Friday, April 21: Halford, “Screaming in the Dark”
“Screaming in the Dark” was one of three new studio tracks tacked to the end of Live Insurrection, acting as something of a victory lap for the Halford band after the warm reception awarded to Resurrection. And as the only newly written studio number (the other two were refurbished from unused Priest demos), the tune was sort of a bridge between Resurrection and Crucible, leveraging the trad metal framework of the former with the increased bite of the latter. And with the chugging central riff over which Rob Halford literally screamed in the dark the entire time, it felt like a natural predecessor to Crucible’s “Betrayal”. Halford as a band wasn’t a commercial juggernaut, and years later Rob would claim that he only started it up to show his former colleagues in Priest he was ready to make traditional heavy metal again in hopes of them taking him back. This was unfair to the band, because the songs and performance were all there, and “Screaming in the Dark” was a killer banger in its own right.








