Joe Elliott Interview Def Leppard Not Endangered

Def Leppard's Joe Elliott has been interviewed by The Sydney Morning Herald ahead of the Australian tour. Joe reveals unless they get an offer for a new record contract the band will go it alone next year.

Interview Exerts

"Those are the songs where we don't get out of the building alive if we don't play them," laughs Elliott, who knows that the majority of the group's two-hour set is A-list.

"We tried to make this record sound like we really wanted it," Elliott says.

"We don't want to sound like tired old men. We may be old but we're certainly not tired in the sense of just going through the motions. We're hungry. It would break my heart to make a record we didn't care about just to fulfil a contract."

The band have also employed the full gamut of promotional opportunities: the album's lead single, Nine Lives, is a duet with Nashville country star Tim McGraw, their songs have featured in video games and the five-piece appeared on the top-rating American version of Dancing With The Stars.

"We delivered a record that couldn't be ignored," Elliott says. "For the last five or six years we haven't had the greatest of support from our record label. We signed our contract in 1979, a lot of regimes ago. Once upon a time there was respect for what you'd done but it's all just bean counters now. I find that very sad."

Unless an offer they can't refuse is coming - "and it doesn't appear to be," Elliott observes dryly - next year Def Leppard plan to join the exodus of established acts leaving the major-label ranks, exchanging their home of 30 years, Universal Music, for independent status, a lucrative touring agreement and online sales.

"If Radiohead can go off and do it on their own and the Eagles can go off and do it on their own, that's an acceptable yardstick to measure our own chances by," Elliott says. "All the record labels were 10 years too late to the internet - they've shot themselves in the foot."

"We're painting the picture, this is our art. It might sound pretentious for the band that wrote Let's Get Rocked to think that they're artistes but it is our art," Elliott says. "It's what we do. We sit in the room, we look each other in the eye and we write a song. If people don't buy it then you didn't write the great song you thought you did."

Read The Full Interview - Here

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