Heavy Duty: Judas Priest’s Defenders Of The Faith at 40
Reflections on one of the band’s “strongest and fiercest” albums
Judas Priest entered 1984 riding on the wind. The band had finally conquered America with its 1982 international breakthrough album Screaming For Vengeance.
Hit single “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’” was blaring on car stereos around the country. The band spent all of 1983 touring the U.S., having finally graduated to stadium status after a dozen years of heavy lifting.
Screaming For Vengeance gave Priest a chance to show the metal legions that they hadn’t lost their way. Their previous album had disappointed so many, and remains underappreciated today. In truth, Point Of Entry is one of the most adventurous recordings in their catalog, but it lacked the front-to-back, meat and potatoes rock fare of British Steel. Nor could it compare to the molten modern assault of Screaming For Vengeance. With Defenders Of The Faith, Priest had no choice but to conjure that Vengeance-level magic again.
Thankfully the band was confident, at the peak of its powers, and had just signed up with new management. “Wild” Bill Curbishly had worked his way up the chain as a roadie, then tour manager, then actual manager of a little band called The Who. He hadn’t built a stable, instead maintaining focus on his flagship clients. But in 1983, when Priest was touring stadiums after their previous managers had thrown in the towel, Curbishly saw their potential and signed them up. The mid-eighties were the commercial heyday of heavy metal after all. Priest had headed out to the highway a decade before just about everyone else. In May of ’83, they played mid-bill at Steve “Apple” Wozniak’s US Festival in front of 300,000 people.
For a third time, the band flew to the Mediterranean island of Ibiza off the coast of Spain to record. Ibiza worked as both a tax shelter for UK bands, and a round-the-clock island culture party place. Some distractions came out of a bottle, others from a bikini. Priest guitarist KK Downing was even hit by a car outside a bar, and found himself on the hood with a broken windshield at his back. Luckily that was all that broke, and he was able to play on the album without delay.
Screaming For Vengeance outsold Defenders Of The Faith, and a great many people will argue that the former is the better album. I don’t agree, though both are absolute classics. I would argue that the highs are higher and the lows lower on SFV, while Defenders Of The Faith is just solid as a rock throughout. Be honest, how often do you put “Fever” or “Pain and Pleasure” on a playlist?
One area where I will agree with the SFV crowd is that the production was better; there’s a reason for that.
When Priest returned to record in Ibiza in ’83, they found that Fritz, the studio proprietor, had some unpaid debts. The studio had been stripped and the equipment seized. Once the band wrote a check, microphones began returning. The huge mixing board was unceremoniously dropped on the grass down the road. Our svelte rock stars had no choice but to help Fritz roll it into the studio on top of several logs found nearby.
Once the band and producer Tom Allom got cooking, they were on a roll. Sadly, the hastily rebuilt studio simply wasn’t capable of producing the same quality of sound that it had a year prior.
In KK Downing’s 2018 autobiography Heavy Duty: Days And Nights In Judas Priest, he admires the album’s barnstorming A-side. “If there are four better opening songs on any metal or rock album, I’ll happily listen to what they are.” Those songs, in order, are “Freewheel Burning,” “Jawbreaker,” “Rock Hard Ride Free” and “The Sentinel.” He makes a very strong point.
VIDEO: Judas Priest “Freewheel Burning”
The original 12” single version of lead cut “Freewheel Burning” features a 45-second intro that recalls Priest classics from the 1970s. I’m not sure why this version still seems to be unissued digitally. Assuming you don’t own the 12-inch, give it a listen on YouTube.
Perhaps the band just wanted to get right into the riffs. Or maybe they knew that no opening salvo could ever top “The Hellion” off Screaming For Vengeance. Regardless, “Freewheel Burning’s” music video played pied piper to the youth of America with a bevvy of laser effects, and screen shots from the video arcade game Pole Position.
