Judas Priest‘s Richie Faulkner is sharing more details about his health struggles over the last few years. In an interview with PremierGuitar, the guitarist revealed that he suffered a stroke that left him with permanent damage to his brain, which has affected how he plays his instrument.
The musician, who previously suffered an acute cardiac aortic dissection during a 2021 show, explained that in 2022, he noticed that “something was different” about how he used his right hand to play guitar and brush his teeth. He decided to see a doctor and quickly learned he had damage to his brain after experiencing a stroke, not a Transient Ischemic Attack (TIA) as he had previously believed.
“They found some damage on the left side of the brain, which affects the right side [of my body],” Faulkner said. “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.”
“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,” he added, explaining he also had open-heart surgery to address “a leak” in his heart. “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.”
In the interview, Faulkner said he worried that people would quickly notice he was not playing the band’s songs correctly, and he felt a lot of “fear” and “felt like a fraud” about how the condition would affect him.
“I just thought if I kind of free that up, if I make that accessible, then the truth is the truth. You can’t argue the truth. That’s the way it is. I still play, we’re still writing records, we’re still playing as hard as we can — it doesn’t affect that — but there’s just little things I have to do,” he told the outlet. “But I go out every night thinking… Sometimes I come off stage and I call home and I say, ‘I can’t fucking do it. I can’t do it. I can’t do it.’”
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“There’s stuff that I used to play: I used to think something, and it would come out. And now I’m up there struggling to play like a rhythm pattern,” he added. “‘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.”
Shortly after his onstage heart emergency in 2021, Faulkner’s doctor, Siddharth Pahwa, said the musician was still alive “because the stars aligned.” Pahwa said at the time: “He had an outstanding emergency care team, he was close to a world-class heart center, and he was quick to recognize he needed help.”
