Halford is best known as the singer in Judas Priest. You know, famously likened to Mariah Carey (Right here. By me. Now. And nowhere else, ever.) for his six octave range. Six octaves is clearly showing off, it’s essentially the difference between a mouse and a tiger (possibly need more research – must check before sending copy) and has always been something which lends Priest their power. But he is not just the epic voice behind Judas Priest. He’s provided vocals for Black Sabbath and numerous other bands including his critically acclaimed projects, Fight, 2wo (with John 5 [or John Lowrey, to his mum], later of Marilyn Manson, and Trent Reznor) and of course the brilliant Halford.

So I’m talking to a legend, a man who is nearly 60-years-old, a man who has been in music for around four decades, a man who has been in the notoriously hard-living, hard-drinking, hard-snorting world of heavy metal for all of that time and he is talking with the vigour and passion of a 19 year old kid, fresh in the game.

“We’re all really excited to be back on the road. Touring and playing live has always been a big part of what Priest is all about.”

Judas Priest are back with a continent straddling final world tour. Not like the Rolling Stones or other bands desperate to remain relevant so they keep reminding people they are still here by doing farewell tours, but a real last ever word tour.

“We’ll still be recording. This isn’t the end for Priest. We’ve got a few albums left in us yet. I mean, there’s nothing to say we won’t do smaller tours or play special events, but this is the last big tour.”

Playing live, how have your fans changed over the years? Is it still the same guys, a little bit paunchier, a little bit balder, a little bit creakier?

“There are a lot of the older fans still watching us, there are a lot of younger kids there, too. On the first dates of this tour everyone said about the range of ages out there. It’s really great when, as a band, you can see your music reaching out to all sorts of people.”

Forty years deep, can they keep progressing, can they keep bringing something new to the table, have they reached the limits of metal? “No way. Metal doesn’t have rules. In a way that’s the point of it. You can keep redefining your sound and developing forever which we believe is what we have done as Priest. Listen to any of our albums and although they are obviously the same band, they aren’t the same album. The sound has developed, but always remained true.”

Pressing him on this he expounds on his love for Dark Throne, Burzum, Emperor, Mortiis, and Mayhem. He still says he would like to make a black metal album, but “It’s all about finding the time.”

I ask what he likes outside of metal. Instead of the ‘click’ of a receiver being put down and me being cast into Hell by the other-worldly powers of rock as I half expect, he immediately replies;

“Willie Nelson. I love him. The man’s a genius. People will think it’s strange but a part of me would really enjoy doing an album like that. I can’t see it ever happening, but I love listening to him, I could listen to him for hours on end.”

Finally, I ask him the burning question on everyone’s lips. Mr Halford, could you kill a man in anger? There is a pause as he considers this. “No.” I try again, desperate to get a confession of potential murder from every interviewee. Could you kill a man in joy? And with that, I make Rob Halford, Metal God™, laugh.

Words: Garreth Ackerman

If you can’t wait for the gig you can go along to the Home of Metal Exhibition and get up-close to the band’s stage costumes:

Hell Bent for Leather
Until 10 September
Walsall Leather Museum, Littleton Street West, Walsall, WS2 8EQ
Free admission
Tuesday – Saturday, 10am – 5pm
walsall.gov.uk/leathermuseum
Dressed top-to-toe in an awe-inspiring mixture of shining leather, gleaming studs and chains, Judas Priest moved the Heavy Metal scene into rebellious outlaw. Walsall’s historic home of leather-workings inspects ‘the look’ of Heavy Metal and its most famous sons, Judas Priest. Borrowing the  bands’ personal stage costumes from the Painkiller and Fuel for Life tours, with a wealth of fan’s memorabilia and photographs accompanying the collection.

Maybe it’s a mix anticipation along with the sugar from all the chocolate Easter Eggs consumed but Mod classics from The Jam are met with rapturous applause and sing-a-long joy from the sold out crowd at the Civic Hall as The Stone Roses ‘I am the Resurrection’ comes on.

Pretty Green (Gallagher’s increasingly successful clothing label) is the dress de jour teamed with foppish scarves and Lennon-esque hair cuts for the more serious of the fans which are generally made up of 30-something blokes.

