JUDAS PRIEST Bassist: 'After All These Years, We're Still Learning'

JUDAS PRIEST bassist Ian Hill was recently interviewed by Pete Bailey of the Primordial Radio podcast "Binge Thinking". You can now listen to the chat using the widget below.

Asked if it's difficult for PRIEST to create new music without previously used ideas subconsciously finding their way into the new material, Hill said: "I'm sure it is. It's all between your ears — all those songs; there's about two hundred songs there. And, yeah, I think it's what keeps a band recognizable. You start out with, in our case, Rob [Halford, vocals] and the four musicians, and we all have our own particular styles and sounds, and together, that is JUDAS PRIEST. And that will always stay the same — with a bit of different recording techniques, different guitars, amplifiers, whatever. But that basic, little primordial thing, that will always be there, and that will carry on until we drop. So, yeah, it will — it'll pop up now and again. It's not recognizable, of course. It might be to others, but it's not to ourselves. But it's always there. It must be subconscious. It's something we don't think of.

He continued: "With every album, we've always tried to make it a little bit different and tried to improve. We're still learning — after all these years, we're still learning.

"So no, really — we don't dwell on the past," he added. "We don't think to ourselves, 'We need a song that's like this off the last album.' We just go ahead and see what comes out at the end of the day, and then run with it."

While admitting that he hasn't written any songs for a long time, Hill described in general terms how PRIEST's albums come together. "Glenn [Tipton, guitar] and now Richie [Faulkner, guitar] get their own ideas, riffs and chord sequences, and they'll make song structures out of those ideas," he said. "Rob's always writing lyrics — he's very prolific; he's always got something written down in his notepad somewhere. After that, Scott [Travis, drums] and myself will get copies of the basic song, and then we'll formulate our bass lines and drum patterns. And then it'll go backwards and forwards a few times, and then you go into the studio and everybody's got a decent idea of what they're gonna do."

JUDAS PRIEST's latest album, "Firepower", entered the Billboard 200 chart at position No. 5, making it the band's highest-charting album ever. The disc moved 49,000 equivalent album units in first week of release. Of that sum, 48,000 were in traditional album sales, just shy of the 54,000 copies sold by "Angel Of Retribution" in that album's first week. The "Firepower" chart position was bolstered by sales generated from a concert ticket/album sale redemption offer in association with the band's current North American tour.

The North American leg of the "Firepower" tour kicked off on March 13 in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania and will wrap on May 1 in San Antonio, Texas.