[Show Notes] - Full band interview with host Bob Coburn. 8:30-10pm local time (PT). First airplay for tracks from the new album 'Songs From The Sparkle Lounge'. Seven songs payed in full. Many thanks for the info to Lepgirl64/Andy. Thanks also to Kevin who has provided a download link of the whole show. Enjoy (if you can't resist giving in to temptation).

Def Leppard Rockline 2008 (80mb/1hr27mins) - Download Here - New Link

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Interview Highlights By DLUK

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Tour - Phil "We've got a huge tour coming up after we leave the States we've got India, Russia. All over the place, Athens, Greece - Turkey and then we're gonna come back to the States and then probably go off to China and Japan and that afterwards so it's gonna be a big tour this one."

Tour - Joe "This particular leg Bob is a lot of places that we didn't hit in the last two or three years. Because we didn't really wanna over expose. I think there's a point when you can go too many times to the same place. [Uncas....] We're trying some markets we've not been to for a while. And then if the album performs well or whatever the corporate phrase is these days - we're gonna be back like late July/early August. I'd imagine."

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Sav C'Mon C'mon Inspiration Question: Paige - "It basically originated just from a drum groove that just came out of my head. Once you've got that as a basis then everything's just sort of formed around it. It was half started from like a soccer, sort of terrace anthem type thing. That was the original idea behind it. And it just kind of developed from there. I remember clearly just driving the car one day and just getting this 'goo-ga-cha, goo-ga-cha' Just the image of the whole thing. And it just basically grew from there."

What do they enjoy about the recording process now: Joe - Phil "That it's a lot quicker than it used to be. This album we had a choice to start recording it on tour or to take like 6 months off, write songs, think of a direction and all that and kind of lose a lot of momentum so we actually went for recording it on tour. And it actually has that feel on it. The fact that you can actually do stuff on your own. Like even on a laptop these days is just fantastic. Cos you just cut out so much of the - it's like getting straight to the source of it. So we really like it."

Bob - "And with a studio at Joe's house it kind of keeps the cost down too I imagine."
Band - Phil "Absolutely!." Joe "Oh yes! we're very frugal." Phil "He still charges us though, I can't figure that one out."

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Would Sav ever consider singing lead on a Def Leppard song?: Tanya - Sav "Yeah, I'd consider it but I've got four guys in this room that would say absolutely not!. And they're good judges let me tell ya."

Joe - "I wouldn't mind. You can take a lead vocal if you want. I would give you full permission if you ever decide you can sing it better than me."

Sav - "Well, you're very kind for saying that. I appreciate that but you know we've all got our little roles and I think you know our strength is in our unity of doing what we do individually and then it comes together as a band. And I think that's our biggest strength. We can all have little side issues, like you say if we're doing a b side that obviously you still want it to sound good but it just gives us that little bit of an outlet to do things that we wouldn't normally be able to do or really want to do on a proper Def Leppard recording. Joe's the singer and I'm the bass player and that's the main part of that."
Joe - "We can swap if you like."
Sav - "But I'm not too sure whether I'm such a bad singer or you're such a bad bass player."
Joe - "Probably both. I tell you what if we ever wrote a song like Stay With Me I'm absolutely not gonna sing it. I'll let Phil do it."
Sav - "I actually consider myself the second best bass player in the band."

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Is song order on an album important?: Stephanie - Phil "Yeah we do. What's kind of weird we actually do think it's important but I really don't know whether it actually makes a difference in the end. You have to create moods you know with your running order but you know at the end of the day sometimes it changes and it still works."

Sav - "It's important to us but whether as Phil says, at the end of the day, it's important to everybody else out there is another issue."

Joe - "Yeah. It's changed a lot when it was vinyl and cassette. It was very important to balance it out from a time point of view. And notoriously if a band had maybe what they potentially thought were two hit singles they'd both end up being track one side one and track one side two. Then when the CD came along and we had this possibility of 80 minutes worth of music. You started trying to figure out that well, the attention span of the average listener is about 40 mins or put something really heavy after 40 mins to wake them up. It got silly. Now it's just a case I think - better time than ever now to just make the album sound great and don't front load everything."

Phil - "But we like to feel important and that cos we're musicians and we're sensitive so we like to think that it does matter."
Joe - "Probably the thing that we argue most about in music is right at the end of an album, is like the running order."
Sav - "No it's not!."

