and played what we felt.
British Steel was classic, yes, but decidedly commercial compared to all that came before.
At the time of its birth to the public, it was actually a sharp shock to the party faithful — considerably less note-dense, all the bitty parts gone, no flash drumming on display, lyrics teenaged, hot and bothered.
The biggest shock came with advance single
“Living After Midnight,” unleashed on the public in March of 1980, one month before the album proper. Like a stinging slap in the face, this modest anthem emerged from radios the world over with bravado, yes, but framed as little more than a Kiss song. Band lore has it that Tipton had been working on the riff through the wee hours (two or three Marshall stacks are mentioned — could it be anything but?) while Rob slept away in the bedroom directly above the studio, only to emerge in the morning worse for wear, but with a lyric that came to him in his sleep.
“We were expected to do a commercial track,” says Hill, dangerously close to contra-dicting earlier statements. “And Rob had this
great lyric, ‘living after midnight.’ And it just fell into place. It was one of those things. It was one of those tracks that was worked on with an eye to being commercial and radio-friendly, and it turned out to be a very popular track. It’s still in the set today [laughs]. That’s one of the tracks you can’t drop. People will go to the live show expecting to hear that, and if you don’t play it, they’ll walk away disappointed.”
The song is indeed an anthem, and back in 1980 was a smash hit, the calling card that was presented to prospective buyers of this new version of Priest, a band for the ’80s. It was indeed the happiest song the band had written to date, and who can fault making people happy? It also had a catchy, very simple groove, one that wouldn’t be out of place at an AC/DC show. Glenn and K.K. fully admit that the song is less sophisticated than much of their ma-terial, but that it’s a blast to play live, which translates over to the audience. It excites on other levels as well. The end result — success in America — was an intoxicant. The guys just loved how they could hear the song playing on
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stereos and on radios across the expanse over-seas, and how, subtly, the sentiment of the song was more of an American thing than British — this idea of being relentless, being possessed by a determination to have a good time and in the process, going all night long, then disappearing like a Wild West hero. As K.K. is wont to say,
“Who says you can’t sing along to the Priest?”
Invited to headbang with abandon, one almost forgets certain aspects of the song’s
construction, namely that the verse riff is pretty heavy, and that in actuality, it starts with the chorus, rather than the verse. Also, the song is opened by the band’s new drummer, Dave Holland, alone, a man who would become the lightning rod in the band concerning this issue of paring down, or at the negative end, dumbing down.
Looking back, after years of conditioning from drum tornado Scott Travis, Glenn com-ments that “Dave is a very solid drummer, but he never had the ability to operate fast kick-pedal patterns, which, you know, we did suffer from, there’s no doubt about that. But when it came to laying down tracks like ‘Living After Midnight,’ he was a very solid drummer.”
Holland had joined Priest in August of 1979 at the age of 31. Citing Johnny Kidd & The Pirates and jazz as early influences, Holland started on piano but got his first drum set
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when he was ten years old. Debuting with a psychedelic band called Pinkerton’s Assorted Colours, Holland’s main pre-Priest gig was with Glenn Hughes in Trapeze, for which he recorded all of the original studio albums plus later live material. On the side, he guested for Justin Hayward, Glenn Hughes, and in the middle of his Priest run, Robin George.
“We auditioned drummers for Trapeze,”
begins Glenn Hughes, asked to assess Holland
as a drummer. “We were called Finders Keepers before, and Dave was in that band with the ridiculous name — it was a pop band, and they had a big hit in England. Dave is an amazingly good orchestrated arranging drummer. He’s really funky, unlike what you would imagine for Judas Priest, which is a really great band.
But in Trapeze he was a really great arranger of great songs. In Priest, you know, I think Glenn Tipton ran that band on the musical side. Rob obviously was very in control of the vocals. But the music is run by Glenn Tipton. In Trapeze, Dave was a great drummer. I think for Priest, he wasn’t. I mean, I think on a couple of tracks he was, but he’s certainly greater on the Trapeze stuff. I mean, Dave spoke to me many times about . . . I think he had a lot to do with the arrangements of some of the songs for Judas Priest. Dave is really good at that.”
“Dave was always a good drummer, adds Trapeze lyricist Tom Galley. “Strange style — he just belted. But if you’ve ever watched him, you were always wondering whether he was
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going to come out of the roll sometimes, because he’s got a strange technique. But what-ever he was, live he was great, recording he was very good.”
Again, whether it was Holland’s dead-plain drumming or a host of other signals, British Steel was simply all right there, plain for all to see. Even a speed metaller like “Rapid Fire” is drummed stripped-down and old school, in lockstep with the song’s smeary, almost dreary riffing. The production agrees — Hol-land’s drums are dry, and there is a dearth of bass. Only Halford is exerting himself, spit-ting out his words like a drill sergeant, having a ball with what he calls his Olivier moment, being Shakespearean, being a Brummie, even going so far as to make up a word, “desoli-sating.” However, the break section is infinitely guitary, with K.K. and Glenn turning in one of their patented shredding trade-off solos, separated geometrically by Rob’s vocal. According to plan, the song does stick to the memory circuits, aided by Rob’s flash lyric that marries his old sci-fi themes to characteristics of heavy metal.
“Metal Gods” is another song that demon-strates the directness of the new Priest, but with solid success. Holland’s two-fisted high-hat
beat supports handily an instantly memorable riff, which turns dark and increasingly heavy for the song’s sturdy pre-chorus. Halford again is thespian, fully convincing, yet the song closes with an extended musical passage o’er which the metal gods themselves do battle. Says Ian of the clashing sword effect, “That was us drop-ping a cutlery tray, plus there was a golf club making swishing noises, banging of radiators, and dropping bottles, which was in ‘Breaking the Law.’ All sorts of stuff went on there. It was the dawning of production pieces.”
“Breaking the Law” was in fact spruced up by the boys dropping some of Ringo’s beer and milk bottles out back on the patio. The siren in the same track is produced entirely by K.K. on his guitar, through bends on his Strat. Rob was particularly pleased with the outcome of this sequence, which, he says, tells the story with sound, adding that he likes to do much the same with his lyrics, paint a little picture that leaps to another medium, such as the movies.
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