Fan-filmed video footage of Geoff Tate’s March 11 performance at Legend Club in Milan, Italy can be seen below (courtesy of YouTube user “Andre D. Keaton”).

Tate’s current tour is celebrating the 30th anniversary of QUEENSRŸCHE’s “Empire” and “Rage For Order” albums.

The setlist for the Milan show was as follows:

Set 1

01. Walk In The Shadows
02. I Dream In Infrared
03. The Whisper
04. Gonna Get Close To You
05. The Killing Words
06. Surgical Strike
07. Neue Regel
08. Chemical Youth (We Are Rebellion)
09. London
10. Screaming In Digital
11. I Will Remember

Set 2

12. Best I Can
13. The Thin Line
14. Jet City Woman
15. Della Brown
16. Another Rainy Night (Without You)
17. Empire
18. Resistance
19. Silent Lucidity
20. Hand On Heart
21. One And Only
22. Anybody Listening?

Encore:

23. Last Time In Paris
24. Take Hold Of The Flame

1986’s “Rage For Order” introduced a much more polished look and sound for QUEENSRŸCHE. The album featured keyboards as prominently as guitars, and the group adopted an image more closely associated with glam rock or glam metal than with heavy metal (of which glam metal was a subgenre). A video was filmed for the song “Gonna Get Close to You”, originally recorded in 1984 by DALBELLO.

Released in 1990, “Empire” included the hit ballad “Silent Lucidity”, which reached No. 9 on the Billboard singles chart, helped propel “Empire” to No. 7 on the album chart and earned two Grammy Award nominations.

Prior to the launch of the trek in early 2020, Tate told MisplacedStraws.com that he would take the “Empire 30th Anniversary Tour” to “as many countries as I can and playing the album in its entirety, which I’ve never done before. So that’ll be real fun. In fact, I think there’s some songs on that album that I’ve never, ever played live before, so it’ll be a treat — for me, as well, I think, for the audience too,” the former QUEENSRŸCHE singer said. “I’m really looking forward to that.”

Tate told Eonmusic that one song from “Empire” that was rarely performed live is “Anybody Listening?” “When QUEENSRŸCHE was together, we never really put that song in our set,” he said. “We just had a hard time playing it, for some reason; it just never jelled or felt right. And I’d really like to play that song again, and play it right.”

In April 2014, Tate and QUEENSRŸCHE announced that a settlement had been reached after a nearly two-year legal battle where the singer sued over the rights to the QUEENSRŸCHE name after being fired in 2012. Original QUEENSRŸCHE members Michael Wilton (guitar), Scott Rockenfield (drums) and Eddie Jackson (bass) responded with a countersuit. The settlement included an agreement that Wilton, Rockenfield and Jackson would continue as QUEENSRŸCHE, while Tate would have the sole right to perform the albums “Operation: Mindcrime” and “Operation: Mindcrime II” in their entirety live.

Tate was replaced in QUEENSRŸCHE by former CRIMSON GLORY singer Todd La Torre.

Geoff recently celebrated the 30th anniversary of “Operation: Mindcrime” on European and U.S. tours.

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In a new interview with Australia’s Spotlight Report, BUSH frontman Gavin Rossdale, who released a solo album and created the side-project INSTITUTE during his time away from the band, was asked if his “comfort zone” is being part of a group or working as a solo artist. He responded (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “Nobody wants the singer in a rock band to do a solo record — nobody; not even the singer in the band. I did that. I did INSTITUTE, which was meant to be a quick record; it took longer than it should have. And then I wanted the band to come back together. And they just didn’t, so I did the solo record. It’s nothing I really wanted. I don’t like that. I mean, I do like some solo artists, but I think nothing beats a great band. A great band is a great band. And that’s why I’m so happy to be in this band. And when I write and I work hard at the writing, it’s for BUSH.”

Less than two years ago, Rossdale told Kerrang! magazine that he had “regrets” about BUSH’s nearly decade-long break. “It clearly diverted our momentum,” he said. “But back then I was with Jimmy Iovine and Interscope, where the philosophy was, ‘You’ve had a bunch of hits. You better have another hit.'”

Asked how sad he was that things came to a close with BUSH in 2002, Gavin told Kerrang!: “That was never meant to be a permanent thing. I had recently got married, and it was a weird time. I wanted to do the INSTITUTE record, which was meant to be a three-month thing, but it turned into a couple of years. And then I tried to get the band back together in 2008, when I did my solo record. I didn’t want to go solo, but Nigel [Pulsford, guitar] didn’t want to come back. And I never should have done a solo record. I never should have done the INSTITUTE record. I should have just kept on making BUSH records. But that’s the way it goes. I begged the band to get back together, but Nigel and Dave [Parsons, bass] didn’t want to do it, so I had to get some new guys in, and we’ve had the same lineup since.”

