Judas Priest Power Outage Hits Belgrade Concert

Just when the show seemed to be going exactly as planned, the power cut out in the middle of “The Ripper,” and it turned out the most memorable part of the night was the one that wasn’t on the setlist.

Judas Priest played Belgrade’s Usce park on Friday, August 28, eleven years after their last concert in the city. Gates opened at 5:30 p.m., the evening started at 6:30 p.m. with a set from Jelusick, the band fronted by Dino Jelusic, and Judas Priest took the stage at exactly 8 p.m. Rob Halford kept the greeting short, with no wasted words: “Hello everyone, Priest is back!” he told the crowd, and with that the job was essentially done before the first chorus even hit.

Opening with “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’,” followed by “Metal Gods” and “Breaking the Law,” the band made clear it had no plans to spend time on small talk. That’s the logic behind the “Faithkeepers” tour, which runs through nearly the group’s entire history without much of a lull. Then, in the middle of “The Ripper,” the power went out. The lights, screens and sound system all cut at once, and an announcement from the stage explained it was a technical problem, asking the crowd for patience. The break lasted about ten minutes, long enough to become part of the story of the night, but not long enough to spoil it.

What happened next says more about the band than the outage itself. When the power came back, Judas Priest didn’t start over or pause to rebuild momentum, they picked up exactly where they’d left off, running through “The Ripper,” then “The Sentinel” and “Desert Plains,” as if the break had been part of the schedule all along. For a band that’s been on stage for more than five decades, that’s no small thing. The rest of the set continued with “Lightning Strike,” “Turbo Lover,” “Steeler,” “Delivering the Goods,” “Panic Attack,” “No Surrender,” “Victim of Changes” and “Painkiller,” then “The Hellion,” “Electric Eye,” “Hell Bent for Leather” and finally “Living After Midnight.” During “Hell Bent for Leather,” Halford rode onto the stage on his motorcycle, as he always does, a move that’s been part of the show for as long as the song itself, but one that still lands every time.

Accounts differ slightly on how long the show ran and how many songs made the cut. Headliner reports the concert lasted an hour and forty minutes with 17 songs played, while the reconstructed setlist in that same report lists 18 titles, likely because “The Ripper” appears twice, split around the power cut. Tanjug does not give an exact running time. The crowd estimates vary too: Headliner writes of several thousand metal fans, Tanjug of several thousand attendees, and no official figure has been released.

Whatever the count, the point of the night is clear. Despite the crowd’s demands and minutes of applause, the band did not come back for an encore. “We Are the Champions” played over the speakers, and a message appeared on the big screen saying Judas Priest would return, though sources do not agree on its exact wording, so it isn’t quoted here. Earlier in the evening, Halford had explained the meaning behind the tour’s name, “Faithkeepers,” saying that the band and its audience have kept that bond alive together for decades.

For fans who had been waiting for Judas Priest since 2015, the power outage ended up as just an anecdote, not a flaw in the night. A band that’s half a century old showed that a blackout can stop the sound system, but not the rhythm that carries a show, and that, in the end, was the whole job that night.

We wrote earlier about the concert announcement and the traffic changes around Usce in “Judas Priest Tonight at Usce: Schedule and Closed Streets.”