Chants for “Liam Liam Liam” are swiftly met by the bands on-stage entrance at 9.30pm sharp and it is here you begin to get the clear sense that Wolverhampton are definitely backing Team Liam in the Gallagher brother war.

Sounding more like a football match than a gig the stage is set with huge spot lights that tower like giant triffids while the stylish graphics on the back screen change for each track.

Looking sharp in a Parker (which stays on for the entire gig) tonight we are witnessing a different Liam from the frontman of Oasis days. The swagger is less, although the arms around the back and lean in to the mic stance is still very much there – but his vocals are softer and the on stage banter is nowhere to be seen. There is none of the attitude or sneering but a more ‘mature’ man that stands on stage before us.

The crowd is word-perfect for the opener tracks of ‘Four Letter Word’, ‘Beatles & Stones’ and ‘Millionaire’ but then these tracks all sit firmly on the first half of the album so makes total sense.

The melodic ‘For Anyone’ quiets the crowd down but arms are firmly back up in the air for single ‘The Roller’ and the sing-a-long continues in earnest.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Wolves audience are clearly loving seeing Liam onstage and you start to wonder how the rest of the band must feel playing second fiddle to the iconic Manc. This could easily be a solo project for Liam as far as the fans are concerned tonight.

The faster, more upbeat tracks are getting the biggest response; ‘Bring The Light’, with its 60′s beat and footage of girls dancing and spinning around on the screen, along with ‘Standing on the Edge of The Noise’ are both pleasers.

At this point we are 25 minutes and 8 tracks in – with only an albums worth of songs you start to wonder how much longer they’ll be on stage. Slower ‘Kill for a Dream’ is the plastic beer cup in the air moment and marks a momentary key-change in the pace of the gig. You feel the latter end of the album coming as ‘The Beat Goes On’ feels like the tale end of the album and the lesser known of the tracks.

In total the band (with encore) are on-stage for a full hour. Ending the set list with the psychedelic ‘The Morning Sun’ and completing the encore with the rockier ‘Sons of the Stage’ (a fitting red-lit raging end to the show) tonight it is clear that Wolverhampton love Liam and it doesn’t seem to matter whether this is in his Oasis or Beady Eye frontman guise.

Set List
1. Four Letter Word
2. Beatles & Stones
3. Millionnaire
4. For Anyone
5. The Roller
6. Wind Up Dream
7. Bring The Light
8. Standing on the Edge of the Noise
9. Kill for a Dream
10. Three Ring Circus
11. The Beat Goes On
12. Man of Misery
13. The Morning Sun

Encore
14. Wigwam
15. Sons of the Stage

You don’t need Fused to tell you that 80s music seems to be enjoying a longer comeback than most nostalgia fads. It might be something to do with a return to Conservative-led austerity or it could just be that a lingering look back has revealed that the music of the era was actually pretty crack-a-lackin’.

Of course, some of the prominent acts, back when synthesisers were the new plaything and boys started to dress like girls, never went away. Human League are one such act, a pioneering electro-pop troupe led by Phil Oakey that helped transform the landscape of the British pop scene while doing wonders with something as simple as a boy/girl vocal setup.Fast forward to 2010, where Oakey and original female vocalists Susan Sulley and Joanne Catherall front a well-oiled, rust-free machine upon the Civic stage. All but a handful of the songs are new (those, including new single ‘Night People’, are from an upcoming album released early next year) yet the older songs sound fresh: even – or make that especially – debut single ‘Being Boiled’, released in 1978, which is a fine piece of insidious dancefloor darkness that would receive rave reviews if it came out today.

A Human League gig wouldn’t be a Human League gig though without the big sing-alongs. The new material slots in harmlessly, but the Saturday night crowd sipping at Red Stripe wants the big chorus of ‘Mirror Man’, the stuttering groove of ‘Love Action’ and the shameless pop of ‘Fascination’. All the greatest hits are correct and present, Oakey’s voice unchanged from the precisely cool, occasional eyebrow-raised  arch delivery of yesteryear (although the slaphead is a sign of the times) while his shape-pulling, costume-changing dollybirds are perfectly cast during anthems like ‘Tell Me When’ and, of course, an encore-preceding ‘Don’t You Want Me’.

