Glenn Tipton Interview

by Ben Tyree

During the mid-70s America was hit with a second coming British Invasion, the "New Wave of British Heavy Metal." Following in the feral tracks of British metal pioneers Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple was a new branch of metal that was raw and velocity fueled and included groups like Iron Maiden, Motorhead and Judas Priest.

Judas Priest became known for their twin lead guitarists who drilled into complex duets that are now basic ingredients for heavy metal. Some fans say that the group was formed early, in Birmingham, England, when guitarist K.K. Downing and bassist Ian Hill got together, but the group needed a few personnel changes to become the legend it is today. By the time they released their first album, Rocka Rolla in '74, the JP line up delivered with the now legendary figures, vocalist Rob Halford and guitarist Glenn Tipton.

Born in Birmingham, England, in 1948, Glenn Tipton had a rather late start in his musical journey not picking up a guitar until he turned twenty. Tipton's guitar muscles had no trouble developing quickly from gigging at local blues dives.

1973 proved to be a career trigger point, when Judas Priest asked him to join them on stage. Tipton immediately felt the chemistry and sensed the group's potential destiny.

The band skyrocketed to the pinnacles of heavy metal-dom through the late 70s and the 80s while releasing seminal and incendiary albums including Sad Wings of Destiny, Killing Machine (released in the U.S. as Hell Bent For Leather), and the classic British Steel.

After decades of near constant studio time and touring, Priest began to skid off the tracks in the early 90s, falling on hard times and suffering from the consequences of drastic personnel changes that led to a breakup.

Tipton's creativity kicked in during this tumultuous time and he was inspired to create several batches of new solo material, pairing up with a short list of young hotshots, along with some rock legends.

His 1996 release, Baptism Of Fire, was recently re-reissued by Rhino/Warners. Tipton followed up his re-mastered Baptism with a set of material he had stashed in his vault tha included unheard sessions with the late bassist John Entwistle (The Who) and drummer Cozy Powell (Jeff Beck Group, Rainbow, et al) entitled Edge Of The World.

In addition to Tipton's solo work, the original and now classic Judas Priest lineup have reunited and produced their new critically acclaimed CD Angel of Retribution.

The band just finished an exhausting two year world tour and Glenn graciously took a break to meet with me in New York City to talk about the group's recent triumphs, as well as his and the band's future.

Judas Priest is taking a hiatus from touring this year after two years. What do you consider the highlights of the tour?

Glenn Tipton: Well, yeah, it was really good for us. We were out for like 18 months and we played areas that we've never played before. Particularly parts of South America like Chile.

Russia was really interesting for me because, you know, we'd never played Russia before. Actually, heavy metal kids over there are just fantastic!. They really are.

Recently in Japan, Judas Priest captured "Best Group of the Year," "Best Album of the Year," (Angel Of Retribution) "Best Live Performance in Japan," and Rob Halford named "Best Vocalist."

GT: Japan has always been a real stronghold for Priest right from the word "go." We went there many years ago and we were just astounded at the band's popularity. So, right from the word "go" we've loved it over there and this time we recorded the live show at the Budukon. We feel it's a special place for us and that's one of the reasons we chose it, and, of course, we were knocked out with all of the awards by Champions of Burrn! magazine, [laughs] the second time!.

The Japanese poll also ranked your album cover for Angel Of Retribution number one.

GT: Well, Mark Wilkinson designs most of our album covers so, you know, we've got a lot of faith in him. He's one of these guys that will come up with an idea and if you don't like it, he comes up with another idea and another idea, until he eventually comes up with the right one. So we've got a lot of confidence in him.

The band is scheduled to play the Royal Albert Hall, your only gig for 2006. What's the occasion?

GT: It's in aid of the Teenage Cancer Trust and a guy called Tommy Vance who is; you may or may not know; he was an English disc jockey who championed a lot of bands and helped a lot of us. He was very instrumental in helping a lot of the younger bands.

He was very much into metal and rock. So, it's a tribute to him, but it's also in aid of the Teenage Cancer Trust, which is a great charity. What it does is it supplies wards or it helps to generate money to build wards for teenage kids that are suffering from cancer. There's Internet there too. They they all speak the same language, the same music, so it's a really good thing, you know.

These youngsters are trying to fight a potentially life-threatening disease in a negative environment full of ill people, but they've got all people their own age around them, and it's a good thing.

Is this the first time the band has done a charity gig?

GT: I think it is, yeah.

How different is it working with Judas Priest on an album now compared to what it was like in the past?

