Virgin Radio - Def Leppard 10 Pics Gallery | Tour News

[Show Notes] - 6-7pm. Recorded interview with Joe Elliott and Phil Collen by Russ Williams. An hour long special featuring many new songs and chat about the new album. Repeated from Friday 9th. Part of the stations Def Leppard Week.

Interview Highlights:

Phil Collen - "World tour actually - we keep getting these additions to it like South America, Japan, Australia, New Zealand. We've gotta go back to the States. We've gotta fill in the dates we cancelled - Canada."

Joe Elliott - "India we've had to move cause of the elections. We were due to go to India next week but apparently they're not allowed gatherings of more than 15 people! So us and the cricket is off apparently. So that's been shifted so we've got seven weeks in Europe starting 21st May. That's Europe and England obviously and Scotland. Ireland as well. And then we've got the make up gigs in America and Canada that we had to cancel. And then after that I think we've got Japan, New Zealand, Australia, South America."

Joe Elliott - "It's probably gonna go well into next year. Actually I've got a feeling that by the time next summer comes along we'll either be doing some kind of festival thing over here or we're back to the States doing more of those enormodomes."

Joe Elliott - "To us it's just an ongoing thing we're the hamster in the wheel that just keeps going round - it is literally tour/album, tour/album, tour/album that's what we do you know. Until we get really sick of it that's what we will do. We love the idea of making new music. We won't be a nostalgia act. You won't find us going out on tour year in year out when there's no new music. Cos I think it would drive us up the wall. As long as we can stay relevant and the only way to do that is to keep putting new music out and we've just got to reinvent the wheel when it comes to how important the new music is. We probably haven't written our best song yet. That's the way we have to look at it."

Phil Collen - "I think we could have a Sparkle Lounge Two. Because actually there was one track we didn't quite finish. But we got all the backing track done and I think there's a melody...." (DJ asked about a YEAH! part two.)

Joe Elliott - "We just ran out of time - it's like you can either put this record out now or we can labour over this song. It's like let's labour over it on the next album. I mean every record we've ever made has got a leftover from the year before and every band does that. 'Photograph' was something that didn't get finished on High 'n' Dry but nobody else knew that except us. So I'm letting the cat out of the bag but you know it's up to us to be able to say oh it's an old one - it's only a year old and it's not finished so it's still new cos it's a work-in-progress. We've got two or three little things like that."

Phil Collen - "Yeah we had a song we started with Mutt as well and we haven't finished that off either. So I think the way we did Sparkle Lounge is definitely the way to go cos it's keeps you - it's fun and inspiring. And you don't get bored and you actually know what the directions going to be cos you're there on tour. It's great."

Joe Elliott - "And there's more variety because we've all learnt how to write a song over the years. So it's kinda like the way Queen used to do stuff. If you've got the two Roger songs, two Brian, two Freddie's, two John Deacon's."

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