The Uncanny Discontent of Judas Priest’s British Steel
Each metal subculture has its own approach to cultivating a kind of unity, one where the existing rules of what’s off-limits and how, musically, you can go the extra mile, beyond what’s thought possible. It was British Steel, released 45 years ago this week, that brought that vision to life, revealing a place for mortal rage in metal while pushing the genre forward.
On a partly cloudy afternoon, two teen boys venture outside and get a hold of a grasshopper. The brown-haired boy utters: “I hereby sentence the defendant to death by, uh (snickering), uh (even more snickering), saw off his tweeter.” His blond friend manifests a chainsaw out of nowhere, slices the grasshopper in two, and wounds his buddy in the process. He’s too thrilled to notice, hollering with pride: “Breaking the law, breaking the law.” His buddy watches his index finger spurt blood, declaring: “That was cool.” The boys are Beavis and Butthead, the titular characters of the Mike Judge classic that took rock and roll culture to task through a kind of inverse celebration. The Judas Priest hit “Breaking the Law” is a perennial hit on the show, the perfect kinetic track for young layabouts who need a purpose. Resonating with a British audience finding themselves increasingly desperate under deindustrialization and enduring a polity that embraced austerity, “Breaking the Law” tapped into the very human rage that working class Brits harbored. The song is devious, enrapturing, and all too real.
I didn’t encounter “Breaking the Law” via Beavis and Butthead, as important as that show was in my household growing up. Instead, I vaguely recall seeing its music video on one of any number of music channels on our wide cable subscription. It was part of some countdown of the best somethings of some time period that escapes me now. I remember the discussion veering into the band’s influence on the metal community and gay representation—that years after the band’s big break, Rob Halford stumbled out of the closet in 1998. I was years away from recognizing my own gay identity, but there was something about Halford’s shattering of my childish stereotypes, of what kind of people get to become influential rock stars, of all the different ways gay people can present themselves, that floored me. I couldn’t have been older than 10 at the time, but I’ve held Judas Priest in special regard ever since, and have only fallen more in love with the album British Steel in the passing years, especially as I’ve embraced the part of me that’s always loved heavy metal in all its nasty forms. My day-to-day metal habits vary wildly—some days, I prefer the trudging sorrow of Bell Witch or the gory malevolence of Ulcerate—but none of these subcultures would have the same prominence without Judas Priest. Sepultura might make casual Judas Priest enjoyers wince, but their legendary former frontman Max Cavalera considers British Steela perfect album. You don’t get the truly freakish stuff without showing people how metal can be a riot first.
“Breaking the Law,” arguably Judas Priest’s most popular song, is a standout from 1980’s British Steel, the band’s sixth album, which reached listeners 45 years ago this week. British Steel was the metal project designed to break through to MTV as a synthesis of arena rock and heavy talent that’s likely to resonate with everyday rock fans, just as it is to outsiders in the metal world. There’s a little Queen here, a little AC/DC there, and plenty of truly mean riffs and double-bass drumming that advanced rock and roll, for sure, but heavy metal especially. As explosive as the ‘70s were for rock of all kinds, the biggest metal releases stayed true to the Black Sabbath tradition, trafficking in progressive, bluesy doom. Bands like Judas Priest and Saxon articulated their own approaches to the tradition, but they didn’t stray too far from their origins through the decade. As punk and glam rock varieties took hold, however, even Priest couldn’t resist the draw of an alternative approach.
That said, British Steel is not especially complicated material. Over nine tracks, Judas Priest leads with memorable riffs and clear choruses across a range of styles, some more overtly metallic than others. “Rapid Fire” and “Grinder” are a dastardly mix of propulsive and heavy, introducing double bass to a wider fanbase and setting the stage for both NWOBHM (New Wave of British Heavy Metal) and thrash. Priest’s inadvertent contribution to thrash is perhaps the album’s greatest accomplishment: Speed, aggression, and rigorous musicality mixed with a general disdain for the rightward turn of the ‘80s (think Thatcher and Reagan) coalesced into its own subcultural moment. Today, it’s one of heavy metal’s most enduring branches.
