JUDAS PRIEST — Live In London (review)

JUDAS PRIEST — Live In London album cover Live album · 2003 · Heavy Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
4/5 ·
Warthur
Judas Priest have always been one of the great live acts. Whilst some of their studio albums are undeniable classics, there's a few patchier studio releases where the band seemed to have lost their way - but consistently, even when that's been the case they've always offered a killer live show to reassure the world that they are still the grand masters of metal, it's just that sometimes that doesn't come across in the studio.

At no point in their career was this more true than in the Ripper Owens years. Jugulator was a decent enough album - it didn't sound much like classic Priest, but it was alright in its own way - but the following Live Meltdown went some way towards demonstrating that Ripper could handle the classics - and the rest of the band could still play them.

But at no point in Judas Priest's career was there such a vast gap between the quality of their latest studio album and that of the live album from the accompanying tour than in the Demolition era. Demolition was a strong contender for Priest's worst album ever - sure, the blues rock of Rocka Rolla and the poppy aspects of Turbo aren't universally adored in the fandom, but at least those albums had a distinctive sound of their own. On Demolition, Priest outright refused to commit to a specific sound, with the result that the album ended up a muddled mess.

But then there came Live In London, which I'll go to bat for and argue is Ripper Owens' finest hour with the band. It's from a December 2001 show on the tour supporting Demolition; within 8 months or so, Owens would play his final concert with the band, and then in 2003 he'd get the note that Preist and Rob Halford were getting back together and his services were no longer required.

You have to wonder whether Ripper knew the writing was on the wall at this point; if he did, then he seems to have been determined to go out on a high, performing with a gusto we'd already had a taste of on Live Meltdown but which he takes a couple of steps further here. For their part, the rest of Priest do a fine job on the material. Inevitably, the setlist is heavy on Halford-era stuff - they'd only done two albums with Ripper, they'd done twelve with Rob, do the math - but where Ripper-era songs show up on here, it's consistently in a version far better than they'd managed to capture in the studio. (If Blood Stained sounded on Jugulator half as good as it does here, we'd all be much happier with that album - even Demolition cuts like One On One shine here.)

The set does drag a little towards the end - United was never that good a song - and the high level of overlap with Live Meltdown is regrettable, but nonetheless this is about as good as Judas Priest with Ripper on vocals ever got.
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