Yorkshire Tea, onstage rambles and Dream Machines: Life on the road with Judas Priest’s Rob Halford

Having been touring for well over 50 years, it’s safe to say that Judas Priest know a thing or two about life on the road. So we asked Metal God Rob Halford for some of his best tips and stories – like performing in pubs to three people, spending the whole day in American service stations, and always sleeping with not one but two Dream Machines. You do you, sir…

“Yorkshire Tea. Being a Brit, wherever I go in the world, I’ve got to have my tea. I take my own stash so I know I’ve got it. I’d put that above everything else, because when I started doing gigs with Priest, there was no phones or emails, there was nothing like that, but I had to have tea. Fifty-odd years later, nothing’s changed.”

“There’s been a few – mostly in the early days of the band. You’d come home from work, have a mad scramble to load the gear into the Transit to drive up from the West Midlands to Sheffield or wherever. You’d arrive, frantically set up in whatever pub or club you were playing in, and then the doors open, and three people come in. Then you drive home through the night, get an hour’s sleep and get up for work in the morning. But it toughens you up, and makes you understand the responsibility of having to give everything, even for three people. It was fun, though, and looking back now I see how important and valuable all that rough and tumble was in the early days.”

“Loch Ness! Well, a working men’s club overlooking it. That was a pretty unusual place, just in terms of creepy, surreal surroundings – you could keep one eye on the loch for anything moving on the water while you were playing. We slept in the van afterwards, and I couldn’t sleep, so I went and laid out by the loch thinking about what might be under the water. That was actually the seed for the song Lochness that was created all those years later [on 2005’s Angel Of Retribution]. As a lyricist, I can get inspiration from so many different sources, but I would say jamming by Loch Ness was pretty surreal.”

“My bizarre sleeping ritual. The room has to be as cold as that scene in The Exorcist, where you can see your breath. I have to have six pillows. I have my earplugs jammed all the way in. I have a face mask, even if the room’s already pitch-black. And then I have this thing called a Dream Machine, and I have two of them! I have them on full, each side of the pillow, and I can feel them vibrating. It’s the only way I can get to sleep. I can’t do it in silence – it freaks me out!”

“There’s a place in America called Buc-ee’s. You could spend the whole day there. There’s more food than should be allowed, but there’s all this other stuff going on. You could book a week’s holiday there. It’s so American, and when you’re on the freeways on the tour bus for hours on end, that’s a nice respite. In the Cold War years, you’d be going through East Germany to get to Berlin, pull off, and there’d be soldiers with rifles wanting records and stuff. And then the services were like something out of the 1940s, down to the food they’d put in front of you.”

“Again, probably one of the Cold War services!”

“I don’t know – I’ve never been there. That’s why it’s going to be a joy to be there for the first time ever on the Shield Of Pain tour in July. But backstage, apparently there’s this secret room that a mate told me about. You walk down a corridor, and I don’t know, you pull a mirror or something, and a secret door opens up into a living room-type of furnished area, and another room with TVs hi-fis, music stuff… I don’t know who has been there, but I’m going to go for a mooch and find it!”

“The feeling of completing yourself. Getting dressed and getting ready to go and do something that you love with every fibre of your being for lots of different reasons. Outside of the performance, it’s just a thrill. I never want to let it go. If I’m not able to do this, I feel like there’s something missing as to what I’m about, why I’m here, and what I do.”

“We’ve all gone ‘Hello, Cleveland!’ when you’re in Detroit. Or, worse, Leeds when you’re in Sheffield, which is obviously a very political mistake to make. I also have this thing of just rambling on and on and on. We do a nice part of the set where we thank the fans for everything and go through a list of all the albums that we made, and I can see the band going, ‘It’s already been 10 minutes, and they don’t understand you anyway – they don’t speak English!’”

Judas Priest tour the UK from July 23. This feature originally appeared in the summer 2025 issue of Kerrang!.

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