Date sent: Sat, 23 Jun 2001 10:29:51 -0700 (PDT) From: Alter Of Cain Subject: Joe interview at metal-is.com Freaking Out On A Moonage Daydream THE CYBERNAUTS 21 Jun 2001 Metal-Is Editor Valerie Potter caught up with Def Leppard frontman Joe Elliott just as he returned to his Dublin home at the tail-end of a week-long razzle, which involved lunch and golf with members of Bon Jovi, checking out the Roxy Music reunion and sharing vocals with Ian Hunter on his UK tour. With the prospect of a Cheap Trick gig in the company of Ricky Warwick (The Almighty) and Andy Cairns (Therapy?) ahead of him, he enthuses, "I haven't done this many gigs since I was 16 and having just done about five weeks of solid writing with Phil (Collen), I figured it was nice to have a bit of a blow-out!" Aside from working on the next Def Leppard album, Joe has recently been involved in a side-project with guitarist Phil, called The Cybernauts. When the pair played with the Spiders From Mars rhythm section of Trevor Bolder (bass) and Woody Woodmansey (drums) at the 1994 Mick Ronson tribute concert in London, they all had so much fun that they reformed three years later (with the addition of keyboard player Dick Decent) to play at the opening of the Mick Ronson Memorial Stage in Hull and added a few more club shows, during which they performed David Bowie covers from the Ronson era. The Dublin gig was recorded and released as a live album in Japan, where interest was so strong, the band reformed for a third time to play dates there and along the way, recorded some studio tracks, including Jimi Hendrix's 'Manic Depression'. Now the whole package is available, (but only from www.cybernautsruleok.com ), as a double CD entitled 'The Cybernauts Live'. Why did you decide that the Cybernauts album would only be available through the Internet? I only thought about this the other day, but I think it must have been because I'd heard the Jimmy Page/Black Crowes thing had come out on the Web, and I thought, 'That's a really smart move.' With that being an active retro sort of project, I thought, 'It's not a million miles from what this is.' We didn't want to put it out as Spiders From Mars, we wanted it to look more like a legit project, and I think it was Dick Decent who came up with the name 'Cybernauts', or 'The Cybermen' and it just got bastardised. The reason that we did it on the web was that we were aware that it wasn't really relevant as a major release, by any means. It's a little too good to sit around doing nothing, but at the same time, I don't think it really warranted posters on Sunset Boulevard, so we figured we'd just let it sneak out for friends and relatives sort of vibe. Anyone that's interested will find out that it's there and anybody that's not will just leave it alone. What did I call it the other day - "platinum coated karaoke"? It's not really that, to be fair. It's better than that, because it's from the heart, it's a proper tribute to Mick. There's a lot of people out there that get credit for being dead, if you know what I mean; your Hendrixes, your Janis Joplins, your Jim Morrisons, and people go on about how wonderful they were. To be quite honest with you, I agreed with the quote that Nikki Sixx came out with; Jim Morrison was a complete waste of space, in my eyes. He was just a fat, bloated, not very good poet. Nobody really mentions much about Ronson and for someone that was as economical as his playing was and obviously as contributory as he was to the early Bowie stuff, it annoyed me that people ignored such a fantastic musician and there was never enough coverage about him. So we're abusing our position in a good way, really, just to say, "We're in Def Leppard, we've got a bit of a voice, so this is a guy you should check out, because this guy influenced a lot more than just me and Phil." There are thousands of people out there that I meet that go, "You know, if it wasn't for that guy, I would never have picked up a guitar." How did you go about choosing which songs to cover? Anything that Mick played on was the criteria, basically; we weren't going to be doing 'Diamond Dogs' stuff onwards, because Mick wasn't involved. 'Manic Depression' was a Hendrix song, but as Trevor and Woody said, they used to play it all the time in rehearsals and soundchecks, so we figured it was a good song to do anyway. No way did I try to sound like Bowie, because what's the point? I just wanted to be me paying tribute to these great songs, so I just sang them as me, and I think it worked better doing it that way. As long as I could just about squeeze the notes out... 'Jean Genie' and stuff like that are pretty easy. 'Life On Mars' ain't the easiest fucking song to sing in the world, but it was such an important song for me to attempt to do, because I just think it's a brilliant song. 