Interview/Article :: Classic Rock 74 Dec 2004.
Cool For Cats ::
“It’s a great time for Def Leppard,” says Joe Elliott. And he isn’t wrong. With a new regime at their record label, a Greatest-Hits package out and an album of covers versions in the bag, the band could be ready to scale the heights again, getting Hysterical.
Here’s a true story. In late summer of 2002, a single was released in the UK on an unsuspecting public. It was a big ballad, epic in scope and catchy as all hell with one of those choruses.
It was the sort of song that Westlife take to the top of the pop charts with alarming regularity. But this perfect pop-rock fodder went nowhere. Why? Because the band who recorded it was Def Leppard, and consequently it got no airplay - because Leppard aren’t, like, cool. To the ‘powers that be’, Leppard are the boring old mulleted rockers who were quite big for a fleeting moment in the late 1980s. At least that seems to be the general perception. But we know that’s not the whole story. Yes, they had dodgy hair and even dodgier attire in the 80s - let’s face it, who didn’t? (And if you think you never did, then may we suggest you revisit your 1985 holiday snaps.)
Haircuts notwithstanding, Leppard were the band that came up with some of Rock’s biggest crossover hits, a fact not lost on Leppard frontman Joe Elliott, whom Classic Rock cornered to talk about their new greatest-hits package, and an already finished covers album that doesn’t yet have a release date.
“Right now it’s a great time for Leppard,” Elliott begins. “There’s a new regime at Universal [Leppard’s long-time label] in New York, and they’ve got a new and exciting way of looking at this band.”
The singer has a reason to be cheerful, too, as the new guy in charge at Universal is most unlike the last one, who didn’t want to touch the band wish a bargepole.
“We weren’t his thing, he was a rap guy,” he states simply. “His way of thinking was, why do I need Def Leppard when I’ve got Bon Jovi? because they can’t tell us apart. That’s when you realise you’ve got problems. But this new guy is desperate to make us a success again. he’s convinced that ‘Long Long Way To Go’ should have been an enormous hit and wants to put it out again.”
‘Long Long Way...’, if you haven’t already guessed, is the single to which we alluded earlier - the standout cut from Leppard’s return-to-form ‘X’.
Earlier this year, The Alarm - another band who seem to be unfairly tainted by their history - released their latest single under the guise of a fabricated hot young band called The Poppyfields (complete with promo picture of sprightly young things). And guess what? It was a hit, lauded by the fickle critics and championed by ‘cutting-edge’ Radio One DJ Jo Whiley.
When Classic Rock mentions this to Joe he responds with a heavy laugh, “That’s brilliant. Good for them,” he chortles.
‘Long Long Way...’ however, didn’t get any airtime, probably because the band released it under their own name. “It was the radio pluggers that wouldn’t let it through because it was a Def Leppard single, it wasn’t the fans that said no,” he shrugs. “You might have heard it on satellite radio, but that was it. You certainly didn’t hear it on Mark and Lard, or even Radio Two where it would have been more likely to sit.”
So Leppard are going to give the single another shot (in America, at least, as they ‘shot a great video for it’. At home the band have just released a two-CD-plus-DVD greatest hits package.) Titled simply ‘Def Leppard, Best Of, it is essentially an update of 1995’s ‘Vault’. “Hopefully it’ll cement our place in history - which it should, because we’re a great band and these are great songs,” Elliott says of the new collection.
And there he’s nailed it - that’s exactly what Def Leppard always stood for. Despite the tragedies that have hit the band - drummer Rick Allen losing his arm in an horrific car crash; the death of guitarist Steve Clark due to alcoholism - Def Leppard have always been about making good, fun rock records - with a healthy dose of pop stirred in for good measure.
The ‘Best Of’ is something of a stepping stone, too, as Leppard have already finished their next studio record. Yep, you read that right, Leppard have already finished their next album - an album of cover versions. And it’s one they want to get out there, but the record company had a different agenda.
"Hopefully this will enable us to put this covers record out early next year,” Joe says. “That way, then we’ll have some momentum rather than having to wait the usual four years between albums."
