In 1980, Judas Priest released the British Steel album. It is one of the classic Judas Priest releases, with the band redefining themselves as a heavy metal band to be reckoned with for the 1980s. It’s one of the few albums where all of the songs have featured in their live set – some of them obviously more than others, but it contains a high percentage of Priest evergreens.
Metal Gods is one of the stalwart tracks from British Steel. It might be easy to see the title as a bit self-referencing, referring to the band as the gods of heavy metal. The song certainly made it easy for the press, always keen to make a pun, to refer to the band in that way. Even more so, ‘Metal God’ would become vocalist Rob Halford’s nickname and alter ego, to the point that he trademarked the phrase in 2009.
It is almost ironic that someone as humble and generous as Halford ended up with that term, but he has never used it to elevate himself in any way. The term plays more into his continual championing of heavy metal over the years, especially during the years when the genre looked down upon.
This includes talking about metal with Queen Elizabeth II. Halford was invited to a meeting at Buckingham Palace in 2005, where the Queen asked him, “Heavy metal… Why does it have to be so loud?” Halford responded, “It’s so that we can bang our heads, Your Majesty.” Priceless. You tell me if he deserves to be called ‘Metal God’ or not.
“Metal is my life,” Halford once said. “That might seem very twee, but it’s true. I still have this wonderful feeling about metal music, it makes me feel alive.”
The references to metal are plentiful on British Steel. That album title itself could be said to be a reference, declaring what type of music a listener will find on the album. The song title Metal Gods is certainly a reference, but it has a duality about it as well, as the title is meant far more literal.
The song depicts a science fiction tale where robots created to help mankind develops a mind of its own, rise up, and come to destroy mankind.
We’ve taken too much for granted
And all the time it had grown
From techno seeds we first planted
Evolved a mind of its own
Marching in the streets
Dragging iron feet
Laser beaming hearts
Ripping men apart
This is a common theme in science fiction, which Halford was reading a lot of at the time. The genre was also riding high in cinemas, with the amazing success of Star Wars having led to a sci-fi boom.
“We’d use a lot of fantasy and illusion,” Halford said in the Classic Albums documentary series. “A lot of science fiction books and anything that’s got a lot of fictional quality to it, that comes from good pieces of literature. So a lot of that went into songs like Metal Gods. I got inspired by things like The Kraken Wakes and Day of the Triffids [both by John Wyndham]. That kind of stuff. And all those great black and white movies, made by those wonderful British movie studios. You can almost see and feel these robots, these metal robots, walking around, you know?”
Like most Judas Priest songs from this line-up, Metal God was written by Halford with guitarists K.K. Downing and Glenn Tipton, the latter two coming up with the music.
The song seems to be musically quite simple, but it contains a number of carefully constructed passages and audio elements. The music ends up telling the story of the marching robots as well as the lyrics.
This is evident from the start of the song, which contains the distant sounds of metal processing/pounding, as if the song starts in a robot factory where the conveyor belt is delivering an ever-increasing number of them. Frustratingly, the CD age has moved this sound effect to the end of the song preceding it, preferring to start the timer at the point where the guitars come in. Are those distant metal sounds really the end of Rapid Fire rather than the beginning of Metal Gods? More than anything it appears to link the songs, so either answer might be correct. In the age of vinyl those things could be left a bit ambiguous.
In any case, when the band comes in, the music establishes a hypnotic rhythm that fits the ongoing, relentless march of the robots. This is highly emphasised later in the song which adds the sound effects of the robotic army taking their metal steps in rhythm to the song.
The chorus is a prime example of how simple, yet effective, this song is. Lyrically, all it consists of is the title “metal gods” sung twice in a piercing vocal. It’s direct, it’s commanding, and it should send a chill down the spine of anyone facing that metal army. What makes the chorus really majestic, though, is the guitar part that echoes the vocal passage, casting a lovely shade on it.
Guitarist Glenn Tipton said, “With two guitarists, we have the luxury to make simple passages sound much more punctuated. The echo of the vocal passage played on the guitars is a recognition of the band’s character and identity.”
The song also contains a number of sound effects, which go a long way towards making this into a musical audio drama. In addition to the already mentioned distant metal drumming and marching robot feet, there are laser sounds, explosions, whips, robotic acoustics, and so on. A lot of creativity went into this song, with the band thinking in terms of an audio experience as much as writing a song. The result is a very innovative song that pushed the boundary of storytelling within a heavy metal song.
The band recorded it, along with the rest of the tracks on the British Steel album, at the Tittenhurst Park estate in England. It was owned by Ringo Starr at the time, who in turn had bought it from John Lennon and Yoko Ono. This is the house in which Lennon recorded the Imagine album, containing the white room where you can see him perform that title track on the white piano in front of the wide windows where Yoko Ono gradually removes the curtains.
