Chad Bowar: What was the approach in putting together the tracks for A Touch Of Evil Live?
Glenn Tipton: We wanted to release tracks that hadn’t been released before as live tracks.
Did you know going into the tours that this was the plan, or was it decided afterwards?
Afterwards, really. We sat down one day and thought about how we had been performing tracks live on these legs of the tour that have never been released, and it would be nice to release them. It’s good for Priest fans to have something different, especially on a live level. Priest are first and foremost a live band, and we get a lot of energy from the audience. The tracks recorded in the studio are always more exciting when they are performed live.
When you go back and select which performances to use, do you self-critique your own performance closely?
I’d rather not go back and listen back to stuff, but obviously when you are choosing versions or songs, you have to listen. I think everybody can be critical, but in this day and age it’s nice to hear live stuff. It doesn’t have to be note-perfect as long as it’s a genuine great performance in terms of yourself and the audience.
Priest has released a few concert DVDs over the years. Has there been any thoughts of a more biographical documentary type release?
There’s always that possibility. There are no definite plans to do that at the moment, but it would be an interesting thing that I think a lot of people would take interest in. It would give a lot of information and aspects of the band that people perhaps didn’t know. It’s a good idea, but we don’t have definite plans now.
Have you or the band as a whole been approached to write a book?
There is talk now of doing an official biography of the band. We’ve had so many unofficial ones where there’s a lot of false information in there. The true events and true stories are far more interesting, I think. There has been talk of beginning that process, so hopefully at some point in the not so distant future there will be an official biography.
Joel McIver’s recent book about the greatest metal guitarists ranked you 25th and K.K. (Downing) was 29th. Should you have been higher up on the list?
(laughs) As I’ve said many times, you’ve got to remember that in Priest the votes are split. That would put us much higher on the list, I suppose, if we were just individual players. It’s a fairly respectable showing, anyhow.
Nostradamus has been out for a while now. As you look back on it, do you think the reaction to it was more polarizing that most of your previous albums?
I think we knew the dangers and risks of doing a concept album, particularly a double one, in this day and age. But we’ve always been a band who’s never been scared to try and attempt to do what we feel is the right thing, and we felt the time was right for a concept album from Priest. It’s a complex, pretty mammoth project. We don’t expect everybody to get it or enjoy it, but a lot of people did understand what we attempted to do and appreciated it. If fifty percent did, that’s a great thing.
But really, in all honesty, a lot of people who initially were guarded and very hesitant about it have now come back and changed their opinion. It’s a whole story. You have to step into the world of Nostradamus, and I think once you get that, and if you’ve got an hour and half to put aside, which is the most difficult thing for everybody, you do get a lot of enjoyment from the album.
On your upcoming U.S. you’ll be playing British Steel in its entirety. Are there any songs on it you’ve never played live, or haven’t played live in a long time?
I don’t know if we ever played “The Rage” before, maybe at some distant point, but we’ve never played the whole thing in its entirety from start to finish. We feel like it’s a great celebration, and we felt British Steel was a very appropriate album to try to sum that up and pay tribute to our fans really, for being there for 30 years.
What is it about British Steel that’s made it so influential?
I’m not sure. It might have been partly due to the writing. We went into a studio called Tittenhurst Park, which was John Lennon’s old house. That was very inspirational. We went in there with only about fifty percent of the material written, and we wrote the rest while we were in the studio, which is unusual for us. We usually have all the ideas before we start to record. It just worked. It was one of those albums that was very immediate, was easy to write. A good song usually just happens. Sometimes songs you have to work too hard at, and they don’t always quite work. It was a very refreshing album. I think that’s the secret behind it.
A lot of critics say British Steel is Judas Priest’s best album. Do you agree?
It’s certainly a landmark album. We’ve done 16 or 17 albums now, and each one has its own character. I think there are certain landmark albums in there, like Screaming For Vengeance or Painkiller or Sad Wings Of Destiny. And I think British Steel is definitely a landmark album.
