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LiveDaily Interview: Joe Elliott of Def Leppard

July 26, 2007 01:07 PM
By Christina Fuoco-Karasinski
LiveDaily Contributor

Currently on tour with no new album to promote, Def Leppard is facing the 
challenge of giving fans a show that isn't a carbon copy of its production 
during last year's "Yeah!" tour.

"We've really got to juggle things around, so we've dug deep into our back 
catalog and we've pulled out songs that we've never played on stage [and] songs 
that we haven't played on stage in maybe 10 years," lead singer Joe Elliott 
told LiveDaily.

"'Pour Some Sugar on Me,' 'Hysteria,' 'Animal' and 'Armageddon' are apparently 
obvious, but sometimes we have to go a little further than that. That's where 
we're going with most of our back catalog," he added.

Elliott, who hails from Sheffield, England, and lives in Dublin, Ireland, said 
he doesn't think too many fans will be disappointed by the shows, which feature 
openers Foreigner and Styx.

"The only disappointment there might be is we go back so deep that there will 
be some people who don't know [all of the songs]," Elliott said. "We have to be 
very careful. We've done this before. We've had people screaming at us, 'You 
must play "Rock Brigade." All right, we rehearse 'Rock Brigade,' put it in the 
set and in front of 10,000 people, [and] we saw 100 people going [crazy] and 
9,900 people [standing] there with their arms folded saying, 'I don't know it.'"

Elliott--who is joined in the band by guitarist/vocalist Phil Collen, 
guitarist/vocalist Vivian Campbell, bassist/vocalist Rick Savage and drummer 
Rick Allen--talked with LiveDaily about the band's forthcoming album 
(tentatively titled "Live from the Sparkle Lounge," due out in 2008), choosing 
songs for the covers album "Yeah," and touring with Styx and Foreigner.

LiveDaily: What can you tell me about the new album. I understand it's 
tentatively called "Songs from the Sparkle Lounge."

Joe Elliott: It's more than tentative. Until somebody comes up with a much 
better title that's the title of the album, you know. It's named so because we 
wrote much of the songs in a little room backstage on the tour. We set it up 
every day. No matter where we were, we set this stuff up. Sometimes we didn't 
go in, sometimes we did. If anybody had any ideas for songs, we banged them 
down. It just made our life a lot easier. We don't normally write well on the 
road, but for some reason it worked this time. [I]t's a great little scenario, 
what we had going. The crew would put up the gear, but we would use the gig as 
the secondary studio situation. They just put all these sparkley lights up 
everywhere--hence the title "Sparkle Lounge"--and give a bit of atmosphere, and 
off we went. The songs just kept coming and coming and coming. It was really 
cool, I have to say. It worked really well.

Musically, ["Songs from the Sparkle Lounge" is] a big mish mash of various 
stages of Leppard through the ages, I think. Some of it sounds like "Hysteria" 
songs recorded during the "High and Dry" period. There's some songs that don't 
sound like anything we've ever done. I think that's important. We've gone a 
little left field on a couple of songs. Hopefully, we'll pull in audience 
interest. Who knows? We may bring in new people. That's the dream of every 
artist that makes records. We'll have to wait and see on that one.

...I think we may write more songs on this tour because we've set up the 
Sparkle Lounge yet again.

When do you expect the album to come out?

We want to put it out early next year. We were going to put it out this year, 
but there's no point in trying to rush it. We want to make it good, not quick.

I read you felt a little more adventurous when you were doing "Sounds from 
Sparkle Lounge." Were there things you were able to do this time around that 
you weren't able to do in the past, or did you feel more freedom?

I think we've always tried to be adventurous. There's a point and there's an 
argument that can be said that we have a formula. I've never really believed 
that we did. I don't think anyone can say that "Slang" was a formulaic album. 
That was completely off the wall. We jokingly call it commercial suicide 
because it was so not what people were expecting us to do. Adventurous is a 
strange word. If we were truly adventurous, we'd be making records like 
Radiohead. But we don't want to make records like Radiohead, so we don't go 
that route. It would be dead easy for us to wank off in jazz. That's easy. 
That's not difficult to do. You just go off on a tangent. It's almost like 
making records for the sake of it being weird. We're not going to be weird for 
the sake of it. We believe we get adventurous as we want to get.

It's more of a case of making memorable songs than being adventurous. It 
doesn't matter to me if we wrote a song that's so close to "Jumping Jack Flash" 
or "Brown Sugar" [by The Rolling Stones] or "You Really Got Me" by Tthe Kinks." 
It's not close enough to get sued, but it's close enough for people for people 
to say, "This is the kind of music I like." It's just age-old rock and roll. 
It's traditional in the sense that maybe nobody's done it for awhile or it's 
got such a twist on it you don't notice that it sounds like those guys. But the 
melodies are things that cause people to get up the next day and start 
whistling the song when they're on their way to work and not quite remember 
what it is they're whistling because they're not that familiar with it yet. 
It's already sinking into their DNA because it's a memorable melody. That's the 
kind of stuff we try to do. We never wanted to be a band that just wants to be 
noise, like, say, Motorhead. God bless them, I love them to death but we could 
maybe do a song that sounds like Motorhead on an album, but we couldn't do a 
whole album like that.