'Five Years' was a breeze to do, but it was a bastard to try and remember the words, 'cause there's so many of 'em! How much into the Internet are you? Well, I won't let myself get anal about it. I'm into it as much as I'm into a newspaper. I pick it up and scour through it during breakfast, put it down, pick it up during the day, then put it back down again. Like most people, I log on in the morning, check my e-mail, log on at night before I go to bed, check it again. If somebody sends me a thing saying "Check this out" and it's got a web address printed on it, I'll have a look and see what it's about, and it's normally about a footballer getting transferred from one team to another, or somebody's selling Mick Ronson's guitar for 9,000 quid and do I want to buy it? I surf, but I don't surf religiously. I also avoid all things chat room, because they're just so full of shit. I've read the Leppard ones and they're extremely annoying, because they're not truth, they're just people's fantasies, and because they're faceless, as in they don't use their real names, they can pretend to be who they want and say any old rubbish about anybody. We closed the Leppard one down, because it got to the stage where, if a ten year old decided to go in, he or she were reading things which they just shouldn't have seen, and it was pretty stupid. I work very closely with the official Def Leppard website and there's a Cybernauts one as well, and I avoid all the other ones, because you can stretch yourself too far. There are a lot of, probably, very, very good unofficial Def Leppard websites, and it's very flattering that they do it, but I can't get involved with them, because to spend ten minutes with each one would take 28 hours out of one day, and I have a life outside of Internet! So I don't get involved with them. All you can do is hope that they stick to the truth. If you want the actual 'from the horse's mouth', you go on www.defleppard.com or www.cybernautsruleok.com and you get the truth, not the rumours, not the "Oh, I heard..." or "I'm not sure if it's true, but..." We don't need ten websites to do that; if they want to find out the truth, they can go on our website and steal it. Do you think the Internet is going to change the face of the music business? Well, maybe slowly but surely... I don't think the Cybernauts album is going to change the face of the music business! I saw a couple of reviews last week - Sebastian Bach and Stray, two examples of artists where it looks like it's only available on the website, so it looks like more and more people are doing it. It's an outlet, it's your own Napster, it's a shop and it's a specific shop, and all this shop sells is Cybernauts CDs right now. I will mention, however, in the future you will be able to buy baseball caps, t-shirts, (laughs) and we will be available for bar-mitzvahs and weddings! I think what you will find is a lot of those artists between now and whenever who are deemed by some moron In a record company to be not valid, who should but don't get a record deal, will start self-financing, selling on the Web. I know of people that are very relevant in the music business, maybe in the same way of Al Stewart and the 'Year Of The Cat' kind of thing. He can do a 400-seater club tour of Britain and people will go and love him, but he's never going to be played on Radio One. Anybody that's cool or had cool at a certain stage in their life and didn't blow it, but just kind of faded away, can make a record, sell it on the Web and not have to go through all of that corporate rubbish. You lose what you gain and you gain what you lose. You don't have the backroom staff doing the press and all that kind of stuff, but what you gain is the fact that if you can sell a few thousand, it's probably the equivalent of selling 100,000, because there's no top line profits skimmed off, and then you can survive to make another one, and it becomes a more professional cottage industry. I can see that happening. If (someone like) Donovan or Francis Dunnery does a solo album and if 10,000 people round the world love it, that guy can pay his rent for the year. If 10,000 people buy it when it comes out on a major label, you don't even clear the advance, so it has its advantages, it has its disadvantages. It's like most things. Everything that exists has a use and it can be used or it can be abused. If a friend of mine says, "I think I've got lymphoid cancer", you can find out what you should do about it on the Internet. I don't use it to see if somebody thinks who's got the biggest dick between me and Phil. There's no point - I already know anyway! There's a Def Leppard biopic coming out on VH1 soon. What's that about? It's one of these made-for-TV movies. I think there are a few snippets of the real band in there, maybe on TV screens, but there's five guys playing Def Leppard. Orlando Seal is me; he's been in 'Sleepy Hollow' and Kenneth Branagh's 'Hamlet', I think. It covers it from Day One, as in probably me with a tennis racquet when I was three or something, to Donington in '86, I think, up to before 'Hysteria' came out. So it covers the formation of the band, Rick's accident, Pete Willis' downward spiral into alcoholism and touches on Steve's, but it doesn't go as far as Steve dying and Vivien joining the group. Have you had any say in the making of it? I was script doctor. I had to, because I volunteered for a start, and I wanted it to be as accurate as possible. We want to be able to stand by this film when