ROB HALFORD On Live At Rock In Rio III - "They Were So Loud I Couldn’t Hear Myself, So I Just Turned The Mic Over To Them..."

January 8, 2009, 15 years ago

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Charlie Doherty at Blogcritics Magazine recently spoke with JUDAS PRIEST / FIGHT / HALFORD frontman Rob Halford. An excerpt from the interview is available below.

Q: Moving on to the Rio [III] DVD…. It has 15 great songs on it that encompasses your whole career with Fight, Halford and Judas Priest but I’m wondering, is that the whole show? Or were there any songs that didn’t make the cut that you remember playing that night in 2001?

Haford. "I believe it’s everything, from the first note to the last. There were no extras, or I don’t recall us going back out to do an encore session because time was tight. We looked through all the footage that we were grateful to receive from the Rock In Rio people, who were very generous in handing it over to me a few years after the event. And it’s been kind of waiting in the archives to be looked at and treated. So I’m pretty sure it’s all there. I’d be surprised if there’s anything else. When I watched it, it was exactly as was planned with the setlist and everything. The only real two, real moments, new moments was the extra tracks 'God Bringer of Death' and 'Fetish' from the Resurrection remastered CD.

Q: Back to the live show part of it, was it a conscious effort on your part to issue a live show based not only on top-level performance, which Rio clearly was, but on audience interaction? Because it seemed there was just 200,000 crazy Brazilians singing every word. Even if there wasn’t a word, they were singing.

Halford: "[Laughing] That’s just the way they are down there. They are just so mad and passionate down there about metal music, and they know all the tunes and everything. The setlist that we played was the setlist that we’d been working with for most of the Halford Resurrection World Tour. But as far as interaction and everything, that was just real spontaneity on the part of the metal heads at the gig. You just can’t help but feel to interact with something like that you know, especially that magic moment at the end when they all sing 'Breaking The Law'.”

Q: I was just going to ask about this moment, so what was that like? You were serenading the crowd, then all of a sudden—

Halford: "Yeah I think I started singing a couple of lines and then they were so loud, I couldn’t hear myself. So I just turned the mic over to them and they started wailing away at it. So that was just a bit of metal magic."

Go to this location for the complete interview.


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