BUSH’s current lineup also includes guitarist Chris Traynor, bassist Corey Britz and drummer Nik Hughes.

The group, which reunited in 2010, has released four albums since reforming.

BUSH is currently taking part in the “Under The Southern Stars” tour of Australia with CHEAP TRICK, STONE TEMPLE PILOTS, ROSE TATTOO, ELECTRIC MARY and BLACK REBEL MOTORCYCLE CLUB.

Rossdale recently announced that he will host a cooking show. The program, dubbed “E.A.T. With Gavin Rossdale”, will feature the musician inviting luminaries, celebrities and other members of the public to his home in the Hollywood Hills, where he will provide them with a dish he prepared himself.

Rossdale has already reportedly started filming the show, with Roundtable Entertainment producing the series.

The singer said: “Roundtable are the exact partners I’ve been looking for to produce this project. They understand my vision and will help execute a compelling series in which we get to see behind the public persona of people we know and admire for their work.

“This show is about connecting more deeply with them, hearing their stories, walking in their shoes. It’s hard to be surprised anymore, but the simplest surprises are the human revelations that occur over food and drink.”

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JUDAS PRIEST was rejoined by guitarist Glenn Tipton on stage during the band’s headlining concert Saturday night (March 12) at the Fox Theater in Oakland, California.

As he has done a number of other times over the course of the last four years, Tipton appeared with PRIEST for the encore, performing “Metal Gods”, “Breaking The Law” and “Living After Midnight”.

Video of the performance can be seen below (courtesy of Stephanie Cabral and YouTube user jesseriah).

Tipton was diagnosed with Parkinson’s eight years ago — after being stricken by the condition at least half a decade earlier — but announced in early 2018 he was going to sit out touring activities in support of JUDAS PRIEST’s latest studio album, “Firepower”. He was replaced by “Firepower” album producer Andy Sneap, who is also known for his work in NWOBHM revivalists HELL and cult thrash outfit SABBAT.

PRIEST singer Rob Halford recently told Metal Pilgrim that Glenn is “still actively involved with JUDAS PRIEST, a hundred percent. Andy is still standing in that spot for Glenn with Glenn’s blessing… And my gratitude to Andy. It couldn’t have happened in a better way, if you wanna try and make something good out of it. It was a really important day when Glenn said, ‘I think it’s probably best if I step to the side and maybe we should let Andy come in.’ That was just a really beautiful act of selflessness. That’s Glenn treasuring PRIEST and PRIEST’s reputation, particularly in live concert more than anything else. So bless Glenn for that. And as a result, Andy stepped in and did amazing work on the ‘Firepower’ tour, and we’re looking forward to doing the same thing with him on this 50th-anniversary [tour]. And don’t discount the fact that Glenn can show up. He plays the guitar differently, but there’s no reason why Glenn can’t show up and do some work. I mean, I’ve said to Glenn, ‘Just walk out on stage and do that to everybody [flashes devil horns], and the people will just go fucking crazy, ’cause you are loved so much.’ But I’ve got a feeling that Glenn’s gonna be making the occasional appearance on this 50th-anniversary [tour].”

Bassist Ian Hill is the sole remaining original member of PRIEST, which formed in 1969. Halford joined the group in 1973 and Tipton signed on in 1974. Rob left PRIEST in the early 1990s to form his own band, then came back to PRIEST in 2003. Founding guitarist K.K. Downing parted ways with the band in 2011, and was replaced by Richie Faulkner.

PRIEST’s current North American tour kicked off on March 4 at Peoria Civic Center in Peoria, Illinois and will conclude on April 13 at FirstOntario Centre in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Support on the trek is coming from QUEENSRŸCHE.

JUDAS PRIEST was forced to postpone around two dozen North American shows on its rescheduled 50th-anniversary tour in late September after Faulkner suffered an acute cardiac aortic dissection during a performance at the Louder Than Life festival. He ended up undergoing a 10-hour life-saving surgery a short distance away at Rudd Heart and Lung Center at UofL Health – Jewish Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky.

The Priest were AWESOME tonight! The best that I’ve seen them out of the four times in the last four years.

Here’s Tom…

Posted by Craig Locicero on Sunday, March 13, 2022

Oakland California welcomes Judas Priest live???

Posted by Roberto Ruiz on Saturday, March 12, 2022

Judas Priest Oakland, Ca.

Posted by Brett Hobbs on Sunday, March 13, 2022

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Daryl Hall has confirmed that he was asked to join VAN HALEN following the departure of David Lee Roth more than three and a half decades ago.

