Def Leppard's Joe Elliott on feeling like a 'fraud' and the 'insanity' of Taylor Swift
Joe Elliott is sitting in a room at the Four Seasons in downtown Minneapolis, eight or nine hours before he’ll climb onstage with his band Def Leppard for a gig at the Minnesota Twins’ baseball stadium.
“See it over there?” he asks on a Zoom call, tilting his laptop so that the camera takes in Target Field through a large window behind him. “Green Day was there on Saturday. And over here,” he adds, swinging the camera across downtown to U.S. Bank Stadium, “is where Metallica just did two nights. Crazy weekend here.”
Twenty years ago, few would’ve predicted that Def Leppard would still be in that kind of mix. The British pop-metal outfit exploded with 1983’s 10-times-platinum “Pyromania” and its 12-times-platinum follow-up, 1987’s “Hysteria,” both of which the band polished to a high-tech gleam with its famously exacting producer, Mutt Lange. Inevitably, the group’s career cooled throughout the ’90s and early 2000s as peacocking hard rock gave way to grunge and pop-punk.
But then things started heating up again for Def Leppard, which eventually got back into arenas and stadiums armed with enduring tunes like “Photograph,” “Love Bites,” “Rock of Ages” and “Pour Some Sugar on Me.” Now here they are — singer Elliott, guitarists Phil Collen and Vivian Campbell, bassist Rick Savage and drummer Rick Allen — on a tour with another purveyor of glossy ’80s rock-radio hits, Journey, that will stop Sunday at Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium.
“We get onstage and we wink at each other and go, ‘Can you believe this?’ Forty-seven years in and we’re playing places this big after everybody said we were done,” says Elliott, 65. “We were the only five that said, ‘No, we’re not.’” The frontman is wearing a black Taylor Swift T-shirt, a souvenir from the Eras Tour date in Dublin where he introduced his 8-year-old daughter to the pop megastar. (Fun fact: Rick Allen’s brother Robert is part of Swift’s management team.) “It was a very magical moment,” he says, “and I will be forever be grateful to Taylor for making Daddy look cool for a couple of days.”
Def Leppard played an episode of CMT’s “Crossroads” with Taylor in 2008. Could you see where she was headed?
I don’t think anybody could. You look at it now and it kind of makes sense. But if you think back to 2008, there was no such thing as what she’s accomplished. I know anybody that was there when the Beatles and the Stones came over will go, “Wait a minute…” But for people born this century or in the ’90s, this is a phenomenon that’s never been seen before — technically bigger than the Beatles and the Stones combined, at least commercially. It’s insanity, the amount of tickets she sells.
But I always knew she’d be big. And for all the hardships she’s gone through — the people who’ve tried to trip her up over the years at certain parts of her career — she’s just dusted herself down. She’s a fantastic role model for a generation of kids.
Robert Plant told me a few years ago that you were once known to make “a complete hullabaloo” while warming up your voice before a show.
I know exactly what he’s talking about. That was the 1988 me that didn’t really know what I was doing. At that time, as successful as we were, there was always a certain amount of anxiety within me: Am I a fraud? Am I able to do this? So I used to have to test myself before I could put myself in front of an audience. I would go into the shower because it’s nice and big and echo-y, and I would clear my throat by … kind of doing the beginning of “Immigrant Song,” I suppose.
When Vivian joined in ’92 he brought along Roger Love, who’s this renowned L.A. vocal coach, who came and hung out with us for a month in Ibiza, where we were rehearsing. And he specifically tailored tapes to everybody’s voice for warm-up purposes. But Robert’s absolutely right: Back then, I made a hell of a hullabaloo, and it seems he’s never forgotten it, which is hilarious. He and I talk quite often, mostly about soccer. In fact, his birthday’s coming up — I owe him a text.
Read more: Robert Plant and Alison Krauss on the secrets to aging gracefully
The core of Def Leppard hasn’t changed in decades, which is fairly unusual for a touring legacy act these days. Journey, for instance, is on the road with Arnel Pineda in place of Steve Perry. Do you think fans care whether they’re watching the original members of a band?
