{"id":551479,"date":"2026-01-29T11:49:14","date_gmt":"2026-01-29T11:49:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/551479\/"},"modified":"2026-01-29T11:49:14","modified_gmt":"2026-01-29T11:49:14","slug":"turbo-lover-by-judas-priest-the-story-behind-the-song","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/551479\/","title":{"rendered":"Turbo Lover by Judas Priest: The Story Behind The Song"},"content":{"rendered":"

Judas Priest<\/a> were living in a material world. This was the mid-80s: greed was good, success meant excess, and for five nouveau-riche Brummie metallers with swollen disposable incomes, nothing was off limits.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you look back at the 80s, living through that decade, it was incredibly decadent,\u201d admits Judas Priest frontman Rob Halord<\/a>. \u201cThere was a lot of money flying around. It was a real pig-out in many ways, but what a great time. From 1980 right through to the grunge movement, all the Porsches, all the turbo engines, everything was larger-than-life.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThe band was incredibly successful,\u201d he adds, \u201cand we had an enormous amount of wealth going around us. I remember that at the time of Turbo Lover, both Glenn [Tipton] and KK [Downing] were absolutely mad on Porsches.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The lyrical seed was sown, but the genesis of the music for Priest\u2019s 1986 single really began when Tipton arrived at sessions in Spain with a new-fangled guitar synth. \u201cWe\u2019d just finished a world tour. We went straight to Marbella and started to write,\u201d recalls Halford. \u201cWe\u2019d rented this beautiful place by the ocean and just locked ourselves away for months and months. We were very prolific at that time, just on the crest of all the great things that were happening for Priest.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut the big thing about Turbo Lover was this new invention that Glenn was using. I forget the name of the device, but it was making all these really interesting and inspiring sounds. I remember one day when Glenn kicked his pedal board and this sound came out \u2013 the one you hear at the start of Turbo Lover \u2013 and I said: \u2018It sounds like a turbo engine revving up.\u2019 That was the spark. That was the way the song suddenly grew and how the title popped up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Judas Priest – Turbo Lover (Official HD Video) – YouTube
\n\"Judas<\/p>\n

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Halford, by his own admission, would not be the first lyricist to join the dots between cars and coitus. \u201cWe were just noodling around and, for whatever reason, we used the typical rock\u2019n\u2019roll analogy of having a bit of fun in the back seat of a car,\u201d he recalls. \u201cY\u2019know: \u2018I\u2019m your turbo lover\u2019; you\u2019re using the vehicle as an innuendo for having a bit of slap and tickle. That\u2019s been going on since day one. If you look at early movies like Rebel Without A Cause or On The Waterfront, they featured fast cars and motorbikes. It goes arm-in-arm.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tipton sparked the riff and played the juddering solo (\u201cit\u2019s simple but effective for that particular track,\u201d he says on his website, \u201cending in a machine-gun frenzy\u201d), while Halford says all five members pitched in: \u201cIt was a combined effort, like the writing is now, but the riffs are always the basic format for every good metal song. We had so much material from those sessions that we actually told the label: \u2018Look, we\u2019ve got a double studio record here. It didn\u2019t turn out like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

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When it came to recording, cars were not Priest\u2019s only indulgence, with 80s-sized royalties also giving them a licence to move between top studios. \u201cWe moved around three places,\u201d says Halford. \u201cFirst we went to Compass Point in the Bahamas\u2026 but that was insane. We didn\u2019t get any work done and we couldn\u2019t get focused. It was just mad. We\u2019d start work at six at night, and by eight we\u2019d be down the pub.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was going for everything,\u201d he admits. \u201cIn fact, that was just before my sobriety kicked in. It\u2019s like a test of fire. Everybody goes through that ritual in rock\u2019n\u2019roll, and it can either be very creative or you can end up doing a lot of damage to yourself, which is what I was doing. I was peaking at that time. From the mid-80s onwards I feel like I became a more serious musician. Maybe it was because I hit that inevitable rock\u2019n\u2019roll wall and survived it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

\"Rob\n<\/p>\n

Turbo-loving Rob Halford circa 1986 (Image credit: \u00a0Michael Ochs Archives\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n

Recording moved to Miami, and finally to LA, where both the song and its parent album, Turbo<\/a>, were completed. When they wrapped, recalls Halford, the band were too close to Turbo Lover to assess it objectively. \u201cWe didn\u2019t know it was a classic. But that was the same with Breaking The Law<\/a> and Living After Midnight<\/a>. You never think where a song might end up. You\u2019re so immersed that you have no idea.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Los Angeles was also the city that gave Halford his favourite memory of the song. \u201cI was driving down Sunset Strip in a convertible Porsche, and Turbo Lover actually came on the radio,\u201d he grins. \u201cI was like, my god, here I am, a kid from Walsall in the West Midlands. It was so unreal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Others were less enchanted, though, and, six years after their breakthrough British Steel album, Turbo\u2019s zeitgeist-straddling sound split the hardcore.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was a bit of push-back,\u201d says Halford. \u201cBut I can remember when we released Painkiller, there was a bit of push-back on that too. That\u2019s the way it goes. You can\u2019t please absolutely everybody. Sometimes all your fans want is to keep living the same experience over and over again. In Priest we never dismiss what our fans say, but at the same time it can be very dangerous.\u201d<\/p>\n

The singer admits the song and album were \u2018love\/hate\u2019, yet insists both were vital to Priest\u2019s evolution. \u201cWe were passionate about protecting Judas Priest\u2019s music too, but if we\u2019d shut every possibility off we wouldn\u2019t have been as adventurous. The truth is, we\u2019ve never believed in rules, and we\u2019ve always said you\u2019re foolish if you\u2019re in a band and you don\u2019t listen to the radio, or check out other bands\u2019 music, because you can learn a lot. That\u2019s what\u2019s so cool about Priest: if you lay out all the decades \u2013 the 70s, 80s, 90s and now \u2013 they\u2019ve each got a representation of the vibe that was going around. So Turbo Lover and Turbo were controversial to some people, but that\u2019s where we were at the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Halford still loves the track, if not the subject matter. \u201cTurbo Lover has become a classic,\u201d he says. \u201cBut I\u2019m not really a car fanatic anymore. Since I turned 60 I\u2019ve become less attached to stuff. I\u2019m not really interested in the material side of life. I went through that phase, but I\u2019ve realised now the most important thing in my life is Judas Priest.\u201d<\/p>\n

This feature originally appeared in Classic Rock 167, published in May 2011.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Judas Priest were living in a material world. This was the mid-80s: greed was good, success meant excess,…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":551480,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[171,975,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-551479","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-music","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115978237792420405","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=551479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551479\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/551480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=551479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=551479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=551479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}