GT: It's no different, really. We've always worked in the same way. We get our ideas as individuals. We're doing that at the moment and we're meeting up in about two weeks. Then we sit down ad we pool all the ideas and as soon as the room lights up, we know we're on to something. Then we pursue that until it's in a rough format and we're happy about it and we're excited about it. We move on to another idea, you know, and before we start to fine tune things we just like to know the direction that this particular album is going in, so we usually sort of rough a few things out first and then get a feel. If we like the general direction, then we go with that.

So the feeling of enthusiasm is the same, more or less, as it was in the '70s?

GT: Yeah. It's even more exciting now because, we were apart for so long and apart from everything. The magic is still there! We're very lucky we've got a formula, a writing formula that works.

And I've said this many times. There's a lot of people in bands, a lot of musicians better than me that just weren't fortunate enough to fall in with a band where everything locks together. And then you've got a recipe for success, really. I don't just mean on the writing level. I mean on the band's performance level, as well. I'm just privileged to be in the band, really, and proud to be in Priest, proud to be part of it.

Do you feel that you work better when you stick to formulas?

GT: Not really, no. I mean, I feel that every album of Priest has got it's own character. It's all unmistakably Judas Priest, but I do feel that every one has got it's own identity. I think it would be boring, really, if you wrote the same album with different lyrics, which a lot of bands do. They've got a formula that works and then tend to stick to it. Too regimented. We like to have that, I mean it hasn't always worked. We're quite an adventurous band, really, when it comes to writing and recording and we've paid the price with albums like Point Of Entry or Turbo.

When they first came out, they came under fire and maybe quite rightly so, because you can't always experiment and always get it right, but I think you've got to do that. I think you've got to push those boundaries further aside so that you've got room to maneuver more and you, thereby, create more room for other bands to maneuver, as well, so you're doing everybody a favor I think, really.

Can you tell us about some of your earliest inspirations and how you feel their inspiration has led you to where you are today?

GT: Well, there's two, really, two main guys. When I first started, I used to listen to Robert Johnson and people like that. But, really, Hendrix was my first guitar inspiration. But the guy who was most responsible, I've said many times, was Rory Gallagher from a band called Taste. I used to go watch him in a little club with this battered Stratocaster and an old AC30. The guy just used to put so much energy out there that I just thought, "Wow!" and it sort of made me want to pursue the guitar.

Do you come from a musical family?

GT: Yeah, like, my mother taught the piano and my brother was a guitar player. My father wasn't very musical, but my mother certainly.

Were they all supportive of your career choice?

GT: Yeah and no, you know? I mean, going back to those days, obviously, before you attain any sort of success, your parents view - my mother was supportive. She was supportive because she was musical but I don't think she seriously expected me to be successful. My father, certainly, wasn't supportive, but I don't blame him.

Going back then, he was a working class guy. He had nothing to do with music anyway, so, you know, I can't say that he had any confidence in me. He didn't understand it, really and he felt that I should get a proper job, so he initially wasn't supportive. But obviously, as things developed, he could see that it was probably the right thing to do.

As a musician myself, I feel that sometimes musicians, at some point in their lives, reach a point where they go beyond the sum of all their influences and parts.

Do you feel that you've hit that point or do you remember when you did hit that point?

GT: Yeah, I've said this many times, really, that the big moment for me, the big sort of, "Wow! I've got it now!" was the day I stopped trying to copy other guitar players.

I think everybody when you first pick the guitar up, you've got heroes and these new licks and you try to play like that. I could never get it quite right. I never played scales or anything. I never played through a guitar scale in my life, you know? That's not me.

Rightly though, it's probably laziness, but I didn't want to sit there all day and learn scales. I didn't want to do that. So, I play in weird ways. I look at the fret board in weird ways. I'm sure that if anybody entered my mind and looked at the fret board, they'd go, "What?"

When I used to try and copy other people, I could get close to it, but I couldn't really do it the way they were doing it and it used to frustrate me and then I thought, "What am I achieving by it?" If I played like someone else, I'm only playing what they can play. And get so far that I'd veer off and go in my own direction which, in a way, was a lot easier. And it also impounded my own style. That encouraged my own style, my own creativity. So, I'd get a little bit of inspiration from what they were doing, but I never, after that point, it was so much easier for me because I didn't have to struggle to try and play like them because I'm not them and I didn't want to be them.

Once that dawned upon me, it was a revelation, really. I think it changed my whole outlook on everything and I got a lot more confidence in me as a guitar player because I was developing my own style and I figured, "Well, I don't really want to play it like them when I can do it like me anyway."

And all around, that's a better thing. It was easier for me, as well, you know? So, that was an important day when that finally registered.

