This week, I found myself watching Judas Priest at Wembley Arena. Not just Judas Priest, but Saxon and Uriah Heep too. Not something that I expected to be doing in 2024 (or ever in the case of the latter two acts). As was pointed out, the bands have 150 – or is it 160? No one seems sure – years of performance between them. Rob Halford, Priest’s frontman, is 72. remarkably, Saxon’s Biff Byford is even older at 73, even though the band’s first album wasn’t released until 1979. Mick Box of Uriah Heep is 76. This is, by any standards, remarkable.
Time creeps up on us unnoticed and while rock bands were always supposed to have a finite life – the music of the young, for the young, by the young – after a while the bands who have never stopped become a part of the scenery. It’s one thing for groups to reform as doddery old men, rehashing past glories because they never saved their money (or perhaps had their money stolen by dodgy managers, accountants and record labels), playing the Butlins circuit as embarrassing nostalgia acts; it’s another when bands simply kept going all these years, slipping almost unnoticed from their thirties to their fifties and then beyond. All three of the bands on the Judas Priest Metal Masters tour have new albums out and are slipping tracks from 2024 into a mix of songs that stretch back to 1970 in some cases. These are not simply ‘greatest hits’ shows in the way that many bands now do, playing their most popular album in its entirety or simply going on the road without any new material to promote. This show was, in effect, no different from the shows that these bands played four decades ago when they were on the album-tour-album-tour treadmill.
These are bands that are still going because they have never had any desire to stop. For them too, the passage of time becomes something that you overlook, as years slip into decades without anyone realising. It doesn’t seem odd that Judas Priest is still going, still playing Arena tours and releasing new albums until you stop to think about just how long the band has been doing it for – and then it becomes extraordinary. Of course, the line-ups of the bands have changed in all cases, Judas Priest only having two members of the classic line-up remaining for the bulk of the show (guitarist Glenn Tipton, stricken with Parkinson’s, only makes it on stage for a couple of songs during the encore), and there is no defying nature – both Byford and Halford walk around the stage rather than run, and Halford pops off stage for a few minutes every couple of songs for a quick rest and costume change. He may or may not be reading his lyrics from an autocue (claims vary), though who can criticise him if he is? I’ve often marvelled at how rock stars can memorise the words to so many songs, even for new pieces that they’ve barely performed. If I was on stage, I don’t think I could make it through a single song on memory alone.
As much as the bands defy or deny their advancing years, so does the audience. There was a mixed age range at this gig – people in their twenties through to people in their sixties (or possibly beyond). This in itself is strange when you think about it. You wouldn’t get young people watching men in their seventies performing during the 1970s or 1980s when even a rock star in their late thirties would be dismissed as a dinosaur. Once upon a time, there was an unspoken cut-off point for a love of music – certainly, once you’d left your twenties, you were expected to have outgrown such things. But just as the bands refused to stop, so the fans kept the faith. To a degree at least. I wonder how many people at Wembley on Thursday had bought the new albums by any of these acts? With Judas Priest, I imagine it was a fair few – Priest are like Iron Maiden, a legacy metal band that maintains that sense of authenticity and significance with new generations. Their new work is as relevant as their old work to a fan base that doesn’t view them as a nostalgia act in the slightest. It says something about their ongoing credibility that they are still playing arenas after all this time. I haven’t heard Priest’s new album Invincible Shield – in truth, I was never a huge fan back in the day, admiring the band more than actually liking them – but the tracks performed at this show were brutal, furious and fresh. The songs felt as though they belonged here as much as the more familiar classics. Had they not been announced as such, I wouldn’t have even known that they were new songs – they felt every bit like Priest at their peak to me.
I don’t generally go to arena gigs so I’d never really thought about this before, but it struck me while here that these shows featuring bands of a certain age are often like mini-festivals. This was, of course, a Judas Priest show – but the support bands didn’t feel like afterthoughts or space fillers in the way that they often did in the past. I mean, two ‘classic’ acts that your audience would know and have a certain affection for, with one of them given a generous amount of time on stage with a light and smoke show that would befit many a headliner, suggests a package that has been put together to justify the high costs of tickets for these big shows. I’ve seen lots of these shows promoted in the past without it registering – three acts, one of them that bit bigger than the others (or perhaps with alternating headline slots) but all major names for the audience, even if not the sort of act that would usually play to a crowd of this size.
I think that we can safely say that neither Saxon nor Uriah Heep would ever play venues of this size as headliners. Saxon in particular seems to have had a hard time of it over the years, splitting into rival versions and becoming something of a joke after their initial years as one of the leading lights of NWOBHM. You wouldn’t guess it by this show – given a generous hour to play, they mixed a set of familiar classics with new stuff and Byford headbanged with the best of them. They were received warmly – you could almost convince yourself that this was the headlining band at times – and I’d forgotten just how many solid tracks they’d produced at their peak. The band’s confidence here suggests that they are having a renaissance of sorts and good for them. Uriah Heep were yesterday’s men even as Saxon’s recording career began and had never really troubled my consciousness – but they too were solid here. I’m not sure that I would ever feel the need to take a deep dive into their back catalogue but I’m glad that they got the chance to play for half an hour in a place this size to a crowd that appreciated them.
The one thing that perhaps contradicts my earlier comments about the fact that shows like this are not exercises in nostalgia is the sense of people wanting to catch the legends while they still can. There was certainly a sense for me that this might be the last chance to see Judas Priest. Equally – and hopefully – it might not, but at some point, Halford is not going to be able to do this any more. At this gig, he was on top form, defying his age effortlessly, belting it out like a man a third of his age. But no one can go on forever – and nor should they. There is the worry that bands just don’t know when to call it a day – I saw recent video footage of AC/DC and they were painfully bad. The audience loved them, of course. I know that for many people, just seeing a legendary band is enough and that can compensate for any terrible performance, with any critical commentary jumped upon as blasphemy. But I hate to see once-vibrant and vital acts struggling their way through a show, tuneless and confused. Judas Priest was impressively brilliant at this show, as vital and powerful as the band has ever been. Come to mention it, so were Saxon and Uriah Heep. All three bands showed why you are never too old to rock ‘n’ roll, as long as the body, the voice and the playing ability are still there. I hope, as Halford promised at the end of the show, that the Priest will be back.
DAVID FLINT
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