Written by Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford has spoken about his decision to embrace sobriety and quit drinking 40 years ago.
On January 6, 1986, following an alcohol-fuelled breakdown and an overdose on painkillers, Halford checked himself into rehab to face his addiction. He has been clean and sober ever since.
“It’s difficult to express that moment,” he reflected last year, “but when you’ve had your stomach pumped, because you were so sick of feeling sick and everything around you was so black and dark that you just wanted to leave all of that, that was part of the first major mental crisis that I went through.”
in a new interview with MOJO magazine, Halford looks back on his darkest days with alcohol, and how he knew he had to change.
“I’ve got fame, I’ve got adulation, I’ve got all this… but I was still in the mental prison,” the singer tells writer Bob Mehr. “I didn’t know I was an addict until I got to the place where I couldn’t function as a creative person. I couldn’t sing in the studio without downing a bottle. I came to realise that drinking isn’t going to change me, it isn’t going to mask my sexual identity. If I keep drinking, I’m not going to wake up straight because I’ve drunk the gayness away.
“There’s a T-shirt for you,” he jokes. “‘I drank the gay away’.”
When Mehr suggests to Halford that there must have been “real pain and pressure” in covering up his true identity, Halford concedes that he felt he had no choice in matter.
“Not being able to go to [gay] bars and clubs after a show because you were told by the label and management – ‘Don’t do that, your whole career will collapse like a house of cards if that becomes known.’ Which it would have – there’s no doubt in my mind, it would have been a disaster, it would have been the end. The combination of dealing with that and the addiction… it started to get very gruesome for me, it was a total train wreck of dysfunctionality.”
Asked if he still struggles with sobriety after 40 years clean and sober, Halford replies, “The great thing about being in recovery is there’s joy – but there’s still pain there. The pain never leaves you. There’s pain because of how you hurt yourself, how you hurt others. That’s why in the Steps you have to make amends.
“There are still amends that I need to make from years ago. Hopefully, please God, I’ll get to make them all. Being sober isn’t an instant fix.”
In 2020, speaking to GQ magazine, Halford admitted that, although substance abuse got “pretty dangerous” for him, he “loved those drinking and drugging times.”
“Even though the end game was total self-destruction, at the time, yeah, it was great,” he continued. “In your youth that’s what you do, isn’t it? You have a weird party and do crazy stuff and it’s a rite of passage. I have fond memories of those times, even though it got pretty dangerous for me, and I don’t look back at it all and have regrets. I have never had regrets. I think you learn from your mistakes, but I don’t regret anything.”
