http://www.guitarist.co.uk/print.asp?ID=6778&type=int Date: 06/06/02 With a new album in the can, genial guitarist Phil Collen talks guitars, dispels a few myths and explains that legendarily exhaustive recording technique As Phil Collen breezes into the foyer of the plush London hotel in which we're awaiting his arrival, it's hard to believe that this unassuming Londoner has sold the best part of 40 million albums since he joined Def Leppard a full two decades ago. Certainly in the running for the Brian May Nicest Man In Rock(tm) award, Collen is aware of another Queen parallel, that of being continually derided by the media without the level of success ever being seriously compromised. "Adrenalize went triple platinum and was at the top of the US charts for five weeks, but we got really slagged off for it." He grins. "Y'know, it came out at the height of the grunge thing so we got a battering for that." To say that the band have experienced a topsy-turvy ride to the top is an understatement. Collen joined after the sacking of original guitarist Pete Willis in 1982 during the Hysteria sessions, and the former member of NWOBHM also-rans Lucy and Girl quickly formed a solid relationship with original guitarist Steve Clark, always the blues-based ice to Collen's technique-strong fire (singer Joe Elliott presumably the lukewarm water)... In 1984, drummer Rick Allen lost an arm in a road accident after being catapulted through the sunroof of his car and, in 1991, the enigmatic Clark, easily the coolest man to have ever wielded a Gibson Firebird in anger, died after ingesting a lethal cocktail of booze and painkillers. Devastated but even more resolute, the band continued their increasing assault on the US charts. America has always been Leppard's most successful stomping ground, even before double tragedy struck, and not even the seven million-selling Pyromania opus completely broke the band in Blighty. What's more, they are only one of eight British bands to have been inaugurated into the Diamond Awards, given out by the US record industry for sales of over 10 million for a single album. Total sales of Hysteria amounting to 15 million have seen to this; other UK artists on the same exalted plateau include The Beatles, Clapton, Pink Floyd and the Bee Gees. Still not convinced by Leppard's stratospheric status? Then check out the bands Collen states have been, ahem, 'influenced' by the Lep sound. "When we had Pyromania, everyone was copying us." He says, smile slipping only a fraction. "The Scorpions, Bon Jovi, they were all doing a karaoke version of it." Coming bang up to date, the new album X will be on sale by the time you read this and fans will be happy to know that it's chock full of sheer good music. The super-slick production and various styles are ever present but it sounds like Def Leppard, even before the unique voice of Elliott comes in. Surely there's some sort of formula involved... "Well, we certainly have done." Concedes Collen with what continues throughout our chat as refreshing honesty. "We did on Euphoria, which was a reaction against Slang, which was a reaction itself against Adrenalise. For Slang we went for something more honest, but the album didn't do great and it pissed a lot of fans off. So, we tried pandering to them with Euphoria and I wasn't happy with it, especially the approach - us copying the drum sound, the amount of backing vocals, all that stuff. "So, the brief when we started the new album was to just see how it went, and the songs really developed on their own. Sav (Rick Savage, bass) had a song and we stuck a bit on the end that was like Freebird, a big long guitar solo. And this was something we wouldn't normally have done and we thought fuck 'em, y'know? "There was another song that we thought might have sounded a bit like the Backstreet Boys, but we didn't care and we were actually pleasing ourselves. I've got to say that it felt really good to do that!" He laughs. For some reason, this attitude is something that has stuck in the craw of the hacks since the band came to notoriety way back in the early eighties, when support slots with the likes of Judas Priest, AC/DC and Ted Nugent in the US contrasted cruelly with their being virtually bottled offstage at the Reading Festival when they returned to the UK. Of course, with the amount of aforementioned record sales under their collective belts, it would seem that the last laugh is Leppard's. But they are still prepared to do something new, as Collen explains. "One of the big differences on this record was that we worked with three different producers including Marty Frederiksen, who'd done the Aerosmith album. I heard Jaded on the radio one day and I thought, I want us to sound like that. "Having said that, the first song [and first single], Now, became the standard for the rest of the album after we got it down, even the stuff we did with [long-time cohort] Pete Woodrooffe. We kept using that as the standard, and it was a good thing to get Marty involved. We have used other songwriters before, but it was always Mutt or Pete producing." Aah, the legendary producer-cum-svengali John Robert 'Mutt' Lange. As the knob twiddler behind most notably Hysteria, the mantra of the interestingly haired legend was that the 'song is king and anything that works does work'. This is something that remains an edict with Leppard's inner sanctum to this day. "The song Four Letter Word I had on the last tour and I was doing on my son's acoustic on the bus!" says Collen by way of illustration. "Originally it was supposed to sound like Elvis but when I started demoing it, it started to sound like AC/DC and I thought, This is not what I want. But I played it to Joe and he loved it, so I just went with it. "Most of this album is like that: instead of pulling stuff back and moulding them into something, we just let the songs go where they wanted to really." As befits a Leppard album in the classic mould, there's a whole lot going on within the confines of each track and, although the band has always been filed under the 'melodic rock' banner, there's more than enough guitar happening to keep everyone happy. However, the gear used may come as a bit of a surprise. Custom Shop Les Pauls, vintage Strats, old Jacksons? Not