Judas Priest – Defenders Of The Faith (1984)

This is another just visceral picture with a lot of action and a lot of motion. I also love how strange the style is. The artist Doug Johnson did a few covers for Judas Priest. He did Turbo and Screaming For Vengeance as well. I'm a fan of airbrush graphic illustrations like this. I think his work is really fantastic. I love the glossiness: how everything looks like it's made of painted metal. I would never think to design something that looked this way. I'm not sure how he comes up with it, because it's got a flat quality to it. But it also is very three-dimensional and rendered. It looks like it's made out of metal, which of course is appropriate, and it looks dangerous. It looks sharp and deadly – like a wrathful deity from Tibetan thangka paintings. It could be something from a children’s book, with the music it adds this dimension where it seems like a metal machine. It sounds like churning riffage – the way Judas Priest sounds.

I guess metal hadn't been firmly determined in terms of imagery at that point. So there was a lot of room for experimentation. Not everything had to be skulls and satanism and things like that. So that's what I like about the early metal stuff. In terms of imagery, it's a lot more open and experimental and strange. Iron Maiden probably influenced a lot of people later to get more into the sinister devil stuff and the satanic stuff – not that they were satanists, of course. I love their covers, too. You can see how there's like a path toward there having to be a grim reaper, or for some kind of grim character, which started with Iron Maiden. But Judas Priest really experimented a lot. They had some great artists do their covers, and they seem to not really be tied down to any certain type of imagery, other than just their own aesthetic.