The highlights are thick and fast, with the original fans knocking knees with newbie admirers as they lap up hit after hit, hook after hook. ‘Louise’ is a sweet moment that flaunts their craftiness in writing pop gold, while you can give me ‘The Sound of the Crowd’ over any modern-day dancefloor fillers any night of the week. Regardless though, there’s one defining moment here, and that’s finale proper ‘Electric Dreams’ which remains one of the forever-glorious pop songs and inspires one of the biggest crowd receptions I’ve seen this year. One can only wonder if La Roux and the like will still be wowing crowds in 2040?

Luke McNaney

For Ian Astbury, The Cult has something of the power of a cult; not a homogenising hippy-ish commune, with robes and hidden sexual practices (although that sounds like a cracking basis for any rock-troupe), I really just mean that he’s seemingly been unable to leave – name changes, two reunions and tens of members later he’s still creating.

The band’s forthcoming tour (Wolverhampton Civic Hall on 26th January) gives Midland fans a slim window of opportunity to snatch and reprogram the singer – should you want to. But if you’re happy to see the mystic-rock continue for another 25 years, then you don’t need to do anything – except go along and hear the (pretty stunning) new material.

Last time The Cult played live was in support of the remastered Love album, doing the increasingly fashionable play-the-whole-of-an-old-album thing, including a huge show at the Albert Hall with former members turning up for the encore. Fans were ecstatic, but Astbury? Not quite so much.

“The Love Live tour was from Billy [Duffy, the other main Cult-ist] … He wanted to do something to celebrate the album and we’d missed the 20th anniversary so it was 25 years. I’m not a fan of nostalgia or anniversaries so I compromised with him, and all he wanted to do was play the Albert Hall. Then it just grew from there into a world tour. I’d sort of acquiesced, but it worked out really well.

“It was strange … Mark Brzezicki I hadn’t seen since we’d made the record and Jamie [Stewart] usually turns up if we’re playing some shows in the UK but I rarely speak to him. You get to rediscover things, songs feel like old sketches … we’ve been playing ‘White’ from Ceremony – which I don’t think was one of our better records – and it’s become a really important part of our set. It has so much more guts.”

Not being a Cult completist, I’d been listening to the back catalogue on Spotify before talking to Ian; I could feel the lineage of that crisp chiming guitar and Ian’s vocals (making him sound never less than the heir to Jim Morrison that he briefly became) across the albums. When they get everything right at once, it’s epic in all the right ways.

Ian Astbury isn’t a man bothered by the forward march of technology, however. Driving through the early morning on the way to Michigan he’s reading Area on his iPad and planning different ways to make music.

“Pre-internet, pre-new formats, pre-iTunes older artists can get entrenched in a way of doing things: tour, album, tour, album. It drives the way you create. Writing a single for the radio? It doesn’t really exist anymore, it’s a dead format.

“The bands that are really important are what I call the ‘wilderness bands’; it’s happening in the wilderness, on the fringes.

“Billy and I are from the North-West, but we came up through Brixton doing shows. Punk was incredibly important, it touched everybody … but that’s all gone. Maybe we wouldn’t have made the Love album if we’d had computers, there may not have been that need to escape.

“We came up with the idea of the Capsule, something a lot fresher – writing songs and releasing them as we go along. The idea of sitting in a studio for a year and a half chiselling out an album for a commercial market is something we just don’t subscribe to anymore. We don’t even have a record company.

“The 21st century is a level playing field. Here’s the wonderful thing – I’m sitting on a bus driving from Cleveland to Grand Rapids and I’m looking at Area online, being exposed to artists in the Midlands. It doesn’t matter where you are, you have access to information. It’s all down to what you – what creative people – choose to do with it.

“Tony Iommi [Ian worked on his recent solo album] is rapidly becoming the poster boy for the 21st century … Black Sabbath were for real. Black Sabbath Volume 4 is one of best pieces of work ever; I’d like to see an exhibit devoted purely to Black Sabbath Vol 4 … I get excited when I hear it.”

