Rob Halford - Confess

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Its half past eight on a weekday morning in the early sixties. Time for school. Say ta-ra to my mom and slip out of the front door. Left out of the gate, walk to the end of our street, turn left onto Darwin Road. Go along for a bit, do a right, take a deep breath and cross the canal.

At the side of the canalor the cut, as we say in Walsallstood a huge smelting metalworks called G. & R. Thomas Ltd. It was the kind of infernal factory that gave the Black Country its name during the Industrial Revolution: the sort of crashing, heaving, stinking hellhole that most Walsall blokes spent their working days in.

During my childhood it would be crashing and heaving and stinking 24/7. It would take far too long, and cost too much, to close its vast furnaces down and fire them up again, so the factory never stopped. And the filth and the poison that would belch out of there was unbelievable.

Metalworks like G. & R. Thomas Ltd. shaped and dominated where I livedand how I lived. At home, my mom would hang our white bedsheets out on the line on washing day, and bring them in streaked with gray and black soot. At school, I would sit and try to write at a desk that was vibrating to the rhythm of the giant steam press in the factory over the road:

THUNK! THUNK! THUNK!

Sometimes, on my way to school, I would see the silhouettes of the G. & R. Thomas workers tipping up the giant furnaces cauldron over the sandpit. The molten metal would flow down like lava and instantly solidify into huge slabs of pig iron.

Pig iron. The name seemed to sum up the ugliness.

Passing it on my daily walk to school was an endurance test that I was not always sure I would survive. The choking fumes that swirled out of that factory and over the cut were incredibly toxic. If the wind was in the wrong direction, which it always seemed to be, fine pieces of grit caught in the smoke would blow hard into your eyes and stay there for days. They hurt like fuck.

Ive always said that I could smell and taste heavy metal before the music was even invented

So, I would take a deep breath, clutch my school bag close to me, and run across the bridge as fast as I could. On the worst days, when the smog and the pollution were so thick that you felt as if you could cut them, my brain would panic and rebel against the ordeal:

Im suffocating!

I never did suffocate, somehow, and I always got to the other side, even if I was coughing and spluttering. Then I would do the whole thing again when I came home that afternoon. I was used to it. That was life in the Black Country.

There have been plenty of other times in my life when I have thought Im suffocating. There were the claustrophobic, desperate yearsso many of them!when I felt trapped: the lead singer of one of the biggest heavy metal bands on the planet, and yet too frightened to tell the world that I was a gay man. I used to lie awake at night, worrying and wondering:

What would happen if I came out?

Would we lose all our fans?

Would it kill Judas Priest?

That fear and angst took me to some very dark places. It was hard to breathe when I was deep in the shitpit of alcoholism and addiction. It was hard to breathe when I was pinballing between doomed relationships with men who did not even share my sexuality. And it was hardest of all the day that a troubled lover hugged me goodbye minutes before he put a gun to his head. And pulled the trigger.

When you are suffocating, that is how you are going to end up if youre not careful, and I almost did: my self-destructive lifestyle nearly killed me. I even tried to do it myself. Yet, I survived. I came out the other side. I took a deep breath, and I got over the bridge and across the cut.

Today, I am clean, sober, in love, happy and fearless. I am living an honest life and that means that nothing, and nobody, can hurt me anymore. I am a rock version of an early, very secret, hero of mine: Quentin Crisp (who appears later in this tale). I am the stately homo of heavy metal.

I thought of the perfect title for this memoir: Confess. It could not be more appropriate. Because, believe me, this venal priest has sinned, sinned, and sinned again, but now it is time to confess those sins and maybe even to get your blessing.

So, let us pray.

Confess is the story of how I learned to breathe again.