Saskatoon, SK - Media Reviews

Def Leppard Loud, SaskPlace Crowd Louder By Cam Fuller

It happens rarely, but once in awhile there's a moment in a rock show that breaks the routine, throwing even the star attraction off-balance for a second.

Friday night at SaskPlace, about three-quarters of the way through Def Leppard's concert, frontman Joe Elliott stood at centre stage and waited for the cheering to die down after one of the songs. It didn't. The ovation continued, and you could see the exact moment when Def Leppard realized they had a tiger by the tail. A crowd of 6,000 - bigger than most stops on the tour - didn't merely attend this show. They made it happen. It was like a stadium full of football fans drowning out the quarterback.

The 13th Man made even 25-year rock veteran Joe Elliott do a double-take. This was the second show of a second leg of the tour, "and you guys are very close, if not the loudest," he said, and meant it. Naturally, the cheering got louder. "It has been 20 years since we first set foot on Canadian soil. I was only six," Elliott joked. "If it's anything like this, we're just going to keep coming back again and again and again." They did just that. Rather than stop at the routine one or two-song encore, the band came back for at least three, including the huge Let's Get Rocked. It's like neither the fans or the band wanted to part.All the more amazing was the lack of any tricks to urge the audience on.

The set was bare, save for a big Def Leppard logo on the floor in that distinctive angular font. There was no video screen, no pyro, no confetti cannon and no lasers. Not even a fake elephant a la Cher. Just the band and hoard of die hard fans, most of whom were in the exact same twentysomething age bracket.

Elliott, wearing a black muscle shirt but looking a little puffy around the middle, strutted from side to side twirling the mike stand and brandishing it like a spear as the nad ground through Bringin' On The Heartbreak, Make Love Like A Man, Rock Rock, Pour Some Sugar On Me and all the greatest hits.

This was rock 'n' roll history in the flesh, a band with a bio that's too unreal for fiction, a band that lost one player to a deadly cocktail of alcohol and pain killers and which somehow pressed on when drummer Rick Allen lost his left arm in a car accident.

Allen was up there on the riser of course, wailing away at the skins. Below, guitarist Phil Collen took the first opportunity to doff his shirt (he's more buff than the boss) while Rick Savage on bass and Viv Campbell on guitar did the rock god thing.

The only down moments were attributable to a couple of tracks from the band's most recent album X, which were slow, tuneless and boring.

By Star Phoenix 2003.

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