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Would they ever have different lead singers on different tracks?: Rob - Rick "I think we're gonna lean on Phil as much as we possibly can."

Joe - "What we have is a great blend. This band, everybody can sing really well. So anybody is capable of taking lead vocals..."
Rick - "Apart from me, of course!."
Joe - "You know you probably could to if..."
Phil - "You can! You were supposed to sing on that tour..."
Rick - "The mike that never was."

Phil - "When we actually started rehearsing Rick was supposed to sing this harmony because he can actually sing really well. But halfway through the thing we look over and and there's nothing coming out of his mike. He didn't bother to sing so we stopped that little privilege."
Rick - "Well I have ADD and it's difficult enough playing the drums as it is."

Joe - "Phil's just done the Man Raze album where's he sings lead vocals. Vivian did his blues album and he sang on the Clock stuff. You've got three guys here that've sung lead vocals on full albums. Sav's the only one that's just dipped his toe in it with the Queen cover."
Rick - "I'm actually a producer. So I resent that."
Joe - "In a nutshell if a situation arose where it was the right thing to do and somebody else was to sing a lead vocal. I have absolutely no problem with it."

Rick - "So the answer to your question is. Yes and no."

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About the song 'Tmorrow' - "My Dad passed away like three years ago, he had cancer, and they gave him two months to live. So I went over to England and got him out of hospital. He went 'I don't wanna die in here just take me home'. And we actually had the most amazing time. You know just like talking about stuff, everything. And he passed away but you know but it was his acceptance that it was his time to go. And that's what the song's about really. It was a very positive thing. I know it was a terrible disease and it was really painful for my Dad but we had such a great time. My Dad included. But it was just the way he changed, the last couple of days was like. You know what, get me out of here I'm good to go now."

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Question about the album cover: Christian - Joe "I can't remember how we got started on it but I do remember the very end part. Talking to Richard who was the designer of it saying look just pretend you woke up having had a really mad dream. And you turn around to your wife and say I was stood on a stage and there was all these weird people in the audience. A panda with KISS make up and the Pope. Statue of Liberty. We had all sorts of mad people but as it went along we had to start pulling people out because of like image issues and things like that. And permissions to use people so as we had to take famous people off. We started sticking more of ourselves in."
Phil - "Well the great thing was that we had this sleeve kicking around for about a year and a half and two days before the deadline they went. Well you can't use Elvis. Cos that's 1800 bucks And Marilyn'll cost ya two grand. And it was like what?! So they all got kinda chopped very quickly and like you see our crew guys in there, Dave Wolf. Mike Kobiashi's in there."

Rick - "And they cost even more."
Joe - "One celebrity survived, Ian Hunter, because he wouldn't dare sue us."
Rick - "I think the album cover itself reminds us of all the things we grew up with when album covers were important."
Vivian - "Now our eyes are too crap to actually see them."
Phil - "No I still maintain they keep making the words smaller. And funny colours as well."
Joe - "The idea Bob really was we wanted people to still look at it with a magnifying glass when they got to track 7 or track 8 and instead of just tossing it off to one side about halfway through the first song."

Joe - "We wanted it to become part Sgt. pepper and part Monty Python so it became Sgt. Python."

Bob: Who is the Hamster? - Joe "Oh Richard Hammond. He's a guy from Top Gear which you may get if you've got satallite TV. Or you get BBC America. He crashed a car about a year and a half ago at about 280mph. And after about three days in hospital he just came out fine. It's unbelievable. He's a TV presenter that does - like tests cars and stuff but he's a huge fan. I met him at the Zeppelin gig in December and you know we swapped numbers and I phoned him up and said do you wanna be on the cover? And he said 'I will die happy if I do'. So Rick gets to drive cars on British TV in a couple of months time."

Rick - "As long as they're automatics."

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What was the most difficult song to write on the album?: Justine - Phil "Every song's kinda different. Difficulty-wise. To write but the thing when you actually record them sometimes you come up against - sometimes they don't sound like you imagined it to. So in the production part of it it's probably more likely to be a sore thumb than - usually when you're writing it's kind of inspired. It's based on inspiration but sometimes you just never know what's gonna happen. You go that's the wrong speed, it's the wrong key. And we've done that with a lot of songs on every single album we do. There's a few on this album we done different versions of them. Sped 'em up - different key. I think 'Only The Good Die Young' there was a few different versions of that kicking around. So it really depends it's usually on the recording and not the writing."