necessarily... "The main guitar on this album was this Squier Tele that I have; it pops up on every track..." Wha'? He smiles at me, acknowledging my confusion, giving me a 'there you go' half-smile. Things are just as unconventional in the amp department and it seems that the 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' theory continues in this arena. "Everything was speaker simulators aside from the Marty Frederiksen stuff, which was real amps. That was interesting too, as we used things like Vox AC30s, those Gibson Goldtone amps and Telecasters, and we hadn't mic'd up for years, not since Slang actually. "It's horses for courses really," he expands. "We'd track it up with whatever. There's a Coral guitar on there somewhere, old Les Pauls. So, for the main guitar sound, it wasn't like just doubling up with the Tele and leaving it at that." The main Leppard guitar sounds come from the Marshall JMP1 preamp, a piece of rack gear that has become almost the industry standard and something that Collen succinctly reckons "...is great, works a treat." It's the same in the live environment too. "Live we use a Palmer Speaker Simulator also with the JMP1, so it's really controllable out front. I mean we have cabs on stage too; I use four bottom cabs. I'm actually going deaf, my hearing's declining each year, but I actually think it's from singing rather than the guitar. I always try to avoid getting nasty frequencies in the sidefills, but singing in the studio through headphones, I have that shit so loud that I think that's what it is." We were hoping we'd get to this: the enduring rumour of Leppard using tapes when playing live. Surely they couldn't recreate the signature multi-layered backing vocals on-stage? Cock-ups such as an errant click track blasting out of the PA during a performance at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert at Wembley Stadium (ironically one of Vivian Campbell's first gigs with the band) have done nothing to dispel such stories. Far from being defensive or evasive about this, Collen actually laughs. "A lot of people think we use tapes, yeah. When Viv joined he was convinced that we did, but we don't; it's us singing. Everybody in the band could be a lead singer. "What's better now is everyone takes a part, where before we'd just take different harmonies and it was all a bit of a mish-mash. Mutt used to sing everything with us; the main backing vocal was usually him with us around the edges." He warms to a subject he's surely addressed many times. "Now I do the mid ones, Sav does the low ones and Viv the high ones, but playing and singing to a high standard is the hard part. For example, what fucked me up on doing Now live was that the riff goes all over the neck, while I'm singing these really high notes. You have to look at the neck, so we turned the mic so that it was pointing straight up so I could do both at the same time. When we first started doing Animal live too... it was a bastard; I thought I'd never be able to do it, but you do in the end. "Actually, this is the best we've ever sounded vocally." He continues. "We just did a gig in Kansas and it actually shocked me, They're using tapes!" He guffaws yet again. As is often the case, after getting to know massive rock stars for an hour or so, you discover they're as mad about guitars as the rest of us. Collen has long been associated with Jackson and he positively bubbles when he tells us of the new spec'd PC1 he's just received. "My personal PC1s have a fatter neck than the shop ones, more like an old Les Paul baseball bat, and Jackson have come up with a version that doesn't have the maple top and also has black hardware. I've got a couple, and I've got a single-coil version too, which is really nice. I've never got rid of any of my guitars. I've given a couple to mates but that's it, they're mostly in the attic at our place in California." Does he continually try different set-ups? "Well, I have done, but I find using just one guitar can sound great too. It's how it makes you feel really. People say that to get different tones you could use loads of different amps, but really it doesn't matter. It's all about the feel and if it moves you, then it's the right guitar sound. Honestly, if you really analyse it, you can get away with two guitars for an entire album. "On stage I've found I play better when I have just one guitar, because I'm not trying to get used to different necks. That's what happens without realising it, even if it's exactly the same model, cos they're all different." There's no doubt the man can play, but his influences, again, are the same as for the vast majority of us. "I started playing guitar because of Ritchie Blackmore. He was the main influence for years, but when I got into Hendrix later on, that really blew me away, what he was doing when he was singing. It was as if he was portraying something different, y'know, that whole R&B thing, around the vocals and everyone misses that, especially white guitar players! "When I started learning technique I used to listen to Al DiMeola for hours..." He pauses for thought. "Oh, Eddie Van Halen, obviously, for the fire he had, and I like Pete Townshend and Steve Stevens for the fact that they play with conviction. In the eighties I met a lot of players who had really light strings and I thought it was something other than rock. If you're going to be a rock guitarist, you've got to give it some stick." Collen uses a standard set of 12 gauge along with metal plectrums, and modesty forbids us to print how he described the strings we'd set up the PC1 for our photography session with... We continue to chew the fat over a variety of subjects ("Dave Grohl! He's fackin' awesome!") until Collen is whisked away, but he does first offer another instalment in the 'it could only happen to a guitarist' files... "I gave Jackson one of my own PC1s to display at a music show in LA [NAMM] and they fuckin' sold it! Some guy in Germany bought it and it took me ages to get it back. It's my guitar, y'know!? It was like, Thanks very much!" Simon Bradley © Future Publishing. All rights reserved. Guitarist, Future Publishing Ltd., 30 Monmouth Street, BATH, BA1 2BW. guitarist@futurenet.co.uk Tel:+44 1225 442244 Fax:+44 1225 462986