Judas Priestess Deliver The Goods

Photos by John Doseph and RockMetal Inc

While most tribute acts offer little more than great covers and maybe even a gimmick, there's only a few who can transcend beyond the music. New York City's Judas Priestess offers a personality wholly their own, making already great metal covers even stronger and giving their show a life of its own. We talked with singer MilitiA ahead of the band's October 20 show at the Brass Monkey to talk about keeping covers fun, writing originals and getting praise from Judas Priest.

Ottawa Life: Did the band start as a fun side band for all of you, and what got the success really snowballing to your current world-wide acclaim?

MilitiA: It just started off that we wanted to come out with guns blazing, as a tribute band. We wanted to push the boundaries of what a tribute meant. It was important for us to be a band first, who happened to be playing the music of Judas Priest. It was always about making a statement more than anything else. Because yeah we're females and yeah we're badass enough to play this shit. It was never a side project that people were casual about. It was very thought out, and it was a vehicle to make a statement about females in metal.

With so many tribute acts around, what did you want to do to stand out from the rest?

The key differentiator here was that we were always ourselves and we weren't just trying to imitate Judas Priest. We didn't do the Chickadee's thing, like I'm not Roberta Halford or anything, our drummer's not Stephanie Travis. It was never a parody or a joke. If you do a tribute you can make that choice and some people like the hokey nature and the gimmick, and that's cool. We never did it that. Everybody is their own person and personality, and that's what sets us apart. I'm not up on the trends in tribute acts, but I see a lot of female acts doing it. We even take a lot of liberties music that a lot of acts don't, we add bass and change drum patterns to make it work for us as a band. There's a lot of people that say they didn't even like Judas Priest until they saw us. The music is so amazing, so we're just a different delivery system for it, but the spirit of Judas Priest is alive and well there.

Considering the wide breath of Judas Priest's work, do you stick to a mostly static set list or are you rotating from a larger set night to night?

There's always the hits, that are must plays that we have to do or else people get pissed. We have to play "Breaking the Law" and "Living After Midnight" or else it's unfair to the audience. But we have a lot of songs because we've been together for so long and we want to keep it fresh for ourselves. We want to give people a reason to come back and see us again and again, so we have to keep it fresh for them too. We always move songs in and out, so we're lucky that Priest has this huge catalogue to chose from. It's great for us because we like to do the deep cuts, sometimes songs that Priest has never even done live before. We just do what everybody is feeling. Each band member steps up and say what they want to do next. Some tribute bands don't have that luxury if their band have only a few albums but we have decades of material.

I guess with the band's time off for an album it's been a bittersweet blessing for you guys?

I'm always excited to see what they'll do next as a fan before I think about what it will do for us. I like their story and what they do as a band, and then I'll think about what we can do. I tend to latch onto the older stuff. We really love the 70's stuff, so we tend to focus on that more. We're two very different bands so people appreciate us both for different things even though it's the same catalogue. They're also tending to play more of their new stuff these days anyways.

You've been blessed by multiple Judas Priest members now, but what was your reaction the first time?

It's an amazing feeling, because we were hoping they would like it. There was a lot of naysayers in the beginning. We'd gotten hate-mail in the beginning before we'd even played live. People were sending hate-mail saying "Hahaha, girls playing Priest, you've got to be joking, " all kinds of hate and we hadn't even played a show. When I first joined, we went on a metal show, and Halford was a guest on the show and he just embraced us fully. He was so excited that there were women who loved Priest and were that excited to play it. He was really supportive, that was huge because it was at the beginning. He had seen me for years at meet and greets, so I'd met him back stage. When it was announced that I was the singer he said "Hey! I know you." It was funny but it all came together which was really cool. 

You guys have also dabbled in recordings a few years back, are there plans for more and do you think you'll ever stray into originals with this group?

That's funny you should ask that. We actually have new recordings that we're sitting on right now…to be continued though since I can't say too much about it right now. It's always been a dream of mine to have originals with this band, it's something that we've always been adamant about doing. We tried to do it once, and it caused some chaos and we had a change in the line up. It got dropped in the moment but we're definitely in talks to do it.