Judas Priest – Thunder and Lightning of the Metal Gods Amid the Ruins of the Pula Amphitheater (2026)
Judas Priest (support: Jelusick)
Tuesday, August 25, 2026, 8:30 p.m. to 11:30 p.m.
Pula / Arena / Croatia
The idea that Judas Priest would still be playing stages around the world 57 years after forming in Birmingham in 1969 sounds more like a really badly made-up stunt. Wrong. This band is standing tall. It’s still got the ferocity. It’s making albums – and great ones, on top of that! And it stays clearly focused! More than that, it’s promising yet another new album. Gentlemen of metal, and of course we call them the gods of metal too! A band of huge pioneering spirit and endless inspiration, after all these long decades, still can’t and won’t disappoint in 2026. Despite plenty of (justified) worries that every one of their shows could be the last, Judas Priest have a clear answer to that too. They’re holding on to their status as a major force even in the autumn of their lives.
The “Faithkeepers” tour is drawing great crowds. Shows are packed. And with it, Judas Priest returned to Croatia for only the second time, conquering the Pula Arena. They came back after 35 years. They first played there in late February 1991. That was Zagreb, one day after the show in Ljubljana. And it was ‘that’ famous “Painkiller” tour. The return of towering legends who spent the seventies discovering heavy metal and putting it on the world map promised a real, proper celebration. Rivers of black T-shirts flowed into the Arena from everywhere. Already on the outskirts of Pula you could spot clusters of people on the road who knew exactly where they’d be spending the evening. At the toll station right before the Pula exit, where tourists were still causing most of the queue and jams, you spotted a pile of license plates from all over Croatia, and from their vehicles (windows down) Judas Priest anthems were thundering.
And then came that rain. Again. It was the only day of the week with a bad forecast. And yet. The whole of Istria in downpours (and I mean its Slovenian part too)! And Pula, down at the south of the peninsula? It got off pretty well through the day. More or less, it got ‘licked’ and flooded between seven and eight, when the two of us were nicely warming up, safe and dry, over a round or two of beer not far from the Arena. The storm that had been threatening from the north all along did finally head off, but that short-lived shower still drenched the Arena properly, and the whole program was pushed back half an hour. So Jelusick hit the stage at half past eight, while outside the Arena there was still a huge crowd waiting to get in. We therefore only heard Jelusick ‘just about’, meaning ‘from outside’ and with ‘half of one ear’. We’ll have to aim for Dino and company another time to catch them live. Jelusick play all over our region a lot, and both albums they’ve released are excellent. Dino is a respected and sought-after vocalist all over the world, and with a singer like that out front, the band is in the form of its life.
At half past nine, it got real. The curtain with the “Faithkeepers” tour motif dropped after the sampled intro, and the band struck straight away with the “Screaming For Vengeance” (1982) classic You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’, which was a surprise, since for years the band had saved precisely this song for the tail end of their shows! Looking into the depth of the stage, four musicians stood side by side for the opening, and behind them, at the drum fortress and raised on a podium, the one and only Scott Travis. They looked like a hockey team about to scatter in every direction across the ice. And that’s exactly what happened. Faulkner and Sneap each took their own (left and right) positions, and out front of everything within your field of view, marching along, was the one and only – Rob Halford! The great Rob Halford, who turned a round 75 on the very day of the band’s show in the Pula Arena. Venerable. When you see this unbelievably charismatic persona on stage, it shakes you. Rob soon took off the sunglasses and, with the trademark egging-on, kept flirting with the crowd. Now on the left, now on the right, then in the middle again. The stage was full of this frontman. For the years behind it, the singing is unbelievably good. All the essential parts of the songs that define metal precisely because of those vocal quirks get sung very, very decently even in 2026. That means they still hit those trademark, extremely high registers. You know how it is. Halford belongs among those five singers who are the generational definition of vocals in heavy metal. The other four would be: Dio, Lemmy, Ozzy and Udo Dirkschneider. Everything that followed and tried to find later expressive detours was, more or less, just barking and croaking. A tribute to a legend. A big tribute. Already in 2012, when we were on the then “Epitaph” tour in early May and caught them in Linz, Austria (back then still with Tipton in the lineup – RockLine concert review), the feeling was that the band was saying goodbye. That we were seeing them for the last time. And now, a good 14 years later, they’re still standing on stage, delighting hordes of loyal followers with big classics of the heavy metal universe.
