Rob Halford: Slip Of The Tongue

"I feel a bit like Quentin Crisp these days, I've become the stately homo of heavy metal."

Indeed, his sexuality was a topic the record company advised me not to dwell on, but Halford brings it up before I do, cheerily suggesting that coming out during an MTV interview in 1998 was less an act of defiant bravery than a slip of the tongue. "I just say what's rattling out of my brain, you know, and I just happened to go, 'Well, speaking as a gay man …' and then I heard this noise, and it turned out the producer had literally dropped his clipboard when I said it."

Slip of the tongue or not, he says, it was "the greatest thing I could have done for myself". Now he wonders why he didn't do it sooner. "I think I just built in this delusional fear that I was going to destroy myself, no one was going to look at me any more as a metal singer, I'm going to destroy Priest because of my attachment with them. It was all self-imposed paranoia. It didn't affect Priest one iota: the record sales didn't plunge, the show attendance didn't plunge. Unconditional love will accept you for who you are, and I think that was the blessing I had from the fans."

Alexis Petridis interviews the ker-brilliant METAL GOD!© Rob Halford for The Guardian.

Note how the record company had told Alexis Petridish not to talk too much about the gay thing, but the artist brings it up and then happily squawks away. Sounds familiar...