What percentage of your guitar solos would you say are improvised versus stuff that you work out, you know, when you go into the studio?

GT: With Priest, really very little. Going back to when I was in a blues band, every night was improvisation and actually, you get good at improvising if you do it regularly. With Priest, the solos have become part of the song. They've become what people expect, you know?

I've gone to see people like Clapton and they rearrange songs and I'm disappointed. I want to hear the song that I'm familiar with.

In our songs, the solos are actually part of the song, an integral part of the song. So, we don't vary it very much. There are little bits and pieces, though, that I've never quite put together in a set way and I'll just do my on little thing through them. But the actual format of the song, in the solo in the song, remains the same basically.

Obviously the blues has had a big influence on your playing. How about other genres like classical or jazz?

GT: Well, classical, yeah. I've always really loved classical music and that has mainly to do with my mother. She was a pianist and therefore, a lot of the stuff she did was classical. That was embedded in me from an early age. That's probably why I don't play scales, really, because I've been indoctrinated with classical music, so I sort of know what's right and wrong. I don't need to know musically if this fits into that, or whatever. I just know instinctively.

So, right from an early age classical music has always been important to me. But I also love film scores. I love the great big size of film scores. There are some great composers, as well, that are little known, you know, because their compositions are in films. I've always been intrigued by the amalgamation of film and music and what it ends up as. It's a very, very powerful thing. Those are the main things, really.

Would you describe some of the events that led up to your joining of Judas Priest?

GT: Yeah, the breakup, really the failure of the bands prior to that. I was with a band called Merlin, Shave and Dry, the Flying Hat Band, and we ended up with management and record problems, you know, we couldn't get a deal. So, Priest came along and I was sort of a rival. But, we were in the same agency and they asked me to join.

I joined thinking that I wouldn't be there long, but it took me only about a millisecond, really, to realize the potential of Judas Priest and what a great singer Rob (Halford) was and also, you know, to work with Ken (K.K. Downing) and to find that we've got something there together, both with different styles, but they blended together in a very special way.

So, straight away, I could see the potential in Priest and got quite excited about it, really. When I initially joined, I didn't think I thought I would be with Priest very long, but as soon as I joined I realized that with this band we've got something.

Do you feel that playing in a situation with dual lead guitars has enhanced your musicianship more than, say, a situation where you're the only guitar player?

GT: Yeah, definitely! It certainly enhances the band because what you've got is a great, fat stereo rhythm sound when we play. We've got a really full sounding band where one is playing rhythm and the other's playing lead, you've got a trade-off situation which is very exciting. You've got, obviously, harmony guitars which is another aspect of the band and then going down to quieter passages where one's doing one thing kind of quiet and the other can play some really nice melody over it.

So, it just gave the band so much versatility. You know it made us more versatile, more flexible, really and it teaches you that what counts is the band, and the music, and the songs, not your individual playing. That's not important at all. It's the band that counts and it's the songs that count.

What's it like working with Rob Halford again?

GT: It's fantastic working with Rob! Rob's great to write with and, as I said earlier on, we're very fortunate in this band that we've got a formula that really, really works well on a writing level. We were apart for fourteen years and I think we might have all felt a little bit, you know, "Is it still going to be there? Is the writing team still going to happen?"

And as soon as we started, it was back!

It's really exciting when we get together because we don't really know what's going to come out of a writing session, but it's very rare that something doesn't come out. In the beginning of the day, if there's a Priest song that isn't written, by the end of the day there's a good chunk of it, you know, we've got another idea. So, it's really exciting.

Rob's just a great showman on stage. He's a great lyricist. Rob's an all-around great vocalist.

You have two new solo releases out. Can you tell me a little bit about them?

GT: Yeah, well, when there was no Priest, when Rob had gone, and there really didn't look like there was any future for the band, then being a fairly prolific guy, well we all took a break for a couple of years, but then I felt the necessity to create again and started to write a batch of songs.

The very first batch of songs I wrote was with John [Entwistlle] and Cozy [Powell]. Cozy first and then we were looking around for a bass player. I approached John, we'd had the same manager, Bill Curbishley, and he came down to a little studio in my house and we began to kick these songs around and it was just magical to hear John play.

And Cozy, to me, is just one of the best rock drummers anyway. I wasn't aware of how good John was until he started to play. He's got such a unique sound. But, at the time, I was with Atlantic and they felt that I should go and work with some younger musicians and blend everything together. I was very disappointed about that, really, but I had no choice.

I went to worked with, you know, Billy Sheehan, Rob Trujillo, Brooks Wackerman, Shannon Larkin; all these younger guys and a great album emerged which was Baptism Of Fire, an album I was proud of. It was really great to work with all those younger musicians. They've got so much energy and enthusiasm anyway. And at the time there was no Priest.