This time Judas Priest put together a setlist that really gives you insight into which eras of their career the band considers essential. More precisely, groundbreaking. So “British Steel” from 1980 – Richie Faulkner had barely been born then – was once again represented by the most songs, and next to the three standards that can’t be missing from Priest shows (Breaking The Law, Metal Gods (with Halford’s robot march) and the closing, party-starting Living After Midnight), somewhere in the middle of the set they treated us to a sweet candy from the repertoire – Steeler, which after many years made its way back to European concert stages too! Just under two hours of show is little time for picking a repertoire if you’re Judas Priest. Still, you could pick up on the evolution of the band’s sound calling card, especially through the one-of-a-kind standard Victim Of Changes (Halford wailed it out beautifully for the years behind it), then the villainous The Ripper (both from “Sad Wings Of Destiny”, 1976) and then the ‘simplification of songwriting’ that first becomes truly noticeable on “Killing Machine” (1978), with the killers Delivering The Goods and Hell Bent For Leather (Halford rode onto the stage on a motorcycle for this one and sang the whole song on the bike). The eighties drew the shorter straw this time, though the band made up for it with the unforgettable The Sentinel (“Defenders Of the Faith”, 1984), while Electric Eye keeps its status in the repertoire as a mandatory standard of every setlist. The Pula Arena literally burned with every emotion when Priest launched into the long-awaited Painkilller from the album of the same name. It’s a monstrous conglomerate of the heavy metal universe, standing in a special place in the band’s catalog and still representing one of the most inspiring documents in the world of metal, one that new and newer generations of metal fans keep drawing from. Even without newer – ‘Richie Faulkner era’ – material it wasn’t possible! Two songs from the album “Firepower” and one from the latest album “Invincible Shield”. Stylistically all three fit superbly into everything you imagine under the name Judas Priest. And of course Turbo Lover is here again too, a reminder that Priest kept developing their sound all through the eighties and… Oh, of course – it would be a sin not to mention it, there’s the second candy! The best song from the “softer” album of Judas Priest’s career, “Point Of Entry” (1981), out of which rang the phenomenal Desert Plains, where the incredible Scott Travis shone once again with hair-splitting precision and power.
No point going on about how tight they were. Same goes for the sound that night. Superb. Add to that a jam-packed venue with a crowd that literally screams, feels and breathes every note and beat of the band on stage, and an experience like that is hard to describe in just a few words. Unlike the band’s show at Ljubljana’s Arena Stožice on July 12, 2022, when the venue was half empty (RockLine concert review), Pula brought a completely different experience. An unforgettable explosion of passion and emotion, in an open, jam-packed, otherwise soaked venue that was literally boiling like a hornets’ nest. And the band was visibly enjoying it. With the picturesque play of stage lighting, the scenic backdrops behind them and the indestructible commander Halford leading this legendary institution, plus of course razor-sharp, jagged execution of the material, meeting Priest in the Pula Arena belongs in the category of unforgettable and unique concert experiences. A show that fills you with energy, a show that ends too quickly, and afterwards you’re already wondering how long you’ll have to wait for the next one. It confirms just one thing. That after all these giant years, Priest show no signs of wear or fatigue. On the contrary, they give the impression of a young band at the start of its career. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Years are years. We may well have seen Priest for the last time right there in the Pula Arena. Legends are legends. Long ago, like a few of their generational peers, they reached, extended and far surpassed old age. But instead of Halford and Ian Hill staying home to look after the grandkids, these two indestructible uncles, together with the slightly younger Scott Travis and, for their age, two “adopted sons” on the team – the guitarists you’d address formally – Andy Sneap and the especially brilliant Richie Faulkner, keep on delighting us. They’re enjoying it. Simply enjoying it, and not just on stages but in the studio too. As mentioned. A new Judas Priest album is in its first swaddling clothes, which means the band isn’t stopping. Oh, and one more detail. Richie Faulkner played the bulk of the solos. Even the trickiest ones, which on the original recordings are split between Tipton and Downing. Led by all the solo seasoning of the Painkiller classic. Sneap only rarely stepped to the front; he was handed, for example, the tapping solo in Hell Bent For Leather.
Let me say it again. The countdown to the next meeting with the band has begun. No matter that Judas Priest can head off into a more than well-deserved retirement at any time, the band at the Pula show not only convinced us that the beast is still hungry for blood, but also bid us farewell at the end of a great performance with the encouraging message “Priest Will Be Back”. Their further intentions are thus made public. And may it stay that way. As long as possible.
Author: Edita Klemen & Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Judas Priest – setlist:
War Pigs (orig Black Sabbath)/Faithkeepers – sampled intro
1. You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’
2. Metal Gods
3. Breaking the Law
4. The Ripper
5. The Sentinel
6. Desert Plains
7. Lightning Strike
8. Turbo Lover
9. Steeler
10. Delivering the Goods
11. Panic Attack
12. Victim of Changes
13. No Surrender
14. Painkiller
15. The Hellion
16. Electric Eye
17. Hell Bent for Leather
18. Living After Midnight