The singer-songwriter — best known as one half of HALL & OATES — broached the topic of his hypothetical link-up with VAN HALEN in a new interview with “Out Of The Box With Jonathan Clarke”, which airs on the New York radio station Q104.3. Asked if it’s true that Eddie approached him about stepping into the role of the band’s frontman after Roth’s exit, Daryl laughed and said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “Well, yeah. Actually, yes. I knew those guys [VAN HALEN] really well; we actually shared some people — crew and things like that. And Eddie came to a show with [his then-wife] Valerie [Bertinelli] — this goes back, you know — and David had just left the band. And Eddie said, ‘Do you wanna join VAN HALEN, man?’ He was half joking, but I think he was serious — I really do believe he was serious. And I took it seriously. I went, ‘Meh, I think not. I think I’ve got my own shit going on.'”

Hall also confirmed that the iconic keyboard hook in VAN HALEN’s “Jump” was inspired by HALL & OATES’s song “Kiss Is On My List”. “That is correct,” Daryl said. “That’s what [Eddie] always told me. He said that inspired ‘Jump’.”

You can hear the full conversation below.

Hall wasn’t the only singer Eddie reportedly approached about joining VAN HALEN before he recruited Sammy Hagar to front the band. Former JOURNEY vocalist Steve Perry told Rolling Stone in a 2020 interview that he was “honored” when Eddie asked him to come to Los Angeles and jam but that he felt he wasn’t “really suited” to representing VAN HALEN’s “legacy up to that point”. Patty Smyth of the group SCANDAL also said that she was asked to join VAN HALEN but that she ultimately declined because “they were heavy drinkers” and she didn’t want to relocate to Los Angeles. “I was, like, ‘I’m from New York. We don’t move to L.A.,'” she recalled in a 2020 interview with Stereogum.

Hall is an inductee into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame with the best-selling duo of all time. He is also the star of his very own award-winning web series-turned-TV staple “Live From Daryl’s House”, as well as a successful venue owner with Daryl’s House, a restored live music space in Pawling, New York.

Photo credit: Stuart Berg

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In a new interview with retired boxer David “Niño” Rodriguez, Ted Nugent was asked why he hasn’t yet collaborated on music with fellow outspoken conservative rocker Kid Rock. Ted responded (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “Kid Rock and I communicate. In fact, he plays [the Nugent song] ‘Cat Scratch Fever’ [in concert] every night.

“Here’s a great statement. Panama City, Florida, I think, is making a very profound statement because they hired me to headline the beach bash in Panama City on Friday, April 29th, and the next night they hired Kid Rock to headline the beach bash in Panama City on Saturday, April 30th,” he continued. “If they’re hiring Ted Nugent and Kid Rock, what do you think they might try to convey with that? It’s gonna be a flamethrower of we the people, middle fingers on fire, ’cause he is so on the money.”

Nugent added: “I think being raised in the Motor City, I would like to think, since [Kid Rock] likes really soulful, pounding, grinding music — hello? — I think he might have been paying attention to Uncle Ted over the years, and that’s why he’s got his middle finger on fire. Because he’s an entrepreneur, he has a great work ethic, he is really unbelievably creative in his art, he surrounds himself with virtuosos and other creative entrepreneurial-type individuals, So that’s the world I live in, that’s the world you live in, that’s the world Kid Rock lives in, that’s the world all the people in the asset column… People who get up early — that rush hour, pain the ass, they do it every day because they wanna be in the asset column for their family. So Kid Rock and I share that middle finger of independence. And the most important thing on the planet: critical thinking. Anything status quo or standard operating procedure must be scrutinized and you will learn to dismiss it. ‘Cause everything status quo is horrible for the American Dream. And that’s what Kid Rock represents.”

Nugent and Kid Rock got to spend some time in the Oval Office with then-U.S. president Donald Trump in April 2017. They were joined by Sarah Palin, the former Alaskan governor and GOP vice presidential nominee, who posted photos of the visit on social media the following morning. Nugent later told the Detroit Free Press that he and Kid Rock represent a salt-of-the-earth American demographic that helped Trump land the presidency.

Nugent, an outspoken conspiracy theorist who has refused to take the vaccine, has falsely claimed that public health measures taken during the COVID-19 pandemic violate the Nuremberg code, a set of medical experimentation guidelines set after World War Two, as the vaccine is “experimental.”

In the past, Nugent, who battled COVID-19 last April, had referred to the virus as a “leftist scam to destroy” former U.S. president Donald Trump. He had also repeated a narrative pushed by conservative media and disputed by health experts that suggests the official death count from the coronavirus is inflated.

Nugent’s new studio album, “Detroit Muscle”, is due on April 29 via Pavement Music. The follow-up to 2018’s “The Music Made Me Do It” was recorded with Ted’s current band, which includes bassist Greg Smith and drummer Jason Hartless.