The Capsule is a single, of sorts, and more besides – each one has a lead track, live and other music and a film, produced by Astbury himself, and is available to download or as increasingly lavishly packaged CDs and collectors’ editions. It’s making the most of what you’ve got, and the most of the “true fans” who will still pay for music these days.

I get the feeling that Ian Astbury is happy with the way his life and art work at the moment. He’s relaxed and enjoying not only the extra freedom of not being forced to create to a schedule, but just freedom in general.

“The Cult have been going for years, and we live in such an ageist culture that you’re meant to be irrelevant after the age of 28. But most of my heroes didn’t start producing their best work until their 40s … like Mark Rothko. You need that experience to have a broader palette to draw from. As an artist, if you don’t exploit that you’re doing yourself and your audience a disservice.

“I can make films, I can interact with artists from all over the world. When I come off tour I’m going to Tokyo to work with Boris, then back to California to make another film, as well as being in the studio with The Cult, and maybe more music with UNKLE.”

Doing just what he wants to do seems to agree with him.

Jon Bounds

It’s hard to remember back to early 2008, when Florence Welch was peddling Girls Aloud and Cold War Kids covers and testing out early ramshackle versions of her own material during those first formative shows. Fast forward to 2010, and she’s officially the UK’s biggest female solo star: she’s won a BRIT, collaborated with Lord Dizzee, contributed a song to the new ‘Twilight’ flick, and debut album ‘Lungs’ hasn’t been lodged from the Top 10 for nearly a year. Pretty good for a ginger from Camberwell.

Although ‘Hurricane Drunk’ is mysteriously absent considering the amount of pints being splashed around in the throng, the setlist is pretty much a rejig of the ‘Lungs’ tracklisting – no big surprise, seeing as it’s her only longplayer. Two new songs are introduced, and first impressions suggest that ‘Strangeness & Charm’, which continues down the ethereal dance-diva route she could totally own, is a keeper; ‘Swimming’ is pretty enough but sounds merely like a lost B-side from the ‘Lungs’ sessions. As nice as it is to be treated to newies though, the Florence fans want the hits and they’re in abundance.

Against a backdrop of flowers and hanging birdcages, Florence whirls around like a 21^st Century flame-haired Kate Bush, delivering the beatific wonders that have brought her great acclaim. ‘Drumming Song’ is a primal crowd-pleaser, ‘Cosmic Love’ makes us all see stars, and ‘Girl with One Eye’s dark cautionary tale probably shouldn’t – but does – inspire a mass crowd sing-along. A double-whammy of her best song ‘Dog Days Are Over’ (handclaps a-go-go) and the riotous ‘Kiss With a Fist’, which sees Flo banging the shit out of a drum like a demented harpy, prepare us for the big finish; a stripped-down ‘You’ve Got the Love’ also deserves a gold star, with Florence’s emotional vocal soaring over a string-soaked backing and evoking a special kind of bliss.

The potential to fulfil the role of naysayer and dismiss Florence is often tempting, simply because there are so many more accomplished females in her field. However, unlike Bjork, Tori, even more recent stars like Natasha Khan, Florence is still a relative newborn – ‘Lungs’ is, of course, her debut and it’s not her fault it’s still causing shockwaves from the fringes to the mainstream. If tonight’s showing is anything to go by, ‘Lungs’ will be a mere stepping stone into a career that will continue to blossom. The sacrificial brimstone of set closer ‘Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)’ transforms into something euphoric and triumphant, and it’s a perfect goodbye to both tonight and the first chapter in Florence and her Machine’s story.

Words: Luke McNaney

Photos: Lee Allen

Our friends from Ocean Colour Scene have given us 5 signed Live At BirminghamTown Hall’ DVDs and tickets to go and see them live at Wolverhampton Civic Hall on 22nd Dec.

To be in with a chance of winning just join the Fused mailing list and then send an email to competitions@fusedmagazine.com – please include your name, address, telephone number and date of birth.

Deadline for entries is the 18th December at 12noon and the lucky winners will be pulled out of our Santa Hat.