JUDAS PRIEST Frontman ROB HALFORD - "Sobriety Gives You This Incredible Strength"

June 8, 2020, 4 years ago

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JUDAS PRIEST Frontman ROB HALFORD - "Sobriety Gives You This Incredible Strength"

Judas Priest vocalist Rob Halford will release his autobiography, Confess, on September 29 via Hachette Books. As part of the promotional activities for this book, Halford recently spoke with Kory Grow of Rolling Stone, an excerpt follows:

What’s your advice for staying sane during social distancing?

|I think the main difficulty here is everybody has a routine. It’s completely disrupted. That’s the mental side of this pandemic that’s affecting so many people. It’s important that we try to retain some kind of sanity. One of the best ways is to talk it out, whether it’s on a phone call, video chat, or a text. We need to keep that line of communication open with each other."

“Breaking The Law” has become an anthem. How do you keep a song like that fresh, night after night, for 40 years?

"It’s fresh every night that you play it. That given moment in time, it’s new, it’s fresh, it’s different. It’s never exactly, identically the same, and that’s just the way it is. I think what’s important with these kinds of songs is, you don’t put them on autopilot. You don’t go through the motions. It has to be coming from a real sincere place of performance. It’s not like, 'Oh, shit. We’ve got to do it again for the fucking 4,000th time.' You never feel that way. You look forward to it. I still look forward to doing 'Breaking The Law', \Living After Midnight', 'Electric Eye'."

You got sober in the mid-Eighties. What advice do you have for people still struggling with their demons?

"Oh, every day is a fucking struggle. It’s just unbelievable. But what sobriety gives you is just this incredible strength that is in all of us. All of us are strong people; sometimes you have to go to the bottom of the shit pit, as I call it, to realize that you have tremendous strength and resilience to survive. In terms of sobriety and learning to live as a sober person, you have to dig deep for the strength to do it, because you can lose it. It’s incredibly fragile. Strength is a funny thing, because it can break at any moment. It’s finding something in yourself that you can only find by going to the darkest of places."

To read the complete interview, visit this location.

Most priests take confessions. This one is giving his.

Rob Halford, front man of global iconic metal band Judas Priest, is a true 'Metal God'. Raised in Britain's hard-working heavy industrial heartland he and his music were forged in the Black Country. Confess, his full autobiography, is an unforgettable rock 'n' roll story - a journey from a Walsall council estate to musical fame via alcoholism, addiction, police cells, ill-starred sexual trysts and bleak personal tragedy, through to rehab, coming out, redemption... and finding love.

Now, he is telling his gospel truth.

Told with Halford's trademark self-deprecating, deadpan Black Country humour, Confess is the story of an extraordinary five decades in the music industry. It is also the tale of unlikely encounters with everybody from Superman to Andy Warhol, Madonna, Jack Nicholson and the Queen. More than anything else, it's a celebration of the fire and power of heavy metal.

Rob Halford has decided to Confess. Because it's good for the soul.

 


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