JUDAS PRIEST — 50 Heavy Metal Years (review)

JUDAS PRIEST — 50 Heavy Metal Years album cover

Boxset / Compilation · 2021 · Heavy Metal

5/5 · 2023-08-10
Warthur

This latest career-spanning box from Judas Priest celebrates their golden anniversary in grand style. As well as the usual book, photos, posters, and freebies you get with this sort of thing, the box comes with all the official Judas Priest studio and live albums released to date, plus a mass of additional material in the form of live shows and archival recordings that have all been hitherto-unreleased.

The caveat on that is that they’re unreleased on an “official” basis - some of these recordings have formed the basis of much-copied bootlegs over the years. However, bootlegs are bootlegs - they don’t support the original artists, they’re dubiously sourced, and the copy that makes it to your hands is often a rip of a rip of a rip. These live releases come from as close to the original source material as possible, and have had a loving tune-up to sound as good as they possibly can.

I may as well spend this review talking about the new stuff in the box, because there’s not much to say about the already-released stuff beyond the fact that they also sound great and come in nicely-presented cardboard sleeves replicating the original packaging nicely. If you are a metal fan, you probably already have an opinion on all these albums, but getting them all in one shot with a sympathetic remaster is nothing to sneeze at.

As for the vault material, it’s truly expansive - covering 13 CDs, it constitutes nearly a third of the boxed set’s contents in terms of number of discs (and is probably comfortably over a third when you consider the amount of music represented). It all hails from 1991 and earlier, but to be honest that’s fair enough; the Ripper era and the period following the reunion with Rob Halford are both represented by two live albums each, so it’s not like those periods are exactly unrepresented here. (One might wish for a live show from the Firepower tour, which is the only real gap, but then again when you put out this sort of compilation for a still-active band you have to put the cutoff point somewhere.)

The earliest of the live shows in here is a 1979 engagement at New York’s Mudd Club. Hailing from shortly after the Japanese shows captures on Unleashed In the East, the setlist is distinct enough from that album that it certainly doesn’t feel redundant, and the sound quality is fairly decent, capturing the band in a rowdy club context which feels a bit darker than Unleashed.

Next up is a 1980 show from Denver, with the British Steel-era tour setlist in a well-polished state. The band seem more confident here, with Rob addressing the American crowd without the slight hesitation that can be detected at the Mudd Club show, and why shouldn’t they be? They were at the top of their game here.

There’s a 1981 show from London from the Point of Entry tour here. Point of Entry itself might have erred a bit too much towards being radio-friendly - a flaw which, according to the book accompanying the set, the band themselves are well aware of - but this live set reveals that Priest had lost none of their ferocity in-person. The setlist is a bit lighter on Point of Entry material than you might expect, but it does include somewhat more forceful renditions of a few choice tracks from it which cast them in a better light. It’s also generally speaking a fine show, the recording only marred by the fact that, because the audience aren’t miced, when Halford has the audience sing some of the sing-along lines there’s just an absence of vocals (though this does make it fun to sing along to at home).

A December 1982 show from Atlanta hails from the Screaming For Vengeance tour, and the band are absolutely on top of their game here. As well as high-quality renditions of most of their usual hits so far, there’s again some dips into Point of Entry material which really tease out the best in those songs - the rendition of Desert Plains is particularly good. All of the archival live shows in the box are great, but this one is superb.

There’s no show here from the Defenders of the Faith tour, which I feel like is a bit of an oversight; the next show here is from Houston in 1986, on the Turbo tour. Recorded more or less halfway between the two shows which were edited together to form the Priest… Live! album, this naturally ends up having a very similar setlist, but the running order includes selections not included on Priest… Live! and presents the whole show, and it’s such a good performance - on a par with the December 1982 one - that I’d be entirely willing to forgive it. It might feel a little redundant next to Priest… Live! - but if I had to pick only one, I’d pick this over that one, it’s that good. Even songs from less-respected Priest albums like Turbo and Point of Entry excel in this setlist, the more muscular live renditions making them seem like much more natural entries in the Priest canon than they did on the studio versions.

Next up is a 1988 show from New Haven. This is theoretically from the Ram It Down tour, but few songs from that make it onto the setlist. It’s another good show which again reveals that despite some wobbly results in the studio, Priest were still an excellent live band at this point, but I wouldn’t say it adds much over the Houston show.

Based on the MC’s introduction to the 1990 LA show, this seems to have been recorded for radio broadcast, which might account for the truncated track list. Hailing from mere days after the release of Painkiller, it finds the Scott Travis-enhanced lineup in good form, though the mix is not what it could be (Halford’s vocals seem a little quiet on Riding On the Wind, though this is corrected soon enough). It has probably been included out of historical interest, since it includes a live performance of Leather Rebel, which was dropped from the setlist by the end of the year, and it’s interesting to hear how quickly Scott mastered the pre-Painkiller material. (The show also came shortly after the end of the farcical subliminal message trial, and includes a defiant performance of Better By You Better Than Me as the band celebrate a victory for free speech over irrational superstition.) Of all the unearthed shows in this box, I’d say this is probably the weakest, but it’s still an interesting and entertaining listen.

The last full live show dug up from the archives is a concert in Irvine from 1991. Here, the band and Scott seem to have gelled further, but we’re still far enough away from Halford drifting away from the band that he still seems fully engaged. This is more of a full set than the 1990 radio show, and offers a great Painkiller-vintage runthrough of Priest classics and a better selection of songs from Painkiller than the 1990 show had. Another solid live show, though another one with the “we can’t hear the audience callbacks” problem.

The final gift from the archives is the Beyond Live and Rare two-disc set, a grab-bag of particularly nice live performances ranging from 1978 to 1991, topped up with some material saved from the studio cutting-room floor. So far as I can ascertain this does not contain any of the B-side tracks compiled on the original “Live and Rare” release, so anyone who owns that can at least know that this box doesn’t render that release redundant (though anyone who gets this box will have so much live Priest on their plate, I’m not convinced they’ll feel the need for any more).

On the whole, though this box has a chunky price tag, the bang for your buck you get is appreciable. Less than £9 per CD for the entire back catalogue, plus an absolute treasury of live treats, with all the contents sounding better than they ever have? Whatever the reverse of “buyer’s remorse” is, I’m feeling it, because this is absolutely stellar.