A covers album, though, isn’t what first springs to mind when you think of Leppard’s history; previously they've always written their own material. The explanation, however, is straightforward: “We wanted to get straight back into the studio because we were playing so well by the end of the last tour. The last gig we did in Britain was the one where Brian (May, Queen guitarist) got up at Hammersmith. We were really performing well, it clicked. It wasn’t: ‘Oh god, we’re so sick of doing this’. We never played the same set twice.
"For some gigs we opened up with the first side of ‘High ‘N’ Dry’ (Leppard’s second album, released in ‘81) in sequence,” Elliott continues. “I remember when the review of the show came out - in Classic Rock I think - where it said they were a bit disappointed that we didn’t do such and such a song. I remember thinking I wish the reviewer had seen the the Brixton show, then he’d realise why we played like we had, because the set he wanted was the one we did at Brixton, and we weren’t going to play the same exact set twice in a capital city. We keep the set-lists exactly for that reason."
The Def Leppard of 2004 is a far cry from the orchestrated, hit-your-mark precision band of previous tours. “We did 241 shows on the ‘Adrenalize’ tour in 1992 and ‘93, and we never changed the set once,” Elliott smiles. “Vivian (Campbell, guitarist) went fucking ballistic: ‘I can’t do that!’ And then it was only recently that we realised we could change it about: there was no reason why we couldn’t even do the set backwards.
"It wasn’t to do with us so much,” he says of the band’s hitherto rigid set-lists. “It was really for the crew, as it was such a stage show. ‘Adrenalize’ and ‘Hysteria’ were like a big broadway production, you had to do certain things at certain times or the programmable desk would go out of sequence and you’d be fucked for the rest of the gig. And, of course, doing things that way right at the beginning of grunge wasn’t such a great idea, but we’d already set our stall out to do it and we figured we could run on parallel lines. We weren’t going to win over Pearl Jam fans, but we’d still have a huge audience."
This time around, though, the flexibility of the set gave the band some space to have some fun. And for a band whose reputation is built on perfectionism, whether in the studio or on stage, Leppard threw caution to the wind by the close of the 2003 tour.
"By the end of the set we were actually throwing in songs that we’d never played before - ever, like covers and stuff. This was how we started thinking about doing the covers record. We were encoring with them after having played them in the dressing room for perhaps 20 minutes before the gig, and it was such a high. To go out there and do ‘Don’t Believe a Word’ or whatever, 9,000 people might go ‘Huh?’ but there’ll be one kid in a Thin Lizzy T-shirt freaking out. And that’s why we’d do it.
"Towards the end the band are usually getting ready to go home, but we had three or four gigs left and we were starting to panic - what the fuck are we gonna do? Sit around on beer crates for the next six months creating the next record? How can we avoid that situation?
The answer came surprisingly quickly: do songs that were already written, and have some fun with them.
"Bowie’s ‘Pin-Ups’ [his 1973 album of covers] was the blueprint,” Elliott says. “And since then Aerosmith have put out a covers album, Rush have done one too... We had no idea when we started this. We put this into plan a year ago, then all of a sudden these two records come out of the woodwork. If and when it comes out, someone’s gonna say: ‘Oh god, not another covers record’."
Classic Rock has had a sneak preview of some of the covers (one of them, The Kink’s ‘Waterloo Sunset’, made it on to the new ‘Best Of’ as a bonus track). The difference between Leppard’s and the Rush or Aerosmith releases is that the covers Leppard have chosen are somewhat eclectic songs from T. Rex, Roxy Music and Blondie, rather than ‘Ziggy’-era Bowie that may have been more expected.
“We’ve always had pop streak to us,” Elliott says of their covers choices. So we thought it would be intriguing to take some of those songs and rework them. Maybe we’ll do the ‘rock’ covers next.”
Whatever they decide to do, and if and when the covers record finally gets a release, Leppard’s modus operandi has always been - and hopefully always will be - to have fun. Rock ‘n’ Roll isn’t rocket science, and this is a band that’s keen to point that out.
“We weren’t trying to make ‘Dark Side of The Moon’,” Elliott says. “We’ve always been that sort of good time band, and I think it’s gets forgotten. It takes something like The Darkness’s success for people to realise that there’s another side to music other than Coldplay or Travis.”
