Joe Elliott – Def Leppard – Uber Rock Interview Exclusive
Written by Steve Beebee
Sunday, 17 January 2016 04:00
“David Coverdale burst into our room in his dressing gown, and said ‘why the hell did you have to dump Pete Way on me?’”
Def Leppard frontman Joe Elliott is laughing at one of his favourite memories of the venue he’s playing tonight. It’s December 12th, 2015, and we are sitting in a small, dimly lit room backstage at Birmingham’s 15,000-capacity Genting Arena (better known as the NEC). Def Leppard and Whitesnake are once again topping the bill, just as they did in 2008 when the Pete Way incident occurred.
The legendary UFO and Waysted bassist, renowned for his capacity for partying, had apparently drunk Leppard’s rider dry before moving on to Coverdale’s. “Pete got into his dressing room,” laughs Joe. “He’d cleared our bar out, so he went for David’s. It’s moments like that which I remember. There was also a photo taken here of Phil [Collen, guitarist] and me wearing boxing gloves while talking to Black Stone Cherry, which I also remember for some reason.”
Just like that show in 2008, and the back-to-back dates they played here 20 years before that, the arena is sold out tonight. From a band whose heyday is usually regarded as being some three decades ago, we’re talking about the type of sticking power you’d normally only associate with ‘Star Wars’. With Whitesnake and Black Star Riders also playing, it’s enough to put classic rock fans into a hot flush. All the same, given the turbulent state of the music business, it’s pretty bloody impressive.
It helps that Def Leppard recently released their best album since 1987’s ‘Hysteria’. Self-titled, it made the Top 10 in the US. It’s without a doubt Leppard’s strongest set of songs for many years (read Johnny H’s spot-on review here), and it’s also their most varied, at least since 1996’s fan-dividing ‘Slang’.
Behind the stage, a few hours before the headline band’s showtime, road crews are pushing large wheeled flight cases around at considerable speed. They somehow avoid Rick Allen, Def Leppard’s remarkable drummer, who is sedately walking up the ramp to inspect the stage set-up.
A corridor leads off to the left, and it’s full of rock stars. This writer is led through it, easing past Scott Gorham and Ricky Warwick of Black Star Riders who are about to go on stage – few musicians look quite as scarily intense as Warwick in these moments. Phil Collen is in a doorway talking to Live Nation boss Andy Copping. Fellow Leppard guitarist Vivian Campbell is patiently smiling and hand-shaking, and Whitesnake guitarist Joel Hoekstra, beaming as always, pokes his head out of his dressing room.
In a somewhat surreal scenario, I find myself deposited between David Coverdale and Joe Elliott. The former is boisterously teasing the latter about something. Elliott feigns disgust and shakes his head in the manner of an embarrassed and put-upon teenage son. Like a ridiculous potted plant, I just stand there, agog.
We eventually leave Coverdale to his good-humoured verbal sparring, and the Def Leppard singer leads me on a quest to find somewhere quiet for the interview. One route is blocked by the other three Black Star Riders, brandishing instruments. Another finds a small dark room in which Leppard bassist Rick ‘Sav’ Savage is attempting to have some chill time. Sav says hello and graciously leaves us to it.
“I’d be lying if I said there was no rivalry,” says Joe, describing relations with Whitesnake. “But really, we both want each other to do well. It doesn’t matter if you’re going on first, last or in the middle, if the audience has the attention span to watch all three bands, then potentially everyone wins. There’s no rivalry in that, but obviously all bands want to be as popular as possible, so you’re always vying for top spot. But rest assured, Lord Coverdale and I get on famously!”
Talk inevitably turns to Leppard’s new album, music that was approached in an entirely different way to any of their previous recordings. Rather than entering the studio with a potentially punishing schedule, the band wrote and recorded chunks of material whenever they could, not even aware that a full album would result.
“We just went in to do a couple of songs,” says Joe. “Everybody had been saying for the last five years that the album format was dead – we didn’t like what we were hearing, but we were taking note. We thought we’d do something like Ash did a few years back, when they put out a load of singles, or we’d just start doing EPs. We did an EP when we started out in 1979, so why not do one in 2015? The problem was that we wanted three songs, and after a month or so realised we’d have to pick those three out of a total of 12.”
Writing and recording without baggage or expectation meant the pressure was off, not a scenario Def Leppard were used to. As a result, the ideas and the music flowed. They hadn’t released a studio album since 2008’s ‘Songs From The Sparkle Lounge’. The latter was also the last album they were contractually obligated to make. In effect, it set them free.