Kid Rock’s new single, “We The People”, features the chorus of “Let’s go, Brandon,” conservative code for “Fuck Joe Biden” (born when a NASCAR reporter misheard a crowd, reporting that they chanted in support of racer Brandon Brown when they were actually chanting expletives toward the U.S. president), and also takes aim at the mainstream media, CNN, TMZ, Twitter and Facebook, as well as mask mandates and COVID-19 restrictions.

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Fan-filmed video of JUDAS PRIEST’s March 10 concert at Moda Center in Portland, Oregon can be seen below.

The band’s setlist was as follows:

01. One Shot At Glory
02. Lightning Strike
03. You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’
04. Freewheel Burning
05. Turbo Lover
06. Hell Patrol
07. The Sentinel
08. A Touch Of Evil
09. Rocka Rolla
10. Victim Of Changes
11. Desert Plains
12. Blood Red Skies
13. Invader
14. Painkiller

Encore:

15. The Hellion / Electric Eye
16. Hell Bent For Leather
17. Breaking The Law
18. Living After Midnight

The tour will conclude on April 13 at FirstOntario Centre in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Support on the trek is coming from QUEENSRŸCHE.

JUDAS PRIEST was forced to postpone around two dozen North American shows on its rescheduled 50th-anniversary tour in late September after the band’s guitarist Richie Faulkner suffered an acute cardiac aortic dissection during a performance at the Louder Than Life festival. He ended up undergoing a 10-hour life-saving surgery a short distance away at Rudd Heart and Lung Center at UofL Health – Jewish Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky.

QUEENSRŸCHE was originally set to support SCORPIONS on their rescheduled “Sin City Nights” Las Vegas residency in March-April 2022 but pulled out of the dates in order to take part in the JUDAS PRIEST tour. SCORPIONS have since tapped SKID ROW as the new opening act for the Vegas residency.

Faulkner’s medical episode happened while he was performing the closing song of PRIEST’s set on the final day of Louder Than Life. Faulkner later said in a statement: “As I watch footage from the Louder Than Life Festival in Kentucky, I can see in my face the confusion and anguish I was feeling whilst playing ‘Painkiller’ as my aorta ruptured and started to spill blood into my chest cavity.”

Two weeks after his surgery, Faulkner told reporters that he experienced a sharp pain as he was stepping off the stage. “That’s when it exploded,” he said.

“The more I read about it, the more astonishing it is to me to think that I even made it to the hospital,” he added. “The amount of time when I actually go the pain and when I turned up in the hospital and when we were actually operating, it was quite a lot of time. The more I read about it, the more unbelievable — that amount of time — I don’t know how I’m still around today.”

Faulkner said he had no history of heart complications and that the aliment came completely “out of the blue.”

“My point is I don’t even have high cholesterol and this could’ve been the end for me,” he said. “If you can get yourselves checked — do it for me, please.”

Aortic aneurysms are “balloon-like bulges in the aorta, the large artery that carries blood from the heart through the chest and torso,” according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. Dissections happen when the “force of blood pumping can split the layers of the artery wall, allowing blood to leak in between them.”

Doctors said Faulkner will continue to be monitored and will receive a CT scan every six months for the first year.

Faulkner joined PRIEST in 2011 as the replacement for original guitarist K.K. Downing.

The Peoria concert took place less than two months after JUDAS PRIEST revealed that it would perform as a four-piece when it returns to the road in early March. A few hours later, the band’s touring guitarist Andy Sneap, who co-produced the group’s 2018 album “Firepower”, released a statement to BLABBERMOUTH.NET in which he said that he was “incredibly disappointed” by PRIEST’s decision to carry on as a quartet and thanked the Rob Halford-fronted outfit for the “mind-blowing” opportunity to share the stage with one of his favorite bands. Meanwhile, PRIEST fans were understandably upset about the band’s decision to forgo its classic twin-guitar attack sound and made their feelings known on social media. Some even called for the return of Downing, who joined PRIEST in 1970 and remained in the group until 2011.

Only five days later, JUDAS PRIEST released a statement announcing that it was reversing its decision to tour as a four-piece, explaining that the bandmembers “decided unanimously” to continue their live shows “unchanged” with Halford, Faulkner, Ian Hill (bass), Scott Travis (drums) and Andy.

Less than two months ago, Downing said in an interview that it was “very, very strange” for PRIEST “to even think about” the possibility of going out as a quartet. “I’m like everybody else. I’m totally bemused,” he told the “Rock Of Nations With Dave Kinchen” classic rock show. It was just so extreme and insulting in a way, I guess, and insulting to Glenn as well. It was kind of a slap in the face, saying, ‘Okay, you two guys did it, but we think just one guy could do what…’ It kind of made us and everything that we’ve done and created, saying it was all superfluous, really, and didn’t really have the value that… I’m sure Glenn will agree with me that it does have a value.”

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