JUDAS PRIEST – Back In Time with Metal Photographer Bill O’Leary – “British Steel” 1980 (Photos) #judaspriest #billoleary

Once again, I was shooting one of my favorite bands as a teenager, JUDAS PRIEST. This tour was in support of their newest album at the time, “British Steel”.  I had secured front row seats and was very excited to shoot the band, uncredentialed. At that time in 1980, promoters and venues had just begun to crack down on concertgoers bringing camera equipment or any type of recording devices into the shows. If you were discreet and definitely not, using a flash, you could take pictures from your seat. Sometimes entering a venue, we would use so called “gorilla-tactics” to get camera equipment in with us. Hiding a camera lens here and the camera body there discreetly to get thru security. That was the case on this night, I got the bare minimum of equipment in, a 50mm lens and the camera body itself with 3-4 rolls of film as well.

     I find it ironic in today’s concert going world that everyone has a mobile phone with both still photo capability, as well as even worse, video capability. Just look at YouTube and you can see EVERYTHING is filmed. Obviously, the quality is very lacking in most cases, but the fact that it has been allowed so far is ironic as I said.

Over 35 years of keeping photographers jumping thru hoops, securing credentials, band management permissions, etc. and now everyone is a “photographer”.

The irony of it all. Anyway, back to JUDAS PRIEST. Everything this night was perfect, the lighting, the angle for composition, the crowd was also great, completely into the artist. As it turned out, I was the only person up front with a camera, not even a credentialed photographer was shooting the performance. JUDAS PRIEST came on with full throttle energy as usual. I love shooting show’s where I feel as if I am the only person there, just you and the band thru the viewfinder. In the end, you may agree, I got some amazing images capturing JUDAS PRIEST just as they were breaking the big time.