“I still think that ‘…Sparkle Lounge’ is a good album, but this album is clearly a better one,” says Joe. “It’s not just through what you hear. When you’re in a band creating something and then looking back on it, it’s not like eating a cake after you’ve baked it – you also think about how it got to be a cake and what that whole creative process was like.
“I looked at all these songs and thought ‘wow, where have all this lot come from?’. We decided not to pick three, but to make a full record. Some of the songs were finished, while others were still skeletal, without lyrics or melodies, so we went away and worked on them in our own time. Then we got back together and wrote two more, so we ended up with 14.”
By the time Def Leppard joined Kiss on the road in 2014, virtually everything had been written. Joe finished the lyrics to ‘Blind Faith’ and a couple of other songs on days off during that tour, and in the back of the tour bus. When it came to recording, there was no 9-5, three-month time frame to worry about. Taking time off meant they could come back and, with the benefit of hindsight, identify certain flaws and remedy them.
“If you just put a song to bed for 24 hours, and then come back to it, you don’t have that perspective,” explains Joe. “Every artist on the planet should make an album like this, with the freedom of no label, no time constraints, and no budget – we did everything ourselves. Having that artistic freedom was amazing. In 35 years, we’d never had that, not even for [first album] ‘On Through The Night’.
“With this record, the mental side of the process was different. We still all hung out in my studio [in Dublin], made coffee and talked, catching up on the kids and the wives, so that side of it was still there. Then it was a case of seeing who had what in terms of songwriting, and we’d work on it in the same room we’ve used since [1992’s] ‘Adrenalize’.”
The new approach wasn’t just limited to recording. Rather than sticking to the standard procedure of releasing an album and then promoting it with a tour, Def Leppard merely extended the tour they were already on. They’d done 73 dates before the album came out. The only changes were to the setlist, which now opens with ‘Let’s Go’ from ‘Def Leppard’, and also includes ‘Dangerous’. Other than that, the Leppard ship sailed on – both through the night and beyond.
“Instead of coming off tour, we started all over again in Japan,” recalls Joe, with a weary smile. “We’ve now got more US dates that take us to October. We will take breaks of course. It’s not just that we’re not as young as we were, but we’ve all got home lives to juggle and you can only put that to one side for a certain amount of time before your kids forget who you are. None of us want to go through that.
“It’s just part of being grown up – the Rolling Stones have been dealing with it for decades. When we finish towards the end of 2016 we’ll probably be done for a while, unless something sparkling comes our way. If we got offered Download, Hellfest or Sweden Rocks [in 2017] we’d do those and we might put in some European shows around them, but we wouldn’t be going on tour again. Instead, we would certainly look at making another album.”
Def Leppard know better than most the perils of overkill. In their younger years, touring undoubtedly took its toll – the story of how original guitarist Steve Clark succumbed to alcoholism at the age of just 30 is well known and need not be repeated here, but it remains a stern reminder of the rock lifestyle’s potential pitfalls. With Clark’s replacement, Vivian Campbell, now engaged in a long-running health battle of his own – against Hodgkin’s lymphoma – the band ploughs on with one eye focused on not derailing itself. A few months ago, they were – by Joe’s admission – “falling over”.
“How many times do you see a football player carrying on despite not being 100% fit? Sometimes the manager has to play him because there’s no real choice. It’s been the same for us – we carry on if we can.
“Vivian has his cancer thing going on, and it is what it is. That’s an ongoing situation but he’s happy and healthy, and wants to play. At the moment it looks like he’s coming down with the flu which is a shame, but I know what he’s like – unless someone actually chops his fingers off, he’s not gonna stop playing guitar.”
For both Joe and Sav, what appeared to be a cough picked up in August turned out to be something more serious. At the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, a South Dakota biker festival, some of the audience chose to rev their engines between songs instead of clapping, leading to those on stage breathing in dust and gasoline fumes.
“That resulted in me and Sav getting a bacterial infection called Mycoplasma Pneumoniae, which is basically walking pneumonia,” says Joe. “It ripped my talking register to pieces, but not my high register, so I could still sing ‘Photograph’ and so on, but was struggling with some of the songs. I was getting through it but it was such a miserable time because I was on so many steroids and antibiotics.”
