Judas Priest and Alice Cooper: A suitably wild ode to Ozzy – with help from Johnny Depp

Telegraph

26-07-2025

Inevitably, and rightfully, at their more-or-less co-headline concert at a busy O2 Arena, both Judas Priest and Alice Cooper found ways to memorialise their late comrade in metal, the pioneer Ozzy Osbourne, who died earlier this week. As well as having Black Sabbath's War Pigs as their intro music, fellow sons-of-Birmingham Priest splayed Osbourne's likeness on a giant screen. Over an hour earlier, without ceremony, Cooper led his own capable group, along with members of his first band – and a surprise appearance from Johnny Depp on guitar – through a spirited version of Sabbath's Paranoid. The singer introduced Depp, with whom he plays in the side project Hollywood Vampires, as 'some guy we found in the alley'. With the actor bearing the look of a man who paints towns red for a living, this wasn't hard to believe.
Despite becoming the eldest statesman of West Midlands metal singers just this week, 73-year-old Priest frontman Rob Halford wasn't the oldest person on the bill. Still singing songs about blowing up schools – the deathless School's Out, of course – at four years his senior, that honour goes to Alice Cooper. Like Ozzy, the pair have had their run-ins with excess. In London, the evident sprightliness of both Cooper and Halford was attributable either to several decades of abstinent living or else the restorative powers of walloping music.
Returning with his trademark streaky black eye make-up and numerous costume changes, Alice Cooper looked much the same as he did in the 1980s. As one would expect from the godfather of shock rock, in an hour-long set that peaked quite brilliantly, the daft theatrics were present and correct. There was a guillotine, a straitjacket and a man dressed as Jason Voorhees from the Friday the 13th series. Despite never being much of a singer to begin with, Cooper's half-an-octave voice remains in good shape.
Incredibly, the same can be said for Rob Halford. During a relentless Painkiller, on which he sounded exactly the same as he did in the 1990s, the frontman reached notes that were so high, and so clear, that I could only imagine every dog in Greenwich was losing its mind. Dressed in black and patrolling the stage like a headmaster at a school for Satanists, Halford was every inch the commanding frontman. Despite these days resembling Uncle Albert, from Only Fools & Horses, he even managed to ride a motorbike onstage during the irresistible Hell Bent For Leather.
While Ozzy and Sabbath have harvested due credit for creating metal more or less single-handedly, the legacy of Priest remains, I think, somewhat underpriced. But as well as minting the 1980s aesthetic of leather and studs, musically, the quintet influenced both the poppier end of the market – particularly with Living After Midnight, the 75-minute set's closing song – while pointing the way forward for heavier and darker bands such as Megadeth and Slayer. Unlike Ozzy, Halford may not be on first name terms with the wider public; but it's not for nothing that he's called 'the Metal God'.
At the top of the evening, opening act Phil Campbell & The Bastard Sons played Ace Of Spades, the evergreen classic from Campbell's old band Motörhead. Alice Cooper knocked out I'm Eighteen; Priest unveiled You've Got Another Thing Comin'. From first to last, at the O2 Arena, even the death of a rock deity couldn't smother the sound of giants walking among us still. As it always has, and as it always will, metal lives on.
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