Judas Priest’s Rob Halford is about to celebrate 36 years of sobriety, and he’s spoken in a new interview about how he’s managed to evade the urge to relapse.
“I think about it all the time,” the frontman told Spain’s Mariskal Rock. “It’s an addiction. When I’m watching the Phoenix Cardinals play on TV the other day, there’s constantly adverts for beer and for alcohol and stuff. And I know it’s there. And it’s a temptation. So you have to have all of the mental tools ready to get you through that instance. ‘Cause it’s all about instances.”
“And I live one day at a time,” he continued. “I’ve lived one day at a time for 35 years now. And that’s all that matters. It’s the moment. You live in the moment – not yesterday, not tomorrow; it’s now. And you have to be ready for when that little beer devil comes on your shoulder and goes, ‘Come on, Rob. Have a little drink of beer.’ ‘Fuck off.’ [Laughs] Because I don’t wanna feel that way again, man.”
Reflecting on how he was when he was drinking, Halford said he doesn’t want to be that person again. “I was miserable. I wasn’t happy. I was bad to people. I don’t wanna go through that again,” he explained. “So that’s also part of my finding a balance in my day-to-day life.”
Halford previously spoke about how he manages to stay clean on the road in a 2020 interview with the Across The Board podcast.
“It’s not easy,” he said at the time. “It’s very much a day at a time. You’re given all the tools and resources from your rehab experience. I use ’em every day. A lot of it is just like mental notes – talking things through. Sometimes I speak ’em out; a lot of it is internal. So that’s really vital on a day-to-day level of sobriety.”
He’s also credited his belief in a higher power for helping him in his recovery. “When I got clean and sober, that was a major change in my life,” he told Hatebreed frontman Jamey Jasta on his podcast The Jasta Show (via Blabbermouth). “And part of my recovery is just having this higher-power belief. And it works. It works, man. It really, really is important.”
Halford will celebrate the 36th anniversary of getting sober on Thursday (January 6).
Last month, Halford shared a new photo of himself reuniting with the band’s ailing lead guitarist Glenn Tipton.
Tipton announced in 2018 that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and would be sitting out of the metal band’s ‘Firepower’ world tour. He was diagnosed four years earlier but doctors informed him that he had been living with the condition at least half a decade before that.
According to a statement released by the band at the time, the disease’s progression left him unable to play the Judas Priest’s more complex material. He was replaced by ‘Firepower’ producer Andy Sneap.
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