Rob Halford

Rob Halford is the singer who defined what it means to sing heavy metal. Born in Walsall, in the industrial English Midlands, he joined Judas Priest in 1973 and brought with him a vocal range of nearly four octaves — an instrument able to move from dramatic low register to cutting high notes within a single phrase, and one that effectively invented the vocabulary followed by generations of singers in the genre. His mark is not only technical. It was Halford who brought to the stage the leather, the studs and the motorcycle that became metal's visual uniform — borrowed from London's leather subculture, with the audience unaware of the source at the time. On record, his voice runs through Sad Wings of Destiny (1976), Stained Class (1978), British Steel (1980), Screaming for Vengeance (1982) and Painkiller (1990), the last perhaps the most extreme demonstration of what his throat could do. He left Judas Priest in 1992 and spent a decade on his own projects — Fight, the industrial experiment 2wo, and the band Halford, of Resurrection (2000). In 1998 he came out publicly as gay, becoming the first major figure in metal to do so, in a genre that until then had treated the subject as unthinkable. He returned to Judas Priest in 2003 and still fronts the band, through Firepower (2018) and Invincible Shield (2024). His memoir, Confess, appeared in 2020.