“I don’t know who installed the studio, whether it was John or Ringo,” says bass player Ian Hill. “But Ringo went to live in France and it was just sitting there, so he decided to start letting it out to anybody who wanted it, basically.”
“I don’t think we were totally aware of the history behind the house or the studio at all by the time we went there,” said guitarist K.K. Downing in his autobiography. “I can’t really recall why we ended up in Startling Studios at Tittenhurst Park to record, other than we had mixed [1979 live album] Unleashed In the East there. We were never really involved in these conversations anyway. Someone at the record company would just come to us and say, ‘We’re going here to record, lads,’ whereupon we’d all shrug and say, ‘All right.’” When we actually got there, it was a hell of an impressive place: seventy-odd acres in the middle of Ascot, a fishing lake, a church on the grounds that we used for a photo shoot, cottages dotted around; it all seemed vast.”
The album was produced by Tom Allom. It was their first collaboration, and it worked so well that they did every album together for a long time after that.
After having set up shop in the studio, they quickly found it to be too small and dead-sounding. Something needed to be done, and although it would complicate the communication between the control room and the performer, Allom and the band started looking at the premises with opportunity in their eyes. As they had the full run of the place, they decided to start using the various rooms in the house which sounded better for their needs. A lot of the vocals were recorded in the bathrooms or bedrooms. They would place Dave Holland’s drum kit in the marble hallway inside the front doors, which sounded huge. Downing remembers using a library to record his guitar parts, whereas Tipton set up shop in the drawing room. Both rooms were wooden, which gave them a wonderful effect similar to their stage sound. By testing the acoustics room by room, the sounds started coming together.
This would extend to the sound effects, which the band and producer recreated themselves using props from all over the house.
Metal Gods opens with the sound of loud, thunderous, metallic robotic bangs. This was achieved by slamming the large, ornate doors of the church building, compressing the sound, and adding effects to it. The big ‘swoosh’ that can be heard right before the chorus section was a billiard cue sweeping through the air, recorded in the kitchen with heavy compression on it. The whip-like sound in the final bridge was a guitar cable slammed on a flight case. Breaking the Law has the sound of breaking glass towards the end of the song, which was the band actually smashing bottles against a wall outside. Those were the days before samples and sound effects were available at one’s fingertips, meaning that the approach had to be very hands-on and DIY. Everything you hear on the album was created by the band and producer in that house.
Towards the end of Metal Gods, the song emphasises its own rhythm, focusing on the percussive, hypnotic elements of robots marching down the streets. That’s where the cool but uneasy sound effect of hundreds of robotic feet walking in unison sets in. It sounds rather bad-ass, until you learn that this sound was created by Ringo’s cutlery.
“That was me, holding Ringo’s cutlery trays from his drawers,” says Rob Halford. “I’m standing there with a tray full of knives and forks, shaking them rhythmically. It all had to be done in real time. I lifted and dropped that cutlery tray 100 times, I think. Heavy metal cooking!”
And then it all ends. Not with an elaborate play-out section, and certainly not on a fade-out. The song reaches its final note, and – boom! It ends up punctuating the song wonderfully and sharply. A solid and powerful ending.
British Steel was released on 14 April 1980, and made it all the way to #4 on the UK album chart. Incredibly, it also reached #34 on the US Billboard Top 200 chart, signalling that America were about to wake up to the phenomenon that was Judas Priest.
They would frequently crash the top 20 in the decade to come, but only became a top 10 band in the 2010s with Redeemer of Souls (2014 – #6) and Firepower (2018 – #5). From a charts perspective, they have been more popular than ever in America with their last few releases!
Metal Gods was included as the b-side on the Breaking the Law single, released on 23 May 1980. Priest was never a band with much singles success anywhere, but this release would become one of the band’s most popular UK singles at #12.
Rob Halford looks back on the album with pride. “It’s probably the most potent Priest album for addressing social issues ever,” he recently said in an interview with billboard.com. “I think I was just picking up the topics of the time. As you know, most of that record was made around a really turbulent time in the UK. We had all the stuff going on with the miner strikes, the steel workers, the trash guys. The whole of the country was in a really angry state of affairs. Like most lyricists in bands, it gets into the front of your mind and into the songs. Obviously, the most specific one is Breaking The Law. The Rage and Grinder also have references for all of these expressions of resistance.”
The album also contains manifestos of independence (You Don’t Have To Be Old To Be Wise), anthems inspiring a sense of brotherhood (United), and obviously our song of the hour Metal Gods – conjuring images of industrial or alien technology clamping down on human existence.
It’s heavy stuff in more ways than one.
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