Upon its release in 1986, Judas Priest’s “Turbo” album divided the group’s fanbase due to its heavy use of guitar synths and a sound more akin to what was going on in popular rock music of the time. Singer Rob Halford was recently asked about the album in an interview with Planet Rock.
“You’ve got 30,000 metal maniacs singing ‘I’m your turbo lover’ (at Priest shows now), but when that album came out, everybody wanted to throw it in the bin,” Halford said. “‘What is this? This ain’t metal.’”
In the decades since its release, however, many fans have softened their stance on “Turbo,” which at its core is a catchy, albeit sometimes cheesy, hard rock album. Halford added that the band might even begin adding another song or two from the record in their live show. Currently the title track is the only song from the album gets any play on the Priest concert stage.
“I am happy that ‘Turbo’ is embraced,” Halford added. “I listened to it for the first time in years just a few days ago, and I look at the videos that we made, and we all had hair. My hair went south; it went into the Gandalf region. But it’s a good album. It was really well made. Yours truly was going through some difficult moments in life, but here I am by the grace of God and so on and so forth. But it’s a good album. So we’re gonna see what’s on that record that we can bring to (the) Bloodstock (Festival), besides ‘Turbo Lover’. We’ll see if maybe we can add a couple of other tracks. And then you’ve got all of the others to look at. So it is gonna be special, this particular Bloodstock, in more ways than one.”
