Rob Halford has urged men to get their “prostate checked” after his cancer battle.
The Judas Priest frontman was diagnosed with prostate cancer amid the COVID-19 pandemic last year, but, fortunately, he is in remission.
And now, the 70-year-old heavy metal icon has explained the reason he updated his version of his ‘Confess’ autobiography to include his diagnosis was in order to encourage men of a “certain age” to get themselves checked out regularly.
In an interview with MariskalRock, Rob began “It’s in remission. I count my blessings — thanks to God. It was a time when … You know, timing is everything in rock and roll and heavy metal. And, of course, this was going on during the pandemic — the initial stages of the pandemic — so the world was completely closed down.
“Priest would have been on a bit of a hiatus anyway, because we had just been around the world three times with [Priest’s latest album] ‘Firepower’, so we were gonna be on a kind of a break although we were writing for the new album.
“And so I was able to take care of three things, really — promote [my autobiography] ‘Confess’, do some writing with the band before I came back [home] to Phoenix, and then get this cancer business sorted out.”
He then urged: “It’s just a miracle what they can do with health care these days; it’s absolutely remarkable. So in my story, my main message is to guys everywhere around the world, when you get to a certain age, it’s very important that you get your prostate checked, your bloodwork checked, get a colonoscopy.
“It’s all these things that old blokes like me go, ‘Wait, wait, wait.’ That’s the worst thing to do. So that was part of the reason I wanted to push the message out. And the fact that it’s been out for a while anyway — it’s been out since last September in the final edition of the ‘Confess’ paperback — so it was gonna surface anyway.”