1 week ago
9
Judas Priest guitarist Richie Faulkner has revealed that roughly a month after he underwent emergency heart surgery in 2021, he suffered a stroke that led to brain damage and has affected his ability to play guitar.
As widely reported back in 2021, Faulkner’s aorta ruptured onstage during the Louder Than Life festival, leading to a 10-hour emergency surgery that saved the metal musician’s life.
Faulkner has since returned to the band, and continues to tour with the iconic metal act, but in a new video interview with Premier Guitar (as transcribed by Blabbermouth), he disclosed that he suffered another serious health setback shortly after the emergency heart surgery.
The guitarist related the incident and subsequent ramifications as follows:
“We went back out on the road in 2022 and have kind of been on the road since. But there’s a bit of collateral damage. Well, not a lot of people know — some nearest and dearest, they know about it. So about a month after the incident, I went back in and we were walking the dog in the neighborhood back here [in a suburb of Nashville, Tennessee], and I had the dog. [My girlfriend] Mariah had [our daughter] Daisy. And I felt it come, I felt it, and it came over me and I knew it was coming and it came over me and my face went. I couldn’t talk. And Mariah was there. She took the dog, she had the baby, and she was holding me up. The neighbors were running out.”
I haven’t felt comfortable up until this point — and I’ll tell you why — explaining what happened. So long story short, we went into the hospital — this was a month after the surgery — we went back in, and it was the last thing I wanted to do. ‘Fuck hospitals.’ They saved my life, but I’ve had enough of them for a month, So I’m back in there. And they basically said, what I think it was, was a TIA, which means transient ischaemic attack, which is a TIA. It’s a small stroke. So they’re sure it’s that. They put me on some medication. Turned out later on, it was an actual stroke. So Mariah thinks I had one in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. I don’t remember. I don’t recall anything. I remember small ones happening after the event. I was in the bathroom — it kind of went fuzzy and I sort of fell over. I think they were the TIAs, the mini ones. And the hospital said is when you have those, the danger is that there’s a big one coming or a normal stroke coming. So that seems to be what happened — when we were out walking the dog, that’s what happened. And it was obvious — Mariah said, ‘Your face went, you couldn’t talk.’ It was like a weight was pulling me down. I was gonna fall over if she wasn’t holding me up. So, that’s what happened. And at the time, it stopped happening. I had another incident about a year after. I had another open-heart [surgery] — there was a leak, so they went in, opened it up again; I had another small one.
So what happened was we went back out on the road, and I thought everything was fine. There was something in my right hand — I thought it was my rings; I wore these stupid rings for some reason. And I thought it was that. So I took the rings off. I thought it was impeding something. I was changing my picks. There was something different. I could get through it, but there was something different about my right hand. And again, I could get through it. I was brushing my teeth one morning and I thought, ‘Something’s wrong with the right hand. Something’s different.’ And the right foot, the right leg. So we went back in. We’d done some tests. They found some damage on the left side of the brain, which affects the right side. Now, fortunately, I don’t play guitar with my foot, so that’s fine. I can get away with that. But my hand, obviously, that’s our engine room. And everything started clicking into place in regards to what I was feeling on stage. There was something that was wrong. Something was impeding, something wasn’t right. So, as I said, we’d done some more tests. They found the damage. They said that the fact that it hasn’t gone away means that it’s not a TIA; it’s a stroke. TIA damage can go away. Stroke — that’s it. It is damaged. You’ve got damage in your brain. Now I thought I had brain damage before, but this is real. It’s a small thing on the left side.”
Faulkner went on to say that he never talked about the stroke before because after speaking to a couple people in the industry he was concerned about what fans might think, as the stroke affected his guitar playing. He had difficulty laying down the guitar tracks for Judas Priest’s most recent album, 2024’s Invincible Shield, not to mention performing live.
“There’s stuff that I used to play — I used to think something and it would come out,” said Faulkner. “And now I’m up there struggling to play a rhythm pattern. ‘I can’t do it. I can’t. I’m gonna quit. I can’t do it.’ And then you have a good one. So who wants that? But that’s the way it is. That’s the truth. So that’s what I struggle with. That’s the collateral damage.”
But ultimately, he felt it was important to get the information out, to help anyone who might experience a similar health setback. “I have to get it out so people might know what it is,” Faulkner insisted. “I don’t have to hide it anymore. It’s not an excuse to take my foot off the gas — that’s just not in my being — but just so people know.”
Judas Priest have European/UK festival and headlining dates booked from mid April through late July, with tickets available here. Watch Richie Faulkner’s interview with Premier Guitar below.
English (US) · 