The Gazette has issued the following report from Bernard Perusse:

ROB HALFORD believes in heavy metal. Really believes.

It's not just a Spinal Tap pose, either. If you sit down and spend an hour with the JUDAS PRIEST frontman and hear the evangelical fervour with which he talks about his chosen genre or his group's back catalogue, you can draw only one conclusion: His faith in the power of the brain-crushing chord is absolute. He is for real. No one could possibly be that good a con artist.

Not that Halford hasn't had a Spinal Tap-ish moment or two, though. He even invoked the name of the metal-parody mockumentary when reminiscing about a 1991 Toronto show that, notoriously, turned sour. At that fateful concert, Halford prepared to roar onto the stage on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. Disoriented by the noise and lack of pre-show lighting, he was unaware that the steps under the drum riser had been raised and then lowered again because of a missed cue. He hit the riser on his bike at 40 mph.

"It knocks me backwards, literally knocks me out," Halford remembered during a recent Gazette interview while he was in town to promote his new anthology, Metal God Essentials, Vol. 1. "The bike falls over on top of me. I'm on the ground, I'm going in and out of consciousness, covered in smoke and dry ice," the singer said, laughing. "And I can feel (guitarist) Glenn (Tipton) kicking me, trying to find me. We opened up with 'Hell Bent For Leather' and that was the first time 'Hell Bent For Leather' was an instrumental."

Halford made it to the microphone for the second number, with blood pouring from his nose and a stabbing neck pain. After the show, a doctor put him in a neck brace.

Halford left Judas Priest a year later, only to rejoin in 2003, after a period during which Tim "Ripper" Owens handled the vocal chores. Some of the non-Priest solo years, during which he fronted the groups FIGHT and HALFORD, are the subject of the new compilation.

During that era, in 1998, he did something pretty unexpected, at least within the heavy metal community: He came out as a gay man. "I kind of blew the doors off the myth that all heavy metalheads are Neanderthal and very limited in their ability to take on subject matter of any human depth," he said.

"That's ridiculous: Metal fans are just as compassionate and caring and tolerant as any other form of music fans are. (The support) made me feel great. (But) I couldn't have done it while I was a drunk and a drug addict."

Halford can name the date he became clean and sober: January 6th, 1986. He was 12 years into his first era with Judas Priest, which was about to release Turbo.

"I was snorting cocaine left, right and centre," he said. "I'd get whacked out of my mind before I went on stage. During the show, I'd be knocking back vodka and tonic and doing lines behind the amps, then come off stage and have a bottle of Mot & Chandon and start on 16-ounce cans of Budweiser. It just got so bad that I'd be back home in Phoenix, just literally punching walls, trashing rooms and just severely unhappy."

Read the full story at The Gazette.