It’s not even that Elliott is joining in with Classic Rock’s War Against Cool, as he continues: “They are what they are, but it’s just not really that dynamic. And yeah, we can all laugh at Justin (Hawkins, Darkness) or we can all love Justin or we can love him and laugh at him, but god bless ‘em for doing it their way.
“Whether you like them or not is not important. It’s the fact that they have the balls to stand up and look you in the eye and say: ‘I mean what I’m doing’. When I first heard ‘Black Shuck’ (first track on The Darkness’s debut album), when that riff kicks in I thought, this is something that could have been on ‘Powerage’ - it’s total AC/DC, 1978. And nobody else is doing it.”
No, they’re not. And it makes you wonder why. As has been ranted elsewhere in this very issue, the overwhelming attitude seems to be to kick good ol’ honest rock ‘n’ roll in the teeth and not give it the credit it’s due. Face it: people are far more likely to namedrop The Smiths or Jeff Buckley as genuinely important figures in popular music.
“They’re just doing that so they don’t get beaten up in the pub. I know so many people like that,” Elliott laughs. “We joke about it. If you want to impress certain magazines, then you walk in and go: ‘Ya, I like The Velvets, William Burroughs, The Doors, Iggy - before he met Bowie...Lou Reed - only circa ‘Berlin’, mind you...early Jazz...’Fuck Off!’ Motorhead - what the fuck is wrong with ‘Ace of Spades? Nothing. Yeah, they’re crap, but ‘Destroyer’ is a great record no matter what people think of Kiss. I just don’t go there. Give me three chords any day!”
And he has a great story about erstwhile Smiths man Morrissey: “I remember when Ozzy said (affecting Brummie accent): ‘I can’t believe it. The guy gets in the charts just because he’s got a tree sticking out of his arse!”
Despite their so-called absence of ‘cool’ Leppard have certainly made their mark on the American charts, even the rise of grunge didn’t spell the end. The myth of grunge ‘killing’ the big stadium rock bands was exactly that - a myth.
“It didn’t kill Bon Jovi, did it? U2? us?” Elliott says, “Look at U2’s last album - it went stratospheric. Bon Jovi still do more people in Wembley than the Stones do, and for us it’s always been the other way around. America’s where it is for us. We’re like the Viking warriors that rape and pillage. Zeppelin have got more respect in America than they’ll ever have in England. Same with the Beatles and The Stones. Just as Bon Jovi will always be bigger in England than they will be in the States.”
His theory is simply that ‘the grass is always greener’: “My accent is laughable in Britain - it’s all ‘He’s from Oop North’: In America it’s all ‘Oh my god, y’sound so cute’”
Turn on the Radio in America and you’ll be stunned by the heritage of great British rock bands: if it’s not Led Zeppelin it’s the Stones, The Who or The Beatles. And despite everything, Leppard are carving a niche too. Of which Elliott is justifiably proud.
"Especially over there, even if we’re the bottom of the league of everything from The Yardbirds, The Kinks, The Small Faces, The Who, Zeppelin, Sabbath, The Beatles, The Stones... After Queen we were the next big rock band to sell any records in America and, believe it or not, the next one after us was Bush - their first album sold four of five million. And they meant nothing at home - they were playing Brixton Academy at the same time they were selling out New York’s Madison Square Garden.”
But where Def Leppard succeeded where Bush failed was that Bush didn’t have a follow-up album. The Sheffield band had a steady, slow build. “Our third album really sold, our fourth album - that nobody thought would do anything - went even bigger.”
It’s easy to forget that these “third and fourth” records that Elliott speaks so candidly about are the phenomenally successful ‘Pyromania’ and ‘Hysteria‘.
“I just found out the other day that ‘Pyromania’ has just gone diamond. We’re the only band in the history of the world to have two back-to-back 10-million selling albums. You know, The Beatles haven’t even done that!”
“It’s all well and good, but ask me to explain ‘why us?’ and I can’t,” he shrugs.
The reason, though, is quite straightforward: Def Leppard rock. It’s as plain and simple as that.
Siàn Llwellyn © Classic Rock 2004 :: Transcribed/Scanned by DLUK.com.
