Heavy metal legends Judas Priest back at it

Studded leather and fishing rods.

When Glenn Tipton’s not wearing the former, he’s frequently clutching the latter.

The 67-year-old has lived a loud life, but it’s quiet that he often craves.

Tipton’s one half of what just might be heavy metal’s greatest and most influential guitar tandem, his dueling leads with K.K. Downing in Judas Priest creating the artfully over-the-top template for countless bands who followed in the group’s wake beginning in the early ’70s.

Here was a band with two lead guitarists as opposed to a rhythm player paired with a hot shot soloist, once the standard division of labor between six-stringers in the same group.

Priest took everything up a notch: the fleet-fingered twin-guitar harmonies, the bondage-gear-inspired stage garb, the falsetto heights scaled by frontman Rob Halford, whose trademark shriek is suggestive of a banshee passing a kidney stone.

Thing is, though, for all the heavy metal thunder inherent in his day job, Tipton’s also an avid outdoorsman who loves to fish and absorb the tranquility of the wilderness.

A few years back, Tipton thought that this might be where he’d be spending his days right about now.

“I’m getting on a bit,” he chuckles, acknowledging that he thought about life after Priest for a time. “I may have hung the hat up and got the fishing rods out.”

The time in question was 2011, when Priest embarked on their “Epitaph World Tour,” publicly stating that it would be their final trek around the globe as a band.

“We meant what we said last time,” Tipton says of the band’s intent of retiring from the road. “It takes a big chunk out of your life. But it gets in your blood, really. It’s very difficult to give up.”

Priest didn’t say that they were retiring as a band, though, hinting that they might still continue recording together.

Prior to embarking on the “Epitaph” outing, they started writing new songs, eventually bringing in guitarist Richie Faulkner, who replaced Downing after he left the band in April 2011.

Eventually, they’d compile an album’s worth of material, resulting in the fiery, vintage-sounding “Redeemer of Souls,” Priest’s 17th record. Released in July, it became the band’s highest charting album in the U.S., debuting at No. 6 on the Billboard Top 200.

It’s the band’s most reflective record, an album that contemplates mortality (“Beginning of the End”) and seems like a farewell in places. “We thank you for it all / We will never forget,” Halford sings on “Never Forget,” a stormy ballad that closes the record.

On that same song, though, Halford pledges that Priest will “play on ’till the end / It’s not over not over my friends / We are together tonight / Reunited for all of our lives.”

This is the duality of the album: recognizing that there may be a time in the not-so-distant future when Priest will be no more, but then testifying that it’s not that day just yet.

Tipton credits Faulkner with keeping Priest going.

“I personally believe that if we hadn’t found Richie we would have folded as a band,” he says. “Richie’s been involved in a lot of the (new) material. We never knew how the writing process was going to work out. It couldn’t have been any better. What Richie brought to the table was incredible. And it was very Priest-y — that was the most amazing thing about it. It was so appropriate for Priest. It just slotted straight in there.”

Still, Tipton says that Priest didn’t initially intend to do another lengthy world tour after the album was completed.

“We started out with just doing an American leg,” he notes, “and we hadn’t really gotten any idea where to go after that, but suddenly, there’s all these dates that have been put in. We are going to do a few more (shows) than we anticipated.”

And so for Tipton, the salmon will have to wait.

“Certainly, we’re really enjoying ourselves again at the moment,” he says of being on the road again. “I think there’s some life in the old dog.”

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow on Twitter @JasonBracelin.