Listen to ‘Rolling Stone Music Now’ Podcast: Greatest Metal Albums of All Time
The latest episode of Rolling Stone Music Now podcast is now available. Listen and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or Spotify, or check it out below.
Judas Priest‘s Rob Halford joins Rolling Stone staffers Kory Grow, Hank Shteamer, Brittany Spanos and host Brian Hiatt to discuss the magazine’s list of the 100 Greatest Metal Albums of all Time. While on the show, the singer also broke down some of his own Top 10 favorite albums, spoke about the history of heavy metal (“There was really no other band at the time that was making that kind of noise,” he said of Priest’s Birmingham neighbors in Black Sabbath) and discussed the thought process behind Judas Priest’s landmark British Steel album, which came in at number three on the main list.
“We were in transition, really,” he said of the time surrounding British Steel. “We just came back off a great tour with AC/DC in Europe and went straight into the studio. … We came off that AC/DC tour with a lot of awareness. AC/DC are a great band in terms of songs and song structure. We went into the studio with some very basic ideas, and those riffs like ‘Living After Midnight,’ ‘Breaking the Law,’ ‘Grinder,’ ‘Rapid Fire,’ ‘Steeler,’ they all came out of where we were at that time in our musical development. We were still really growing and trying to find who we were, and what to do next. British Steel is very raw and very organic in that respect.”
Listen and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or Spotify and tune in Fridays at 1 p.m. ET to hear the show live on Sirius XM’s Volume Channel.