Everybody hates to be boxed in. Especially for artists, they’re particularly….

 

Rob Halford – Judas Priest(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)

Music » From The Vault

“It would be number one”: The hit song Judas Priest deleted

Lucy Harbron

Sat 31 May 2025 17:20, UK

Everybody hates to be boxed in. Especially for artists, they’re particularly claustrophobic. Experimentation and evolution are their lifeblood, though, or it should be. Stand in one place too long, and your fans will start to complain. But it’s also true that if they run too far off in a different direction, fans will complain about that. It’s a total catch 22, damned if they do, damned if they don’t, and in that dilemma, things can be lost – like the musician’s minds, or in the case of Judas Priest, a hit single.

 

Here is another truism – people seem to know when they’ve made a hit. Over and over, throughout history, the same story is told. A song is being made, the studio is buzzing with energy, and everyone in the room comes out of it saying the same thing, all knowing they just made something special. Sometimes that feeling is nothing but pure euphoria, but other times, it’s a heavy weight. After finishing ‘Purple Rain’, Prince seemed to go on a one-man mission to kill the track in an attempt to run away from its greatness. He didn’t succeed, but Judas Priest

did.

It was the late 1980s when that day came when the band and their cast of collaborators knew in their guts that they’d made a hit. However, instantly, that was met with a sense of dread that they’d made the wrong kind of hit.

That came down to the people in the room. During this one session in Paris, the heavy metal band had decided to call in some different people. Typically, and most intuitively, they worked with proper rock producers. But they were open, keen to switch things up, so they called in a crack team of pop makers: Stock, Aitken and Waterman.

It was the late 1980s when that day came when the band and their cast of collaborators knew in their guts that they’d made a hit. However, instantly, that was met with a sense of dread that they’d made the wrong kind of hit.

 

That came down to the people in the room. During this one session in Paris, the heavy metal band had decided to call in some different people. Typically, and most intuitively, they worked with proper rock producers. But they were open, keen to switch things up, so they called in a crack team of pop makers: Stock, Aitken and Waterman.

 

 

You might not know their names, but you know their songs. They had a hand in more than 100 UK top 40 hits, working with the likes of Rick Astley, Bananarama, Kylie Minogue, Dead Or Alive and a long, long list more. When Judas Priest called them in, they were only just getting started, really. But, as the 1980s rolled on, their power would become unmatched in the pop world as they made chart topper after chart topper.

 

But this one haunted them – the lost tracks left neglected in the Judas Priest archive, all because, and it’s a classic punchline, management said no.

 

During their sessions, the band and the production trio recorded three songs, including a cover of ‘You Are Everything’, which had been a huge hit in the 1970s for The Stylistics, but now the band had given it a makeover from the soul ballad original. According to Pete Waterman, it was one of those days when everyone knew they were making magic here. Everyone knew these songs would be hits, but that’s exactly what the band’s team feared.

“Management were getting very worried that we would dominate the artist,” he said, “It would be Number One all over the world… but it kills Judas Priest.” The songs were too powerful and too poppy, with the team fearing that it would smother the true heavy legacy of the group by making them too mainstream with too light of a sound.

There’s the classic dilemma – box yourself in or risk something. It could be argued that by saving the core of Judas Priest and refusing to step into a pop world, the band still boxed themselves in, staying locked into what they were doing and sacrificing a hit. But who knows? The world never will, but for the producers, who still have those recordings knocking around somewhere, it’s a true loss, as they still say, “the whole of the Judas Priest session was amazing.”