British Steel is a synthesis of the late ‘70s multiplicity of rock subcultures, each jostling each other for radio dominance. “Metal Gods,” the B-side to “Breaking the Law,” is a sci-fi anthem, dialing back the prog and deploying bouncy beats and swinging riffs. A little pre-internet, pre-mass adoption of samplers begot some of the more esoteric sounds: bouncing a cutlery tray to get the metal-on-metal sound, the thwap of a pool cue sweeping through the air. While the song itself is more about technology’s creeping authoritarianism (sound familiar?), Priest’s legendary frontman Rob Halford has graciously accepted the title of Metal God, owing to his decades performing and advocating for metal as a legitimate expression of the downtrodden. Then there’s “United,” the proper metal approach to a Queen-like, stand-and-chant anthem: “United, united, united we stand / United we shall never fall.” Time after time, Halford has identified Freddie Mercury as an inspiration as a frontman, taking cues from Queen’s singular approach to rock and roll and finding room for it in metal. It would be hard to imagine a Queen track with such a downtuned riff, but the mood is the same: It feels like a solidarity anthem so dearly needed in the outsider community of heavy metal. British Steel-era Halford split the difference between Freddie Mercury and AC/DC’s Bon Scott: While he was clad in a leather uniform that made him stand out among frontmen, his rugged delivery of human frustrations gave him an everyman appeal that made every word hit harder.
While much of British Steel leans into the frustration and solidarity needed to face the great labor and political discontents that colored a neoliberal Birmingham, “Living After Midnight” captures the hedonistic debauchery that makes rockstar living so appealing. As abrasive as Halford’s voice is on the verses, the song is a true party anthem, living between the radio-ready world of hard rock and the genuine extremity of ‘70s metal. Judas Priest swing like pop stars but holler like metalheads, splitting the difference by presenting a song with both undeniable weight and irresistible hook. “Living After Midnight” got Judas Priest on the radio. It spent seven weeks on the UK singles chart, peaking at #12 and catapulting British Steel to #4 on the country’s albums chart, their highest position until 2024’s Invincible Shield. Perhaps that makes the song a bit too soft, but it’s got an undeniable swagger that still feels true to metal’s disruptive spirit.
British Steel was successful not just because it arrived as an innovative metal album, but because it was, and is, music that translates to a wide base of hard rock fans—which was going through its own parallel boom in the late ‘70s. Early Black Sabbath turned blasphemy into an art form, both in lyrical content and instrumentation, infusing blues rock with drugs (“Sweet Leaf”), resistance (“War Pigs”), religion (“N.I.B.”), and anything scandalous. To an extent, the content and the delivery was inextricable. Punk and hard, arena-sized rock music pushed metal to new territory and, eventually, that would coalesce into the divisive pop-art hair metal movement. British Steel predated the genre’s glam tangent, preferring to use hooks and aggression without its fundamental unseriousness or garish looks. It’s one thing to loom over an audience with evil, à la classic doom metal; it’s another to provoke the evil within via aggression. After thriving in the progressive and bluesy space of early metal on their first three LPs, Judas Priest’s impending evolution peeked through on 1978’s Stained Class. “Exciter” brought the whirlwind speed that metal so badly needed. Rather than send listeners through a meandering, malevolent maze, “Exciter,” instead, traps listeners on a roller coaster of evil, trimming the excesses of prog and foregoing the blues template to make room for speed and aggression. There’s a faint outline of the heavy metal audiences had come to love, but increasingly, it was clad in leather and moved at a breakneck pace with pummeling riffs and unrelenting drums. Judas Priest made that leather work for them.
Even the evil, mythical content of 1970s metal started to lose its edge. No longer was addressing the devil solely the domain of metalheads. AC/DC’s 1979 masterpiece Highway to Hell, both the song and the album, brought cheeky yet confrontational demonic imagery under the purview of major rock acts, and their influence on Judas Priest is notable. Highway to Hell isn’t a metal album, and AC/DC couldn’t be called a heavy metal band, but their take on blues-rock pushed the genre to its most melodic, party-ready territory. It was smart and anthemic. For a band like Judas Priest, who toured with AC/DC during this era, there was something undeniable about how the Young brothers and Bon Scott could get crowds and executives to respond positively to counter-cultural imagery and walloping heaviness. Priest latched onto that ethos when writing British Steel, shedding excess, embracing aggression, and letting the anthems speak for themselves. No need to rely on the occasional ballad or popular blues riffs to stay in line with tradition.