How did you choose the songs for your latest album, the covers album "Yeah"?

They chose themselves. Seriously, they chose themselves. We didn't really have 
a point to make. But, by accident, rather than by trying, it made a point, that 
record: These are our musical heroes. This is where our true roots lie. So all 
those people that spent a quarter of a century trying to put us in a box that's 
heavy metal are totally missing the point.

We didn't grow up on Black Sabbath, Deep Purple. Yes, they were part of our 
youth, but the biggest part of our youth was British Top 40 radio. We didn't 
have rock radio in England. The Black Sabbath album-cuts stuff were peripheral 
for us, but what was right in our face was T Rex and [David] Bowie and Slade, 
Roxy Music, Sweet--all this stuff that was guitar-based rock and roll, not 
necessarily what you call album-track rock. So things like "Blockbuster" and 
"Ballroom Blitz" by Sweet, every one of us stuck our hand up and said, "Yep I 
bought the 7-inch single." We were buying into the songs, not the band. Back in 
those days, when we were kids, you got a certain amount of pocket money. We 
couldn't afford to buy albums. You could maybe buy a single and even then 
sometimes it would be what we used to call ex-jukebox. It had been on a jukebox 
for six weeks and then they'd sell them for the equivalent of 25 cents or 
whatever, and we'd pick maybe two or three up. They might be a month old but at 
least we've finally got them now. You'd have things like "Rebel Rebel" by Bowie 
or "Get It On" by T Rex.

Basically, all the songs on "Yeah" are from that era, except for a couple, 
which is the Blondie and the [Thin] Lizzy song; they come from mid- to late 
'70s. Most of the things are 1970ish to 1972. I think the furthest we go back 
is "Waterloo Sunset," which I think was '65. But we just all sorted out [songs] 
we figured we could do a good rendition of. But these are the songs and this is 
the time period that, even though we didn't know each other collectively--we 
were spread out over Britain--you had these five guys tugging on the sleeves of 
their parents going, "Mom, mom, I want a guitar for Christmas" or "I want a 
drum kit" or whatever we were saying, these are the songs that made us want to 
do what we ended up doing. So we just wanted to share it.

How did your tour with Styx and Foreigner come together?

The same way the Journey one did--management. We're a band, and I have to be 
honest: from the business point of view, we're totally involved in it, but 
we're not necessarily the instigators of situations. We are occasionally, but 
when you've got good management, you're hoping the phone's going to ring and 
they're going to say, "We've got some great deals."

We used to tour to promote a record. I think, nowadays, you're finding more and 
more people putting out records to promote a tour because of the way the 
Internet is. There's so much piracy and there's so much downloading music, and 
people expecting to get something for free. It's taken the edge off the value 
of music. When I was a kid, you rushed out to buy these songs and you took this 
physical thing home and cherished it. Now it's intellectual property, there's 
no physical connection. You download the song onto your computer, you can't 
hold the thing the song came in on, it came in on the air. You can't look at 
the sleeve unless you look at it on a screen.

So live [shows have] become like this Holy Grail situation where it's the one 
thing people can't clone. You can't be two places at once. It can't be stolen. 
It can be bootlegged, but, you know, people have been bootlegging since the day 
tape recorders started [fitting] in your pocket. That's not a problem, really. 
The live thing, I think, is more important. It's the premiere part of the 
industry. We are well aware of this. We decided rather than being followers, we 
wanted to be ahead of the game and jump before everyone else did and take a 
look at it. Go and sit out in the seats out front and look back at the stage 
and pretend you're 16 again and go, "What do I want to hear tonight?" If the 
show starts at 7:30 and then the show ends at 11, what I want to hear is mostly 
stuff that I heard before.

We took Ricky Warwick out with us in 2002 and it didn't do him or us any good. 
We go out with Journey and they go out on stage and open with "Any Way You Want 
It" and the crowd goes crazy. We don't feel threatened by it. We feel relieved 
by it because, by the time we go on, these guys, they're not tired, they're 
pumped. We go on and we still have to work hard because we have to follow this 
great band, but they're already primed with hit after hit after hit. It doesn't 
matter--the cynics can all go to hell with me.

If you turn up at somebody's wedding, you know what's going to happen. You know 
who the people are getting married. You already know it's a celebration for 
them. This is a similar thing to anything like that. It's a live, evolving 
situation and to add Styx, Foreigner or REO Speedwagon--it doesn't matter who 
it would be. We've had Cheap Trick in the past, Journey, Bryan Adams. It's all 
music that people are familiar with. If they like it, they come, if they don't, 
they stay away. It's as simple as that.

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