JUDAS PRIEST - Broken Up!
By Martin Popoff

"It's coming along fine, yeah. Ken, Glenn and Rob are hard at it. Or they were, because they've sort of broken up for Christmas now. Rob has gone back to the states for Christmas and we'll reconvene in January. The material is pretty much written and it just needs to be routined now, i.e. get into the studio and put it down."

That's the word from Priest bassist Ian Hill, on the assemblage of the reunion album with Rob Halford, Hill adding that "it's going to be typical Priest. We're going to carry on from where Rob left off. You know, a step forward from Painkiller. It will be a varied album. There will be slow, fast, heavy, light, the usual cross-section of music that we have on our albums, a good variety."

But while the band shockingly remains broken up for the holidays, you'll have the Electric Eye DVD to warm your decorative balls. Electric Eye features a whopping 13 production videos, an '86 concert comprising 19 tracks, plus the real gem of the thing (and the only previously unreleased part), six tracks recorded at various times from '75 to '80 for either Top Of The Pops or Old Grey Whistle Test.

Ian is most bemused by the clothes the band wore on those early TV spots. "We went through many, shall we say, contemporary images (laughs). The leather and studs really came in about British Steel time, about 1980. Before then, it was a whole catalog of different looks and styles. It was cool at the time, believe me. I know it doesn't look like it, but it was cool at the time, high-heeled boots, satins and all the rest of it. We were individuals. There wasn't any real coherent plan. We didn't sit down and say, this is the image we have to portray. We just got on with our own images. It wasn't until the leather came along that it sort of fit perfectly with what we were trying to do. The leather and studs and heavy metal were really made for one another."

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