“Jawbreaker” is one of Halford’s most unabashed lyrics. It’s hard to even consider the song coded when it’s obviously about sucking a giant cock. By this time, his band mates were certainly in on the joke. Nevertheless, young women were finally starting to attend their concerts, and everyone but poor Rob was reaping the benefits on a nightly basis.
At 5:36, “Rock Hard Ride Free” is the longest song on the album, but it never wears out its welcome. I’ve found it to be a great song to DJ at bars. An early take of this song was recording as “Fight For Your Life” during the Screaming For Vengeance sessions. For whatever reason, that working version appears as a bonus track on the CD remaster of Hell Bent For Leather. The re-recording is superior, but it’s still fascinating to hear how much the song evolved over a year and change.
“The Sentinel” rounds out side A. This is one of Priest’s most underappreciated classics. Even drummer Dave Holland can’t drag this one down. His basic, workmanlike approach to rock beats worked famously on British Steel. By Defenders Of The Faith, his lack of prowess starts to become a sore thumb. It’s odd that the band’s worst drummer featured on their best-selling albums.
VIDEO: Judas Priest “The Sentinel” (Live)
The album’s second side kicks off with a song that has no antecedent in Priest’s catalog. The vampiric “Love Bites” was a team effort, something Halford was messing around with in the studio. Downing liked what he heard and added the bass notes to the intro. The video for this song gave the band a chance to show off their Metallian stage prop, which joined the band on tour. The Metallian is the horned, tiger-like tank beast airbrushed on the cover by artist Doug Johnson. The creature even gets a dash of poetry dedicated to it on the back cover:
Rising from darkness where Hell hath no mercy and the screams for vengeance echo on forever. Only those who keep the faith shall escape the wrath of the Metallian … Master of all metal.
“Eat Me Alive” follows. That’s the song that landed Judas Priest at #3 on Tipper Gore’s PMRC Filthy 15 list. It’s yet another cheeky Halford lyric about the joys of receiving a blowjob.
As Dee Snider cleverly quipped at the infamous Senate Hearing, “…songs allow a person to put their own imagination, experiences, and dreams into the lyrics. People can interpret it many ways. Mrs. Gore was looking for sado-masochism and bondage, and she found it.” Certainly cannibalism was not on Halford’s menu. At least, nothing more harmful than a liquid lunch.
On Screaming For Vengeance, Columbia Records had twisted the band’s arms into recording a tune by outside pro songwriter Bob Halligan, Jr. “(Take These) Chains” was nowhere near the smash hit it was designed to be. Somehow he came back for another go with “Some Heads Are Gonna Roll”. As much as this turgid, mid-tempo, non-Priest song plods along, I have to admit that it was still stuck in my head the day after my most recent listen to Defenders Of The Faith.
“Night Comes Down” is the inevitable ballad that was a requirement on every eighties metal album. Halford was publicly on top of the world as a career lead singer in a famous, successful band. Offstage, though, he was a mess. His cocaine and alcohol abuse were urging him closer and closer to eventual, permanent rehabilitation. To make matters worse, he had moved a heterosexual man into his pad in Phoenix. That relationship was going nowhere fast. The loneliness exerted in the vocal performance on “Night Comes Down” rings true.
The album ends with a one-two punch—for my money the best moment on the entire record—though most won’t agree. “Heavy Duty” is a monster stomp that harkens back to “Metal Gods.” Spinal Tap released a song called “Heavy Duty” just 60 days later, which makes the odds that either influenced the other pretty much nil.
The megalithic “Heavy Duty” merges into the album’s title track with added audience noise. Priest had attempted Football (Soccer) stadium chant tracks like their heroes Queen several times before. Neither “United” nor “Take On The World” connected. “Defenders Of The Faith” deserves to, and makes for a fitting finale to one of the best solid metal albums of the 1980s. It would also mark the final album from the classic Priest lineup before guitar synths took them into questionable territories.
As Rob Halford wrote in his 2020 autobiography Confess, “For me, it remains one of our strongest and fiercest records.”
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