Joe - "I'd say from a recording point of view the hardest one to nail down was 'Love'. Because it's just so unique in it's style and it was a tough one to get right."

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Cruise Control Guitar Solo - Vivian "That's me actually and I did that one at home that guitar solo. At Campbell Manor yes. I'm not sure if it was that one or 'Gotta Let It Go', on one of those guitar solos I looked at the clock and it was ten past six in the afternoon and I had to go pick up my kids from my sister in laws and it was the one-take, OK I gotta do this now. And it actually ended up being all right. So I'm a firm believer in first take solos. It doesn't always work but sometimes when it does it comes out for the better."

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Did Mutt Lange produce/write any new songs on the album?: Dominic - Phil "No. We was gonna write a song with Mutt. We didn't get round to finishing it off We started it and it's probably gonna be on the next record." - Give It Away?

Do you plan on a live DVD this year?: Dominic - Phil "We'd love to. We've been talking about it for many years so yeah hopefully we're a bit closer to it now. We've got a lot of recording and we keep getting better so a good bet I'd say."

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Will Phil's Roxanne cover come out?: Scott - Phil "As for The Police thing. Yeah, we did a version of 'Roxanne' like a kind of jazzy, kind of bluesy thing. And I think it may get used as a B side or something. It's floating around."

Joe - "It's in the can for whenever it's needed."

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The song 'Hallucinate' - Phil "That's a classic kind of Leppy - Photograph/Promises type song. And just about being in denial. But it's a very typically rocking Def Leppard kind of thing."

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Asks about Man Raze: LaChelle - Phil "Yeah. Actually it's all done. We done a secret little gig the other night in LA." Rick "It wasn't very secret."

Phil - "I invited you and you didn't turn up!. So we done thing anyway and the album comes out June 3rd. It's called "Surreal". It's on the VH1 label. And it'll be available all over the place. All done. good to go."

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The song 'Go' - Phil "It was called 'Tribal' originally. It was like just done on a laptop like just a bunch of drum loops stuck together and this kind of Eastern guitar part. Rick went and overdubbed a load of drum parts over the top and we just got rid of the original loops. And he just went in and kind of overdubbed these like Tom Tom fills, and all this stuff. And it just created this really powerful drum cacophony which we really wanted it was kind of reminiscent of 'Rocket'. But I think with even a little bit more depth cause actually it sounds heavier than 'Rocket'. Yeah, one of the heaviest songs we've ever done I think."

Voice at the end of the song? - Phil "The talking bit in the middle yeah..."

Joe - "If we told you we'd have to kill you."

Rick - "We found him on the street in Dublin and he came back and he was happy to do it."

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Is there any similarity to 'Hysteria' on the album?: Kylie - Phil "I think if there's any similarity then it's probably in the songwriting. We've been learning to write songs as we've been going along. I think some of them are really catchy and they have some of the same elements that the Hysteria songs had. They're just done in a different way and every record we do is kinda different. I remember one album we tried to leave bridge sections out because we - that's something we always did. But I think it was a very kind of a natural thing the songwriting on this album. And I think just listening to it some of it does remind me of 'Hysteria' without us trying to sound like it."

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'Bad Actress' inspired by anyone in particular?: Host Bob - Sav "You don't wanna ask that question."

Joe - "It's an observation of the kind of Reality TV situation where everybody wants to be famous but they don't have any talent to be famous. And I just remember thinking about people trying to walk down catwalks and tripping up. There's a great bit of footage on You Tube with this girl trying to answer a question - I don't remember what the question was but she had no idea of how to answer it. And it was just genius. And it just reminds me so much of what the songs all about. It's like evrybody wants to be famous but some people just shouldn't be."

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Any songs going to be on Guitar Hero or Rock Band games?: Chelsea - Phil "We do darling. It's on Guitar Hero 4. We just had to clear a few things like publishing, record company and all that stuff. But we're gonna have three songs I think on Guitar Hero 4. 'Photograph', 'Animal' and 'Rock Of Ages'."

Transcribed by Def Leppard UK.

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