Def Leppard | Joe Elliott - Interview 2008

Classic Rock Magazine September 2008.



Can you remember what the first song you ever wrote was?

The first song I wrote was when I was eight-and-a-half, it was 1968. And I still have a copy of it. It's a fully-fledged song, it's got the whole lot: verse, chorus and the pay-off line, the bridge.

My Mum played guitar and she said I could have one only if I learned to play it. She taught me a few chords so I could just about play stuff by Pete Seeger, Leadbelly and all this kind of American folk that she was into. She sounded like Joan Baez.

So what inspired me to write was that I had this guitar and I couldn't play other people's songs, so I started making me own up.

What makes a good song?

It's a good chorus. Don't bore us, get to the chorus.

When Def Leppard started as a band were you already in songwriting mode?

Not, not at all. We had no idea what direction we were going to take. I wanted it to be like Mott, The Heavy Metal Kids, T. Rex and Bowie and Steve [Clark, guitarist] wanted it to be more like Pat Travers. It was push and pull, which is why the first album is all over the place. When you've a guitarist in the band whose so into the playing side, it's really hard to get them to understand how something like [The Faces] Pool Hall Richard is such a great song, because "The guitar isn't any good, is it?".

With writing, do you remember getting to the point where you thought: "I'm geting the hang of this"?

I think we first learned to write a song at the end of the Hysteria [1987] sessions. We figured it out. We knew how to write riffs and glue them together on Pyromania ['83] and that's what we were doing on the beginning of Hysteria. But then when we came up with Pour Some Sugar On Me, Rocket and Hysteria which was a team effort.

And then there was Two Steps Behind that didn't make it on Adrenalize ['92]. We used it on a B side, then it ended up on the next record and became a big hit. That's when you know you've written a good song when something you didn't intend to release as a single becomes a hit because someone else sees the value in it. You always see the value in your own stuff. The people you have to convince is everybody else.

It's a great achievement when you put something together that makes sense musically. The song might only last for three minutes but there are subtle changes with each verse and chorus. That's dynamics, and that's the sort of thing you learnt when you work with people.

Take Let's Get Rocked. There's a lot more work that went into that than Bowin' In The Wind. But Blowin' In The Wind will always go down in history as a better song because of what it's about, where it came from, the time period it came from and the artist that did it.

I've said this before, you get a song like Let's Get Rocked and imagine if Prince had done it. It's not that big a stretch. Let's Go Crazy, Let's Get Rocked - not a million miles apart. It would have more cred.

There are some songs that aren't appreciated until many years later, or even at all. Do you have any examples of lost Leppard classics?

Back In Your Face, off Euphoria. Although I think we may have bettered it with C'mon C'mon off the new album [Songs From The Sparkle Lounge]. Basically I wanted to write the song that would overtake Rock N' Roll Pt. 2, something that would get played in hockey arenas for the rest of our lives. We opted for the Glitter Band's drum sound, we threw in that 70s humour that you got in songs like Tiget Feet, Blockbuster and Honaloochie Boogie.

As for other lost classics - Nick Drake's a great example of someone who couldn't get arrested when he was alive, and now, almost 30 years after his death, everyone uses his music, as a yardstick to measure the new folk scene by.

On the first Leppard album you wrote songs about America before you had been there. Since then you've been through a gamet of experiences. Do you now draw on those for songwriting material?

Yeah. But even with the first album, which was a dreaming album, we'd had a lot of life experiences. We knew about the American dream. Led Zeppelin and The Beatles went there so why shouldn't we? So Hello America was like a wish list of things to do.

There are people who can write from experience. Ian Hunter being the best example, and there's certain people and they just write rubbish.

I wrote a song called From The Inside which came from walking over O'Connell Bridge in Dublin and seeing 16-year-old-kids shooting up in the middle of the day. It affected me, it bothered me. I thought, I can write a letter to the Police Commissioner and say this is bollocks, or I can write a song about it. So I wrote From The Inside from the drugs point of view. It was written to a Bowie-doing-Jacques-Brel backing track. And that was the first time that I sat down and wrote a song that's got everything that I wanted in it. I nailed it in 15 minutes and thought "There's nothing else to say". I was not trying to create a pop song, it was a stream of consciousness. I realised that I could do both.

I could sit down a write a song with Bowie, Neil Sedaka, Neil Dimaond, Nikki Sixx, Kate Bush, you name them, as long as they don't have preconceptions about me. I would take what they've got and we would enhance each other by doing something we don't normally do.

What advice would you give to an aspiring songwriter?

Learn enough chords to string a few together, and just keep on writing songs till you get it right. Which means you've got to write hundreds of them till the first one's published. Ultimately, just follow your heart.
Peter Makowski/Ross Halfin © Classic Rock Magazine 2008.

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