Will you be filming the current tour?
We've got cameras we use for the live screens, so all we'd have to do is put film in them, and it's been discussed.
But we're also discussing re-editing and expanding the Don Valley show from 1993. It was only broadcast for TV for 60 minutes, and 90 in Japan, but even that didn't have all the songs. So we thought we'd re-jig it in 5.1.
Is there much unreleased material in the archives?
Not much, 'cos Retro-Active took care of that. There's very very little, though there are some rarities that only huge fans may have: When Saturday Comes, Jimmy's Theme, the alternate version of Truth off Slang, I Am Your Child
and all those B-sides. There's a disc of odds and sods to tidy up there in a box set. But we do have in the archives thousands of live albums - three nights at the archives thousands of live albums - three nights at the Budokan in '93, the In Yer Face tapes,
live stuff with Steve and Pete Willis, Steve and Phil, Phil and Vivian. Plus we could record a new live album on this tour. And we have a great version of Creedence Clearwater Revival's Travellin' Band that we did at the LA Forum in 1983 that never saw the light of day.
And with [guest] Brian May's permission that may end up on a box set. Then there's things that never legally came out on CD like Good Morning Freedom, which was another B-side, Me & My Wine, which went on a remixed High 'N' Dry in '83, and the Def Leppard EP (valued at £300 in the RRPG).
Do you keep any copies of the EP?
When we first did it, a lot of copies were warped. Me and me mother used to hold them up to the light to see how many were bent. There were about 75 or 100. I put them away in a box and, over the years,
being stacked on top of each other, they went straight. So then I gave them away to people who were close to me, and now I'm down to two - and they're my copies and I'm not giving them away!
Are there any tapes of pre-Leppard bands?
Sweet Savage - Vivian's crowd, had an EP. Phil was in Lucy before Girl and recorded a single. And I have a copy of a three-track covers EP by the Johnny Kalendar Band, with Rick when he was 14. One of the tracks was Styx's Fooling Yourself. That's
unbelievably rare. But Sav never recorded before Leppard, and when I was drumming in Jump, we didn't either. We used to do things like Poison Ivy and Johnny B Goode - very challenging, I'm sure!
Have you been writing new songs?
Yeah, we're all writing and want to have half an album done before we go in next time. We gather in the 'Sparkle Lounge', as we call it on tour. We have a tiny kit, a couple of amps and guitars, and fairy lights all over the walls to give it a vibe. The crew set up every day. Sometimes
we don't go in, other times we goof off and jam for hours. We have about five or six things very likely to make the record, but we never actually write on the road. We always write when we've finished a tour.
The only song I think we ever wrote on the road was the music for White Lighting. But the rest just go in the bucket and then we play back the micro-cassette or MiniDisc and go, "that bit's good". But you don't really have the time to write properly on the road. You have the time to sit with a guitar,
but can your head come up with a song in two hours when you know you're gonna be doing a meet and greet, working out, having a shower? Your mind's never focused. So we make time to write after tours and concentrate on it then.
Write the album, record it, tour. We go to our homes, get together after three months, play stuff to each other, and the cream rises. We play through and songs are like rockets - bits get jettisoned, but they're needed to give you that spark that leads you to the moon. When you have that spark at 4am, you have
to get up and play and record it. And then when you get up and listen, you go, "where was my head at? What a pile of shit!" Or, "thank God I did that".
Tim Jones © Record Collector 2006 :: this is from Record Collector not Classic Rock as was stated before. It's also only the first half of the full interview. Transcribed/Scanned by DLUK.
"I'd been on about it ever since Bowie did Pin Ups. And had we been
able to do a double album, we would've. We could've included The Osmonds' Crazy Horses, for instance - we don't have a problem with credibility. If you want to be press darlings you namecheck The Velvet Underground.
We namecheck The Osmonds and David Essex, just to piss people off by being honest. We wanted mainly English artists and we had a lot of fun, to the extent that we delayed the release from last year, purely so we could tour it."