Song · Judas Priest
“Turbo Lover” by Judas Priest
From the album Turbo (1986)
“Turbo Lover” by Judas Priest appears on 10 radio countdowns from 4 stations between 1990 and 2025. It was first released in 1986 on the album Turbo. Its best result is #176 on the Z-Rock Top 1001 Songs of All-Time (1990). In the combined RockLists rankings it is #3,399 classic rock song of all time.
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"Turbo Lover" came off Judas Priest's Turbo in 1986, and it's the sound of the band wiring synthesizers straight into their heavy metal, a sleek, pulsing machine of a song that one magazine even likened to Kraftwerk. The lyric runs on motorcycle imagery with an aggressive, sexual charge, and Rob Halford has described the song as escapism.
Halford wrote it with Glenn Tipton and Kenneth Downing, who both play electric guitar on it, Tipton taking the solo, with Ian Hill on bass and Dave Holland on drums. Tom Allom produced, then mixed it with engineer Bill Dooley and the two guitarists. The album around it drew mixed and often harsh reviews, but critics have been far kinder to this track, and it now gets hailed as a Priest classic.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
RockLists rankings
Classic Rock
Hard Rock & Metal
All Rock Formats
All-time and decade countdowns
| Year | # | Station | Countdown | of |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | 176 | Z-Rock | Z-Rock Top 1001 Songs of All-Time (1990) | 1000 |
| 1994 | 639 | KISW | KISW Top 1000 of All Time (1994) | 1000 |
| 1995 | 596 | KISW | KISW Top 1000 of All Time (1995) | 1000 |
| 1996 | 511 | KISW | KISW Top 1000 of All Time (1996) | 1000 |
| 1998 | 587 | KISW | KISW Top 1000 of All Time (1998) | 1000 |
| 1999 | 628 | KISW | KISW Top 1000 of All Time (1999) | 998 |
| 2002 | 535 | KISW | KISW Top 999 of All Time (2002) | 999 |
| 2022 | 436 | 99.1 PLR | 99.1 PLR Big 500 (2022) | 500 |
| 2023 | 1004 | 101.5 WPDH | WPDH Top 1015 (2023) | 1015 |
| 2025 | 383 | 99.1 PLR | 99.1 PLR Top 400 of the Last 40 Years (2025) | 400 |
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