Worse, the cocktail of medication was “re-wiring” his brain, a deeply unpleasant experience. After finishing the US dates, a doctor finally diagnosed the condition correctly, and prescribed a more specific antibiotic before the band left for Japan. Thankfully, it had the desired effect – but more strangeness was to come.
“I was in fine fettle vocally, but bizarrely, one of the side effects of this particular antibiotic is that it can damage your achilles tendon, of all things. So me and Sav ended up like the walking wounded, limping all over the place!”
The case is often made – mostly on social media or via Gene Simmons – that rock is ‘dead’. A few days after this interview, Def Leppard played to a packed Wembley Arena. The very next day, Nightwish repeated the feat, having sold the place out weeks in advance. Rock, then, is clearly still alive – although the campaign to keep it so is a battle that does not get easier.
“Robert Plant used to refer to it as ‘the perpetual downward spiral’,” nods Joe. “Always fighting to try and stay on top. It gets more difficult every year. For us, to offer another football comparison, it’s like being an experienced professional, knowing you’ve had a great season, but wondering how you can maintain it. You’ve had many seasons already and you wonder how many more you can have at a decent level.
“Thankfully with music you don’t necessarily lose your edge when you reach a certain age. I’m 56 and I’ve not lost mine. Coverdale is 64 and I don’t think he’s lost his. We can do this – look at the Stones and The Who. There is a lot of pride in the fact that we’re not down to playing smaller venues. I don’t think we’d do that. I mean no disrespect to those venues or the bands that play in them, but for us, the day we can’t do it any more at this level is a good time to stop.”
A more thought-provoking argument – often attached to the ‘rock is dead’ myth – is that the power to headline major festivals is held by only a handful of bands. Nearly all of these bands, which include Def Leppard, have been doing so for decades. Given the slump in the physical sales of music, how can another Def Leppard, another Kiss, another Iron Maiden, ever come to exist? Where is the infrastructure, the support, to keep less commercially profitable artists in business, let alone headlining festivals?
While Joe concedes that no simple solution is at hand, he thinks radio could and should be playing a much bigger part: “My hope is that something happens, such as radio being taken over by people who like rock music. That’s how it was for us – radio would happily play us alongside Janet Jackson and Lionel Richie. I’d like to hear current rock bands being played alongside Adele and Coldplay.
“I’m not gonna say that it’s never gonna happen, because I don’t believe in negativity, but one thing I do know is that it’s a lot harder for bands to break through in 2016 than it was for us in 1983.”
There are of course many young bands – from Asking Alexandria to Biters – that have the potential to achieve extraordinary things. While nobody would call Nightwish a ‘young’ band, their almost perfect career trajectory – overcoming setbacks on a steady climb to the top – shows that great heights can still be reached. One band Joe singles out for future stardom is The Struts.
“They’re a British band that’s doing great in America and they’re probably gonna get canned for it, like we did – ‘selling out’, and all that crap. They’ve plenty of time to come back and play a UK tour, but America is so vast that they’re doing the right thing. They’ve got it all – they sound like Slade with Freddie Mercury singing. They’ve got a great image and phenomenal songs, and their gigs are always being upgraded.
“People often talk about the problems in getting young bands up to the level we got to – I think there’s hope, but only if someone like The Struts or Biters get to use the same road map we had. That’s the problem – in modern times, I don’t know how a band like that becomes Def Leppard or Bon Jovi or Muse or whatever.
“You’d hope that Biters get a chance to become the next Guns N’ Roses, but GN’R became GN’R through L.A. – that particular scene, that particular time. Guns N’ Roses might have been part-Stones, part-Hanoi Rocks, but they didn’t come from where those two bands came from, so it was like a whole new beginning, rising up from nothing. I love Biters, The Struts and H.E.A.T, but do they have the management that can do it for them? I don’t know. Do they have a record label that can do it? When we were starting out, record companies would try to predict how many millions they could sell. These days, they’re looking for thousands, not millions.
“It is what it is – most rock music has gone underground. Bands can still get front covers here and there, and have someone like Ross [Halfin] take great pictures, but essentially it’s like it was before Bon Jovi and us broke out. Bands were doing okay, but Rainbow and Dio were playing theatres or sports halls, three to four thousand-seaters; they weren’t doing stadiums or massive arenas.”
Perhaps that ‘Star Wars’ analogy isn’t so wide of the mark, then. Maybe we just need to await the rise of something new, for the force to awaken. It’s there anyway for those who care to look. For now, let’s at least be content that we still have the old Jedi.
