JUDAS PRIEST Guitarist On 'Nostradamus', Upcoming European Tour

Ian Harvey of UK's Shropshire Star recently conducted an interview with JUDAS PRIEST guitarist Glenn Tipton. A few excerpts from the chat follow below.

On where the name of the upcoming European tour, "Priest Feast", came from:

"We just thought it had got a nice ring to it. We'd just done the Metal Masters tour in the States and we had HEAVEN AND HELL on the go with us and MOTÖRHEAD and TESTAMENT and we just felt it's great to get a classic metal bill and the audience is united and unified. It really worked in the States so we thought we'd do the same in Europe."

On whether UK fans expect a similar show to the one JUDAS PRIEST has been touring with around the world this year:

"It'll be more or less the same. We'll probably change a couple of numbers but it'll be more or less the same, because this is quite a different set for us. We've brought a couple of 'new old songs' back like 'Devil's Child', 'Hell Patrol', 'Dissident Aggressor' and 'The Sinner' and we've still got a lot of the classic songs such as 'Painkiller' and 'Hell Bent for Leather'. We've also injected some 'Nostradamus' in there. We open with 'Dawn of Creation' which is the intro tape and we play 'Prophecy' and we do a track called 'Death', so we're introducing people to 'Nostradamus' slowly and that's the way we've always done it when we have a new album. Three tracks is enough while we wait for people to really get to know it."

On "Nostradamus":

"'Nostradamus' was great album to do. It was a mammoth task and it was very ambitious but once we started to write we were very inspired by the man and his life. We didn't start out to write a two-album concept project but before we knew we were so inspired and we became so prolific that it just flowed from us. I think it was the choice of material and the man himself. Whether you believe in his prophecies or not he's still remembered vividly today 500 years on, so he was a very intelligent person. And his life was full of tragedy in the sense that he lost his wife and daughter in the plague and the church exiled him and then he found a whole new life. That combined with the alchemy and the mystery surrounding his prophecies, it made for very good inspiration."

On the talk that PRIEST might at some point perform the whole two hours-plus of "Nostradamus" in concert:

"We'd like to do that. Our intention right from day one when we started to compose it was at some point in the future to play it in its entirety in special venues around the world and that's something we've still got in mind, something we really want to do. It'll either be late 2009 or 2010."

On the fact that today's teenage metal fans are turning up to support the band:

"We've found more and more in recent years that we've got younger kids there. They've been turned on to the band by their parents or they've discovered the band themselves. A younger generation definitively are into PRIEST and that's great, it bodes well not just for us but for heavy metal and a lot of other bands out there."

Read the entire interview from Shropshire Star.

Fan-filmed video footage of JUDAS PRIEST's November 14, 2008 concert at Citibank Hall in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil can be viewed below (clips uploaded by "moraismacedo").

"Painkiller":

"Sinner":