So, that became the first release, but it left all the other songs on the shelf; songs I was really fond of, including some fantastic playing from John and Cozy. I always wanted to release it and when Rhino decided to re-release Baptism Of Fire, they listened to the other tracks and they agreed, you know, that it should be heard, so I mixed it and lo and behold, they released it.

Tell me about your current gear that you use when you're touring.

GT: On stage, I use Marshall power amps, Hamer Guitars predominantly, Ernie Ball strings, EMG pickups, some DigiTech effects, pre-amps which I am always experimenting with but I use Piranhas. And I've got a Godin pre-amps that I'm messing around with and I'm working with a couple of people on a design of a pre-amp.

Pre-amps are things that change and, at the moment, that's what I'm using and a JMP that I've used as well. Um, SPX 90's, various reverbs, and Graffix. Simple stuff, really.

I don't use anything, you know, that spectacular. It's all digital programmed, MIDI programmable. I've got a switching board on stage; simple switching board for, you know, different settings on the pre-amp, mainly and any effects I want to switch with, Marshall cabs, 4x12 cabs with vintage speakers. It's quite a simple rig.

I feel that on stage, your setup should be quite simple because if it's too complicated; One, you're asking for trouble and two, is if it goes down, you can never really get through the show. That's the trouble though, too. It has to be very robust, but more than anything, it has to be reliable.

If you over complicate things, and Priest aren't a complicated band anyway, then you really only have a 50/50 chance of getting through a show, which is pretty important for Priest.

So, what's next for you? Do you have any project or ideas in gestation?

GT: Really, my full attentions are on Judas Priest. We're reunited and there's a great deal of energy and enthusiasm there. We're all excited. I spoke to Rob the other day and he's coming over and we're going to start writing, so we're excited. I don't think anybody out there would want myself or K.K. to be involved in anything else, for the moment, other than, you know, creating the next Judas Priest album and then we can go out an tour extensively.

We were thinking of changing the set thoroughly next year, so that means we're going to do some rehearsing which we don't like to do very often, and we like the audience to feed off it. My full attention really will be on Priest and writing the next album.

Are there any guitarists or bands out these days that really inspire you or floor you?

GT: None really inspire me. There's a lot of good guitar players out there. If you want my honest opinion, I think there's so many good guitarists out there that are not playing what they're capable of because there's this unwritten law now that you shouldn't play lead, you know, or that it's dated to play lead or you shouldn't play long songs or you shouldn't do this and you should look like this. You shouldn't look like what you wanna look like. You've gotta look like this.

Everything's in danger of being a little bit too similar visually and musically. I think that with Angel Of Retribution what we tried to do was to throw the rulebook away and just say, "Look, c'mon guys, you know? Play a bit of lead. It's okay!"

It's okay doing it as long as it's not self indulgent and as long as it improves the song and as long as it's appropriate for the song, you know? Show people what you can do! I'd just like to see more guitar work, you know, from guitarists out there that I know are capable of playing.

Do you feel you've achieved your musical potential?

GT: No, I don't think so. I think anybody that feels that they've achieved their musical potential might as well give up, really. I'm a very creative person and I'm very prolific at times; not always. I don't play the guitar for weeks or months sometimes.

I would really get fed up with the instrument if I did. But then I have very intensive bursts on it and then, I'm fairly productive at that point. I think you've always gotta have aspirations. You've always gotta be excited about creating whatever it might be, whether it's Priest stuff or film scores or anything, you know?

I love music, but I don't eat breathe and live it. I like to enjoy it when I'm ready to write and ready to pick the guitar up and I get hungry to pick the guitar up. That's when I'm excited and that's when I produce a lot and that's when I think a lot. So, I'm a bit of a strange guitar player really.

If I play the guitar every day, I get bored with it and if I get bored with something, you know; I said to someone the other day that there are days when, you know, I've got at studio at home; there are days when I can't go near it. I just dread the thought of it and then there are other days when you can't get me out of there. So, it's just the way I am.

I like these cold wintery days when I get up there and create or even summer days I open the windows and the birds are singing and I'm in there creating, but there are other days that I don't go near the place. I have no desire to. I know that that's the same through all walks of life and, you know, or careers, really. I'm sure that it's very difficult to find a career that you want to do all the time an I think that you've gotta enjoy whatever you do and that's the way I do it. I just create when I actually feel like it and if I don't feel like it, I keep away from it. It's strange, but that's the way I am.

Related Links
Glenn Tipton
Judas Priest
Teenage Cancer Trust

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