My experience of watching Journey is that the crowd is really into it. Are there some naysayers that I can’t see going, “I wish it was Steve Perry”? Probably. We have people that still wish [guitarist] Steve Clark was in the band, or even [guitarist] Pete Willis — the keyboard warriors who make a bit of noise. But the majority of people, I think, just want to hear the songs. The song is the boss, not any one person in the band.
It’s not [Journey guitarist] Neal Schon, it’s not Joe Elliott, it’s not Robert Plant — it’s not even Taylor Swift. It’s the song. So to a certain extent it really doesn’t matter. We did a gig once with Foreigner, and there wasn’t a person in the band that ever played on one of their records. But they went out there, they did their songs and 83,000 people in Quebec couldn’t give a s—.
We fight tooth and nail to keep this band together because we saw the way that U2 were. Until just recently, when [drummer] Larry [Mullen Jr.] couldn’t do the Sphere residency, they’d never changed the lineup at all. We lost Pete along the way, and then we lost Steve, but this lineup’s been together now for 32 years, which is four times as long as the Beatles were together.
And we genuinely like each other! I got this respiratory thing in Boston the other week, and I isolated because I didn’t know what it was. They put me in my own room, and I f— hated it. I said to the guys, “I don’t understand these bands that have different dressing rooms.” We share the same room, and we always have for 40-odd years. Apparently so do the Foo Fighters, because Phil was talking to Pat Smear recently, and he goes, “Well, yeah — this is what proper bands do, right?”
Def Leppard’s hits have always had a home on the radio. What do you enjoy hearing segued into or out of one of your songs?
When I hear one of ours shoved between “Gimme Shelter” and “Kashmir,” that’s good company. That’s how you judge it. The other day we were being driven into the gig in San Antonio, and “Sugar” came on some station. It was “Brick House” by the Commodores, then “Sugar,” and that was followed by “Billie Jean.” Again, good company.
We were the sore thumb in the ’80s — the solitary rock band that had hit singles. A lot of rock albums did great: Van Halen, Guns N’ Roses, Steve Winwood — they all had platinum albums on a very rock-orientated chart. But then you look at the singles chart, and it’s Cameo and Michael Jackson and Janet Jackson and New Edition. That always made us smile, like we’d infiltrated the chart we don’t belong on.
Who made records in the ’80s that sounded better than yours?
Nobody. I don’t mean that in a disrespectful way — I just don’t think anybody made records that sounded as good as ours. Bands made records that sounded different to ours. And they would argue now that their record sounded better because it sounded more organic. But what we were trying to do was use machinery and technology to push the envelope — to take a Queen-type thing and literally bring in the technology of a Joy Division or a Kraftwerk or a Human League. Why can’t a band that plays rock ’n’ roll utilize these drum sounds and these sequencing effects to enhance what hasn’t really progressed too much? When we were making “Pyromania,” we were listening to stuff that was on the charts in ’82, and it didn’t sound any different to anything that came out in ’75.
ZZ Top had a similar idea — combining guitar music with synths and programmed elements — around the same time with “Eliminator.” What’d you think of that?
I was impressed more with the videos because they really did stand out. You have to remember that in 1983, when we were still earning $100 a week and traveling all together on one bus — even though we had an album in the top 10 — it was still novel to check into your s— Holiday Inn and see if they had MTV. We’d see “Gimme All Your Lovin’” and “Sharp Dressed Man” 587 times on a day off.
We’re very fortunate that we’re from a generation of bands — us, Duran Duran, ZZ Top, the Police, Michael Jackson — where you can close your eyes and see the video because it’s burnt into your retinas. ZZ Top were what you might call a three-piece American power trio with things like “Tush” and “Cheap Sunglasses,” and then it just blew wide open to a whole different audience. And I’m sure they had a lot of old ZZ Top fans saying, “This isn’t ZZ Top anymore.” We certainly had people say, when we put out “Pyromania,” that we’d betrayed our metal roots and all this bulls—. It’s called progress.
Which is better: “Pyromania” or “Hysteria”?
Jesus, man, come on. Obviously, the breakthrough was “Pyromania” — the memories from that tour of being this band that got out of a bus and walked into a hotel to being this band that got off the bus and we couldn't even get into the hotel because there were too many kids blocking the way. But by 1987, when it’s the second time, it’s the second time, you know what I mean? So what you had was the first and then the bigger. Which of them is better? I just blend them together and go, The ’80s were great.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
