you just get real.”
The mystique, of course, is what made him a leather-clad deity in the first place. Which is why his 2020 memoir Confess felt less like an ego trip and more like, well, confession. “I didn’t know what I should say or shouldn’t,” he admits. “Ian Gittins, my co-writer, just said: ‘Say everything. Then we’ll figure it out.’” They talked for nearly 50 hours. The result was a book full of “punctuation marks” in his life—good, bad, or jaw-dropping—that made fans realize the Metal God once had stage fright like everyone else. Unauthorized bios, he scoffs, are “just hatchet jobs. You want the real deal? It’s got to come from the horse’s mouth. The metal horse.”
Halford’s restless curiosity didn’t stop with Priest. In the ‘90s, he went solo with Fight and the industrial-minded Two, albums he now regards as survival tactics. “It was my wandering in the metal desert,” he says. “I had to test my metal. And yeah, you can still go from Two to Screaming for Vengeance to Resurrection. It’s all there, waiting.”
Now, improbably, the Metal God has a blues album sitting on his iPhone. “It’s in this phone,” he says, patting it like a holy relic. The project, built with his brother Nigel, nephew Alex, and friends, is stacked with tracks—he just needs to finish the lyrics. “I gave them a list of my favorite blues—Bessie Smith, Gary Moore, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Rory Gallagher—and said: have fun. That’s what I did with the Celestial Christmas album. And now I’ve got a blues record waiting to go.”
Will it sound like Muddy Waters? Or Cream? Or AC/DC? “Everybody,” Halford says. “The blues has been everywhere. Zeppelin. Pink Floyd. Even Stray Cats. The stories are endless. You can do the sad blues, the happy blues, even fantasy blues. Robert Johnson at the crossroads, or Painkiller at the crossroads—it’s all the same thing.”
Fifty years into Priest, Halford still talks like a guy chasing something. He’s part cheerleader, part confessor, part shaman telling you to just get the damn vaccine so we can all go to gigs again. “When life gets tough, we run to our music,” he says. “We wrap ourselves up in it. That’s how we got through COVID. But it’s time to get back to putting on the Priest shirt, buying a beer, lights go down, and bang. That’s what it’s all about.”
Watch the interview above and then check out the videos below.
