kiss and tell

Rob Halford talks about that time he tried to seduce another heavy metal singer back in the ’80s

Rob Halford of the heavy metal band Judas Priest says he once tried to seduce Paul Di’Anno of Iron Maiden in the early 1980s.

Halford writes about the incident in his new memoir Confess: The Autobiography.

The 69-year-old rocker says it happened when the two bands were touring together in 1980. Di’Anno would frequently joke about how Iron Maiden would “blow Judas Priest off stage every night.”

Writes Halford:

We didn’t really hang out and banter with Maiden much on that tour, but maybe I took Di’Anno’s comment that he would blow Priest off stage too literally… because the one night we got drunk together, I tried to seduce him! We went to my room to carry on drinking, but I was too pissed to try anything, and he was too pissed to even know what I wanted to try.

In hindsight, Halford says, the fact that his seduction attempt was unsuccessful was “definitely for the best” given that Di’Anno went on to become a major homophobe later in his career.

At a 2012 show in Ukraine, Di’Anno called a fan a homophobic slur then said he was going to “rip off your head and sh*t down your neck.”

And at a 2013 show in Greece, he called a man in the audience a “c*ck-sucking motherf*cker” and a “f*ggot” before telling him to “suck my d*ck.”

Halford came out as gay on MTV in 1998. Confess: The Autobiography hits bookstores on September 29.

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