it's finished and say, "Yeah, this is right", with the exception of the odd artistic meander, which they will do. They have to - the truth is pretty boring sometimes, so they have to dress it up slightly, but not bend the truth. For example, in an early draft of the film, the script had Phil in the band for the 'High 'N' Dry' tour. I said, "You can't do that!" "But we need to get him in the film earlier..." I said, "Well, you CAN'T! You'll get slaughtered on every website in the world! Our fans will be e-mailing us, saying 'How can you stand by this movie?'" So I offered them the truth and if they choose to ignore it, there's nothing I can do, but we didn't have a final say and I haven't seen it. In fact, it's not even going to be finished until 16 July and the broadcast date is the 18 th, so me being in Ireland, I might not even get to see it before other people do. How's the writing for the new album been coming along? Very well. We've got a bunch of stuff, albeit nowhere near finished, but enough for us to be getting on with, so I think we're going to be started pretty soon. Me and Phil have been together for about a month, banging a bunch of things together, and everybody's been writing individually, and we are doing more stuff as well. We're hoping to mix it up a bit more on this album. We're trying to organise getting three or four different producers involved. We will work with Pete (Woodroffe) on a bunch of it, and we are hoping to write and produce a couple of songs with Marti Frederiksen, who did Aerosmith. Mutt (Lange) will be involved at some stage of the album as well and there are another couple of people in the pipeline that I'm not going to mention, not because I'm trying to fuck you around, but genuinely, I can't see the point, in case in three weeks' time it's not going to happen. It's hard to tell right now, but at the moment, it's kinda rocky, there's a few more riffy bits at the moment, but it's very groovy as well. I think it's going to have a nice swing to it. There's a lot of emphasis on the rhythms, which is something that we've always done anyway, but that seems to be rearing its head a little earlier than usual. That's good, because if something makes your head bob up and down, then you're halfway there. This is always a question that one always asks Def Leppard with some trepidation, but - when will the new album come out?! I know - I see the humour in it too, so don't worry! We're trying to get a lot of it written upfront, so when we go in, we can bang it down. I'd like to think that we'll be at the back end of this album by Christmas. I don't see why we couldn't be, because we've got a lot of this stuff done already. I'm not making massive predictions, but I'd like to think that we'd be back out on the road by the summer of next year. I remember talking to you before the release of your last album, 'Euphoria', which you felt was a very important one for the band - almost a make or break album, if you like. How do you feel it performed for you? I don't think it did as well as we'd have liked. Of course, you can say that about any record. If your album did 10 million, you'd be going, "I wish it did 15..." We were that close with 'Promises' in the States for it to burst wide open and we were 20 stations short of a major blow-out there. It was disappointing that radio wouldn't touch it in Britain, but we ain't the only ones in that box. They probably won't even play the next Oasis single, so what do you do? You know and I know that the quality of that record way surpasses half the shit that you hear in the charts, but then you start sounding like a bitter old man if you rant and rave, and I'm not going to do a Status Quo and start suing people! You have to accept it. I'm not accepting the fact that we're not valid or not relevant; I'm accepting the fact that on that particular record, they said, "No", and consequently, it snowballed downwards from that over here, but in the States, I think we were the only British artist in two and a half years to crack the Top 10 in the album chart, so at the time, it was big news. We sold close to a million just in the States and probably 2/2.5 million worldwide, and a lot of people I know would bite their own you-know-whats off to sell half that many. I still think it's great record, I think it sounded good; I think it's a great shame that more people didn't hear it. But it comes and goes. Let's not forget what Aerosmith were, mid- to late Eighties. It can all make or break on one song. We were that close with 'Promises' and if it had gone huge in the States, it might have bounced back into Britain, because that's how Leppard got their success anyway. But it was no dent in anybody's ego. We're extremely realistic and we know a career is a wheel going round and at some stage, it gets to the bottom, but if it's still got momentum, it ends up back at the top. So we're not in any kind of panic mode. At the end of the day, quality shines through, and I honestly believe that the musicianship and the songwriting and the enthusiasm in this band is way too big and important for it to just go away quietly. And we will not go away quietly!