The Three Tremors (Halford, Dickinson & Tate)

Pic L.Wire

Once upon a time in Metal la-la land someone had a brainstorming session and dreamed up the idea of getting three legendary vocalists [from three quite popular bands] together. Which three bands and which three front men?

JUDAS PRIEST
IRON MAIDEN
QUEENSRYCHE

Rob Halford
Bruce Dickinson
Geoff Tate

Ponder that one for a moment folks.

Part novelty, part way over-the-top perhaps; this could have been one doozy of a Metal project.

Fast-Forward ten years…

So what happened with “The Three Tremors” (aka Rob Halford, Bruce Dickinson & Geoff Tate)?

GT: “Nothing. It was just kind of an idea that was lightly talked about at dinner. People do that. Often times, “What if we do this?” or “What if we do that?” And it just never got off the ground. I think once we started talking about it, we didn’t really have anything in common musically.

Secondly, to make a record you really have to focus on it. Hang out together, write; it’s a six-month endeavor – the writing. Then a few months to record it. And then a tour, you know? You have to be really able to put the time into it. None of us have the time. Maybe in the future we’ll find ourselves with time on our hands and a want to do something. I think we all respect each other as singers but can we find some sort of musical ground that’s common.”

Geoff Tate circa’ 2002

BD: “…Was a project planned with myself, Halford, and Geoff Tate to be called the “Three Tremors,” then we were going to name it “Trinity,” because we figured they would sue our ass if we called it the “Three Tremors”!

I actually came over to L.A. to do some writing for that album with Roy Z, we wrote about three songs but then realized it was going to take us a lot longer than three weeks to write a project with three singers that would work. We wanted to make each song designed to be sung by three different characters as an integral part of the song, not something like; “you sing the first verse, I’ll sing the second verse, and he’ll sing the chorus.” That would be a crap way to do it.

It’s a bloody difficult thing to do, to try to make a song with three different voices to get the full benefit out of it. And it takes longer than three weeks, and we didn’t have longer than that to do it so I canned it in the end.

Pic Henri Kack

It’s a great idea, everybody loves the idea…we had marketing people salivating about the idea of a Trinity project. But the bottom line is, the thing that is gonna sink it is if the music sucks. So I thought we should can the idea for now since we don’t have time to do it. Rob was in the studio doing his album (“Crucible”) and Geoff was writing a new Queensryche album so that was it. It is an interesting idea, and I’m sure the live show would be really interesting, so perhaps in the future it will see the light of day.

The Metal God – Halford

RH: “That’s still waiting to get off the ground. Even now, people are discussing it. It’s one of those things that needs to be fulfilled, I don’t know how it’s gonna happen or when it’s gonna happen but it would be very interesting to see what the outcome would be.”

For now, the next project from Halford is the new Judas Priest album. As for the Three Tremors, metal fans can now enjoy the anticipation for a full-length Halford/Dickinson/Tate album. Gonna’ have to pray to the “Metal Godz” for this miracle to happen – never say NEVER though.

So what do you think? Would it be a flop or a great musical endeavor that you would be interested in hearing?