Def Leppard's Joe Elliott has been interviewed by The New Zealand Herald newspaper ahead of the Auckland show on November 14th. The final show of 2008.

Interview Excerpts

However, for Leppard's singer and frontman Joe Elliott, Hysteria was also somewhat of a creative feat. After recording it he remembers saying to the rest of the band that even if it's not successful - "It turned out to be pretty successful," he laughs - it was an "achievement".

"Because we'd done this ballad [Love Bites]. We'd done a song like Animal. We'd done Gods of War which was the big epic thing. And Rocket, a total thrash-core Whole Lotta Love updated 20 years [which had], from an arrangement point of view, this mad middle section that Zeppelin had in a totally different way. We'd achieved something, and we looked at it like a spoke coming out of the centre of a wheel, we could go in any direction after that because that album had 10 directions."

"Growing up our obvious influences were AC/DC and Queen. We wanted the power of a band like AC/DC but the melody and muscle of a band like Queen and in a perfect world I always wished we'd written Tie Your Mother Down because it's almost a classic Leppard song - it's got the power and the melodies."

"We've never been afraid of doing pop songs, and they're all over [1999's] Euphoria, and there's Animal, Sugar. [Pop] was our true roots and if people are still judging us on our first three albums then they have to get over it because that's not the way we are.

"We were also influenced by people like Ray Davies [the Kinks] and Pete Townshend from a songwriting point of view and they would just throw in these three or four chords and come up with great words and a good melody with a great big rock band to hammer it home," says Elliott, who has a throatie, happy grumpy tone. He likes to have a bit of a laugh about his band and talks about putting songs through the "Leppard meat grinder" and how they've all "been Leppardised".

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