Confess, Rob Halford (2020), a review

The Metal God tells all...I’m a raging Judas Priest fan, and chances are if you like metal you are too. I frequently vacillate between Priest and Maiden as the greatest metal band ever. When I hear the notes of The Hellion/Electric Eye I’m tempted to just say, fuck it, Judas Priest.

So I was pleased to be able to buy and finally read lead singer Rob Halford’s “tell all” Confess. This highly anticipated biography came out in September 2020 and a couple of my friends were like “you’re just reading that now?” But hey, what can I say, my TBR pile is towering and ridiculous.

Straight off, if you’re a gay-hater, you’ll hate this book (and you may also wish to engage in some self-introspection, there is no choice in the matter for a man like Rob Halford, who simply knew he was gay from a very young age). In places Rob went a bit overboard on his descriptions of his various and often sordid sexual encounters. I couldn’t believe the lead singer of such a hugely popular band had to resort to trolling in truck stops, for example. So if you’re squeamish about these things or a prude you should probably skip the book. But, these passages serve to underscore the double life Halford was forced to lead, and the separate identities—bad ass metal god, sensitive closeted gay man—he had to maintain and (attempt) to balance.

Not always well as it turned out.

Rob Halford is immensely talented, but also very human and this artificial duality likely led to his substance abuse problems. Confess gives the full treatment of Rob’s spiraling alcoholism and cocaine use that led to an attempted suicide via O.D., check-in to full-on rehab, and 35 years and counting of sobriety.

But this book is far from dark, or depressing. Or even typical rags to riches story. It’s extremely British—Halford is from Walsall, north of the industrial steel producing city of Birmingham, whose blue collar work ethic was part of what made him so driven and successful, and whose ceaseless sound of the ironworks and ash-choked air led to the development of heavy metal’s sound and feel. I was introduced to an entire new British vocabulary that at times veers into A Clockwork Orange territory. Pass the thesaurus. We get Spinal Tap moments, including falls off his trademark Harley Davidson while driving the machine on stage, early career drummer turnover (Spinal Tap HAD to have used Priest as inspiration for their spontaneous combustion/bizarre gardening incident jokes), broken down tour busses, fist-fights, debauched recording sessions in Nassau. At the tail end of his solo career Halford veered into some truly weird synth-driven industrial crap music, complete with ridiculous eye shadow and fu Manchu look that resulted in him playing in front of a few dozen spectators in bars. While Rob has dedicated his life to heavy metal—he trademarked his moniker “Metal God,” and his band was THE first to embrace the heavy metal label, and give it its signature look and sound—he doesn’t take it all so seriously. In 2014 he brought the talented but fully tongue in cheek Steel Panther on tour with Priest, a band that both loves and mocks all of metal’s excesses.

Confess has the details fans are looking for. We get a pretty good recount of the ridiculous (in hindsight) 1990 lawsuit by the families of two young fans who entered into a suicide pact (one was successful and blew his head off with a shotgun, one was left disfigured after pulling the trigger and later was successful in killing himself with pills), and whose parents sued Judas Priest for inciting the incident. Their case centered on blaming Priest’s song lyrics as well as “subliminal messages” that could supposedly be heard by playing some of their songs backwards, and encouraged their sons to “Do It.” While it’s hard to believe this suit actually made it to trial, it set an important precedent for free speech and free expression. Judas Priest was thankfully exonerated, and went on to perhaps their most successful tour in support of the immortal Painkiller album.

And we get many jaw-dropping big-band moments, like Rob being asked to step in for Ozzy Osbourne for a Black Sabbath show in 1992 when the latter fell ill, at a moment’s notice, and winning over the crowd. Singing in front of a quarter of a million fans at the U.S. Festival in California in May 1983. Coming out as a gay man on MTV in 1998, which was completely unscripted and left the interviewer in shock. Lady Gaga, a noted heavy metal fan, stopping during a concert and bowing to Rob. Meeting the likes of Queen Elizabeth and the lead singer of Queen, Freddie Mercury. Opening up for Led Zeppelin as a relatively unknown supporting act in 1977, in front of 80,000 fans, and later sharing a helicopter ride with Jimmy page. On and on—what a life, what a career.

Still, I wanted more. As I felt after reading other biographies of individuals whom I admire and respect (“What Does This Button Do” by Bruce Dickinson, for example), I was left wishing there was more said about the art, not just the artist. I wanted more perspective from Rob on songwriting, and how the music was composed. I wanted more on his ability as a singer, as I believe he may be the greatest heavy metal singer of all time (perhaps better than even Ronnie James Dio? Heresy? It’s close, at least. I have hashed out this argument here on The Silver Key and it will continue to be fought over, ad nauseum, for as long as there are metal fans on this planet earth. But certainly Halford belongs in any self-respecting metal fan’s top 5 vocalists of all time). And yet, there is surprisingly little about his enormous vocal talents in Confess. I can only speculate that it’s because Halford is so humble and self-deprecating, and it might have seemed boastful to him, and out of character. I also wanted more on his evaluation of Priest’s place in the metal pantheon, and in music history. Where they stand, what he considers their finest hour. There’s also not a heck of a lot on the departure of original guitarist KK Downing in 2011. Instead, Rob returns again and again to the personal, an examination of the inner life rather than the outer. I had to remind myself that when you read a biography, you’re reading a biography of a person, not a band (or a brand). So I can accept the choices he made in writing it.

That's some bad-assery, right there.By the end of the book I was genuinely moved, even to a tear, by this beautiful man’s humility and introspection. He made mistakes, and owned them. He had regrets, and expressed them. He realized he was not living true to himself, and rectified it as best he could. He had a strained relationship with his father, and worked on it, reaching some measure of closure by the end of his Dad’s life. Rob has what I believe to be a high degree of agreeableness as a personality trait, which may sound lovely and positive, but can often lead to very negative consequences, and which I have found to be true in my own life. For example, not confronting simmering issues within the band, trying to smooth things over while you pursue a solo career, not resigning but not committing until the other members of Priest finally and understandably lost patience and found a new singer, Tim “Ripper” Owens, in 1996. Unlike some other pity-wallowing biographies of rock stars who never reached this level of introspection—see KISS drummer Peter Criss’ biography as Exhibit A—Rob owns up to his failures. That makes his triumphant return to Priest in 2004, and self-realization of who he was, an absolute joy to read, and lends this book a wonderful joyous turn at the end.

Pardon the pun but Halford did in fact, confess. Huge respect to him for writing this book.