West Allis, WI - Media Reviews

Def Leppard Proves As Risiliant As Ever By Gemma Tarlach

The power failure should have surprised no one. Friday's State Fair Grandstand headliner Def Leppard has endured, after all, more than its share of bad luck over the years. So when the strobe lights stopped and the band went silent near the end of "Animal," the audience assumed it was time to sing the chorus on its own.

Only after band members exchanged quizzical looks and left the stage did anyone realize something was amiss.

Not that a little problem with electricity could stop the band that bounced back from the near-death of drummer Rick Allen, who lost his left arm in a car accident, the overdose of guitarist Steve Clark and then years languishing in obscurity during the Grunge Era.

If any band can take a power failure on the chin and keep going, it's Def Leppard.

So, after roadies spent five minutes switching the sound system over to an auxiliary power source, Def Leppard returned to the stage and did what it has been doing for nearly 20 years: "keep a-rollin'."

Performing the rest of their set without stage lighting, the boys from Britain played from their catalog of some of the most memorable and influential pop-metal of the '80s.

Singer Joe Elliot, bassist Rick Savage, Allen and guitarists Phil Collen and Vivian Campbell, hit the stage fit and, as the opening song goes, ready to "Rock! Rock!" the delighted capacity crowd.

Elliot's voice is still one of the great clarions of rock, as he proved during a long sustained note near the end of "Make Love Like A Man." The singer's trademark stage moves are still intact, too; that, at 41, he can play the bad pretty boy with conviction is itself an achievement.

The band as a whole brought new energy to its 90-minute nostalgia set. Only two of its 16 songs - the recent hit "Promises" and 1996's more experimental "Slang" - were less than five years old. Most of the tunes came from 1983's "Pyromania" and the band's first comeback, after Allen's accident, the 1987 blockbuster "Hysteria."

If Elliot and his band mates are sick of requesting that someone "pour some sugar" on them, they're doing a good job of hiding it. Bands with half the history should play as tight and with as much apparent joy as Def Leppard did, power failures and all.

By Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 2000.

Back

share this page: