Ian Hill has retired from Judas Priest, ending a 57-year run that began in 1970 and made him the only musician to appear on all 19 of the band’s studio albums. He said Davey Rimmer will take his place.
The timing matters because Hill, 73, said his body has simply stopped giving him the margin he needed to keep going. He said arthritis has reached an advanced stage in his left shoulder and right hand, is established in his right shoulder and is present in both knees, and that he had been trying to manage it with painkilling pills, gels and cortisone injections.
Hill’s decision also follows a sharp warning from his own recent experience onstage. He missed his first-ever Judas Priest show last month after badly damaging a tendon in his left arm, and Rimmer filled in. Hill later said he snapped a tendon in his left shoulder just before the encores during the Brussels show two days before the London show, leaving him unable to lift his arm high enough to reach the neck of his bass.
That is where the choice of replacement becomes the story’s clearest next step. Hill called Rimmer the obvious choice and said he is a great bassist and a genuinely nice bloke who will fit the job perfectly. Rimmer has been with Uriah Heep since 2013, and Judas Priest has already used him once in Hill’s place, so the handoff is not being made in the dark.
There is still one practical wrinkle. Hill said specialists suggested he might get away without surgery, which means the retirement is not being framed as a medical emergency so much as a line he no longer wants to cross. He said he could keep going only until his performances suffered, and added that the time had come. He also said he had neglected his family life for 57 years and now wants to spend the remaining years making up for it, doing things with them before it comes to one of them pushing him around in a wheelchair.
For Judas Priest, the change arrives with no 2026 shows left on the calendar and the next date currently set for June 2027 in Oslo, Norway. That gives the band time to settle the new lineup, but it also leaves an open question about how Hill’s retirement will be marked when the group returns to the road. For a player who helped carry the band from Rocka Rolla in 1974 to Invincible Shield in 2024, the retirement closes one of heavy metal’s longest uninterrupted runs at the same time it opens a new phase for the band he helped define.
