In 1971, John Lennon recorded his most famous song, Imagine, in the home studio recently installed at his country estate, Tittenhurst Park. Nine years later, in the first days of a new decade, the old house reverberated to a rowdier type of music.By this time, Tittenhurst had become home to another Beatle, Ringo Starr. And the noisy band creating a career-defining album in Lennon’s former workplace was Judas Priest.As Priest singer Rob Halford recalled in an interview with MOJO magazine, “We had so much inside us that we wanted to get out. We were on fire!”The first incarnation of the band had formed in Birmingham in 1969 with a different singer, Al Atkins. Named after the Bob Dylan song The Ballad Of Frankie Lee And Judas Priest, they played blues-based heavy rock in the style of Cream and the early Fleetwood Mac.In 1970, guitarist Kenny ‘K.K.’ Downing and bassist Ian Hill were incorporated into a new line-up. But it was after Atkins departed in 1973 that the real Judas Priest was born, with Glenn Tipton as second guitarist and Halford a far more dynamic singer with a multi-octave range.On the band’s first three albums, each featuring a different drummer, there was a rapid development into full-blown heavy metal: screaming lead vocals, duelling guitars, crunching riffs, and songs about death and destruction. In 1978, with the arrival of drummer Les Binks, they delivered two classic albums in Stained Class – later hailed by Metal Hammer magazine as the birth of ‘pure metal’ – and Killing Machine.
