Judas Priest legend Rob Halford is seemingly setting his sights on a Tony Bennett covers album – find out more below.
- READ MORE: Judas Priest legend Rob Halford: “Coming out happened in the right way – it wasn’t premeditated”
Halford is best known for his piercing screams and iconic vocal chops with Judas Priest, but the singer has long been vocal about his affinity for non-metal genres, like country and jazz music.
In 2022, Priest and Dolly Parton were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. At the induction ceremony, Halford teamed up with Parton for a special rendition of ‘Jolene’ – something he looks back on fondly. They later teamed up again on her album ‘Rockstar’.
Now, Halford has revealed that he’s also a big fan of the late Tony Bennett. Speaking to Ultimate Classic Rock recently, Halford shared: “There’s so many musical things I want to do… I was singing Tony Bennett in the shower the other day and I listened to my voice and I’m going, ‘Do I dare to consider something like this?'”
He continued: “And then I go, ‘I’m an old man; I can do what I fucking want!’ And I love Tony Bennett; I was sad, like a lot of us where, when he passed. He as an icon and a beacon. I love all kinds of singers. My love for what the voice can do is always so attractive to me the ideas, the imagination, like [Lady] Gaga doing her thing in Vegas when she does the jazz side of stuff.”
However, he was quick to clarify that he doesn’t have concrete plans on putting that album together just yet: “So, yeah, I’d love to do that. I don’t know how I would go about it, but I better get a move on if I’m going to do something like that. I wouldn’t have dared to have done this back in the day.”
In other news, it was announced earlier this year that Judas Priest are due to get their own documentary film soon, and it’s being co-directed by Rage Against The Machine‘s Tom Morello.
One topic fans hope the documentary will touch on is frontman Rob Halford‘s sexuality –the iconic metal singer caught up with NME as part of the In Conversation series last year, and opened up about what it was like to come out as gay in 1998 – something he described as “the greatest thing I could have done for myself”.
“If I reflect on it, it happened in the right way because it wasn’t premeditated… Everybody in the band knew I was gay, everybody at the label knew I was gay and management knew I was gay. And wouldn’t you believe it? All the fans were like, ‘Well, we always thought you were gay anyway.’ And there was me thinking I’m the only gay in the village! But the goodness that came out of that can’t be overstated,” he said.