A few days ago, Rob Halford was lying in bed when he had an idea.
“It was four o’clock in the morning and I couldn’t sleep because of my insomnia,” he says. “I thought: ‘Maybe I should tell people that I’m going to start an OnlyFans.’ I’d borrow a cat and hold it against my nether regions: ‘You thought you were going to get cock but you got pussy.’”
He lets out a cackle that’s more Carry On film than budding internet porn baron.
It’s mid-afternoon on a Friday in Phoenix, Arizona, the place Halford has called home for the past 38 years, and the Judas Priest singer is in an ebullient mood. As he should be: his band are about to release their nineteenth album, Invincible Shield, a slice of razor-sharp heavy metal that cuts like a bandsaw and keeps up the late-career hot streak that began with 2014’s Redeemer Of Souls and continued with the armour-piercing barrage of 2018’s Firepower.
We’ll get to Invincible Shield shortly, but first back to cats. It’s no coincidence that Halford brought felines into his 4am waking dream of starting an OnlyFans page. His Instagram feed is roughly 65 per cent catrelated: photos of cats doing stupid shit, videos of random cats doing stupid shit, photos of the singer in an assortment of comedy cat-related T-shirts.
“Cats are beautiful,” he says. “They look so cute and cuddly, yet they’re so incredibly fierce and independent: ‘I’ve just took a shit, clean this up.’” He doesn’t
