Dave Holland former Judas Priest Drummer and rapist dead

Post Reply New Topic

Dave Holland, Judas Priest's drummer during their commercial peak in the Eighties, died at the age of 69. He had been living in exile in A Fonsagrada, Spain after being convicted of the attempted rape of a 17-year-old boy and subsequently serving a sentence in prison. The Spanish newspaper El Progreso first reported that Holland had died at Hospital Universitario Lucus Augusti de Lugo on January 16th, but did not report a cause of death. Rolling Stone has confirmed Holland's death.

With Judas Priest, he played on all of the band's releases between 1980's British Steel and 1988's Ram It Down – including the hits "Breaking the Law," "You've Got Another Thing Comin'" and "Heading Out to the Highway" – before his departure in 1989. In The Story of Judas Priest: Defenders of the Faith, original Judas Priest singer Al Atkins said Holland left the band for two reasons: to tend to his sister, who had multiple sclerosis, and ailing mother and because the band reportedly never made him a full member.

Prior to Judas Priest, Holland played in a folk-rock group, Pinkerton's Assorted Colours, which scored a hit in the U.K. with the plinky, autoharp-tinged number "Mirror Mirror" in 1965. He later played with the hard-rock group Trapeze, which also featured future Deep Purple and Black Sabbath bassist and singer Glenn Hughes. He also drummed on Hughes' 1977 solo album Play Me Out. After Priest, he recorded solo projects with Atkins (1998's Victim of Changes), as well as Hughes and Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi, though his work with the latter was scrubbed and re-recorded by another drummer due to Holland's sex crime conviction.

In January 2004, Holland was convicted of the 2002 sexual assault of a 17-year-old drumming student with learning disabilities. The boy, who had occasionally spent the night at Holland's house where he took the lessons, had detailed the abuse in a letter to his parents. Holland denied the charges, but a jury found him guilty of one count of attempted rape and five counts of indecent assault.

In his autobiography, Iron Man, Iommi remembered his shock when he'd heard the news. "You could have knocked me over with a feather; I had no idea he was like that at all," the guitarist wrote. "I remember Dave playing … one day and he brought this young lad. I never thought anything of it. He said, 'This is so-and-so, I'm teaching him to play drums. He's a student of mine.' He was probably about 11 or 12 years old or so, maybe a bit older. But when I found out about all that, blimey. … We thought, we can't release these [recordings] with Dave on them so I took his drum parts off [2004's The 1996 DEP Sessions].