Last month, Rob Halford posted a few Instagram photos of himself wearing some impressive spiked high heels. As the Judas Priest frontman tells Metal Hammer, the boots were a gift from Halestorm‘s Lzzy Hale.

“When Priest were on tour in New Zealand we worked with Halestorm and I was chatting to Lzzy backstage and she had those particular heels on her feet,” Halford recalls. “I was going, ‘Oh my God, how do you even walk in them?’ She said, ‘Oh, you know, it’s a girl thing…’ But they looked so powerful and they scream ‘heavy metal!"”

As Halford explains, he recently was at the post office when he noticed he’d received a mysterious package.

“It was from Lzzy,” Halford says. “I hadn’t a clue what it was, so I opened it up and there were those spectacular heavy metal heels!”

“She wrote me this really sweet note saying, ‘Hey Rob, hope you’re well, lots of love. We talked about these heels in New Zealand and I found a pair for you. Have fun! Love, Lzzy,"” he adds. “And I thought, ‘How sweet is that?"”

As for the process of wearing the boots, that was anything but sweet — Halford says that he was “blacking out in pain” while taking the photos.

“Those heels fit me, but you’re being pitched at this extraordinarily abnormal angle and then you try to keep your balance,” he explains. “I took about five or six pictures and I threw myself on the couch and ripped those shoes off and was massaging my feet, sweating from head to toe.”

By Josh Johnson
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