An eternal source of consternation between punk lifers and metalheads is the place of politics in aggressive music. For as long as punk’s been punk, it’s been nakedly political, pointing accusations of corruption at authority figures and demanding a freer world. Even if those politics vary in coherence, it’s at the forefront. Metal is often accused of avoiding politics, and extreme genres especially risk being painted as exercises in some kind of eternal shock-contest when they could direct their aggressive energies at the establishment. Most metal bands maintain a subtle politics, preferring that their images of death and destruction speak to a generalized malaise. Some contemporary bands are more explicit. Underground slam band Torture mix real, despicable imagery from the War on Terror and abstract “lyrics” in a blend of heavy music and protest; their live sets are punctuated with lengthy, anti-war diatribes. Their tactics get a mix of reactions, with critics questioning if music with no words can serve as effective protest music or if they have the right to use images of violence and dehumanization as they do. Arguably, their naked politics and frequent breakdowns have helped the band, and death metal writ large, translate to devotees of hardcore punk.
In the case of Judas Priest, they never set out to make a protest album, but by the time the band retreated to the legendary Tittenhurst Park in the winter of 1980, there was no avoiding the realities back in Birmingham. Labor disputes between British Steel, the now-defunct mass employer to which every Brummie had some attachment, and its workers showed little signs of resolution in favor of workers facing an austere government and deindustrialization. The members of Judas Priest remembered what it was like to live under the thumb of major manufacturers—Rob Halford’s father worked in the steel factories, and he recalled what it was like for the family to have “just enough money to pay for the rent and food for the week”—and watching the unrest inspired a level of insurgency they hadn’t really embraced. It resonated with audiences in ways that many punk anthems did, coupling heavy metal with resistance from below in a way that it always had, but never explicitly stated. British Steel offered a purpose and an edge that elevated the rage of the common man into the public eye in a way that few prior releases ever could.
British Steel was the metal album that the world needed in 1980. The circumstances were changing, and the old ways of expressing opposition or subverting the norms just weren’t cutting it. As timeless as Sabbath’s original approach to the genre remains, their doom-y, stoner-friendly incantations had not sufficiently tapped into the fury of the era. The ‘70s were an institutional nightmare: lying politicians, withering employment, economic freakouts. Judas Priest spoke to that rage as both witnesses and carriers of it, sharing in the discontents of the oppressed in their midst, speaking to it with vigor and aggression. It’s a rage that translated worldwide: Tribulations in the Birmingham manufacturing and mining sectors were symptomatic of globalization and neoliberalism, paired phenomena that fundamentally reorganized patterns of production and consumption all over the world. Great Britain worked through global institutions to open economies in the Global South to direct investment, providing their robber barons the perfect opportunity to leave the island in search of cheap labor. Working class Britain had nowhere to turn. British Steel had party hits, solidarity anthems, and a palpable frustration with the existing turmoil. It was polished—not for the sake of being shiny and pristine, but for exhibiting their musical path forward with alarming clarity. A linear approach cut the fat off the songs and channeled all the remaining energy into every hook and holler, making abundantly clear what the future of metal could be.
Unencumbered by tradition, the heavy metal of British Steel is wildly fun and instantly memorable. It primed listeners to fall in love with bands from Slayer to Metallica, from their days making uptempo metal up to the extremes of thrash. 45 years later, British Steel is still rich with reckless riffs and an uncannily familiar set of discontents, resonant in a world desperate to give the wealthiest an extra bump with the delirious hope that it will filter down to the masses. After it, heavy metal branched off into dozens of even more disturbing approaches, each designed to exorcise and toy with the discontents of its players and its audience. British Steel kicked off NWOBHM as we know it, priming the emergence of bands like Iron Maiden, an arguably more famous act than Judas Priest, and Venom, whose first two albums helped give rise to the messy, speedy, cultish subculture of black metal. Within every emergent metallic strain—death metal, metalcore, groove metal—there are both political and stylistic discontents with which each movement grapples, balancing desires to practice rebellion and revel in disgust. Each metal subculture has its own approach to cultivating a kind of unity, one where you can demolish the existing rules of what’s off-limits and, musically, go the extra mile beyond what’s possible. It was Judas Priest’s British Steel that brought that vision to life, revealing a place for mortal rage in metal while pushing it forward, doubling the guitars and drums at key inflection points, waging a frontal sonic assault that’s as maddening as it is fun.
Devon Chodzin is a Pittsburgh-based critic and urban planner with bylines at Aquarium Drunkard, Stereogum, Bandcamp Daily and more. He can be found on social media, sometimes.
