From: "Mike N. Reinemann" Date sent: Sat, 31 Jul 1999 05:00:37 -0400 Subject: PLANET ROCK PROFILES pt.1 =================== PLANET ROCK PROFILES Landmark Hotels, London - DEF LEPPARD In 1980, 20 year-old Joe Elliott wrote on the wall of Sheffield City Hall that his band Def Leppard would be the biggest band in the world . A year later they headlined that very venue and the rest is History or Historian as Def Leppard would say. TOM: Before you got into Def Leppard what did it look like you were going to do? JOE: Me, I was a storekeeper in a steel factory I used to work in the basement so I was responsible for buying everything in the factory from grinding wheels that were the size of truck types to Sworfega for getting the oil off your fingers to having the overalls sent out to be cleaned. All sorts of stuff, that's what I was supposed to do but I had other ideas I'm afraid. TOM: How about you Rick? RICK: I was still at school actually.. TOM: Did you have anything in mind, from your career leaflets? RICK: Not really, I was a budding chemist,.. JOE: Does that mean you could roll your own cigarettes. RICK: and em I enjoy cooking. JOE: You could have been the guy in Can't Cook. Won't Cook! RICK: and em that was about it really. I had pretty much decided I was going to play drums at around 10 or so... TOM: And you Vivian? VIV: Before I was in Def Leppard it looked like I was going to have a career in some other band. TOM: before that.. VIV: Before that. I never had a real job, y'know I always knew I was destined for stardom. That a tongue in cheek by the way In case you haven't noticed. RICK: Whose tongue and whose cheek JOE: No, I always wanted to play guitar, its only when I started to play guitar I realized it was a mistake, y'know. JOE: He wanted to be a ... RICK: He wanted to he a footballer. VIV: I wanted to be a foothaller hut a bit late now. TOM: So what was the attraction of music? VIV: girls, really em neh, I always just liked the sound of an electric guitar, I went to see Rory Gallagher when I was a nipper and Horseslips and what not and got into the sound of the electric guitar so it was eh...then when you get beyond that you're in trouble then you have to think about songs n'stuff em I never really had any ambition to do anything else, I was fortunate in that. TOM: So what attracted you Joe? JOE: I personally didn't fancy clocking in and clocking out 'til 1 was 65 and I figured that out when I was about 18, so I used to turn up to this miserable place, it was a shithole, it really was and you know I worked in the basement there was no natural light, everything was like Neon or whatever fluorescent lighting strips and it was pretty unreal down there, it was just a constant, there was no night, no day, theres nothing, no wind, no rain. RICK: Apart from the obvious ... JOE: yes....it was gruesome, it had its plus points, because 1 wrote the lyrics of the first album down there which was useful cos I used to hide cos we'd been doing gigs and stuff, we were just playing local around Sheffield and I used to go to sleep we'd not get home 'til 3 in the morning and I'd be in work at 7 I'd get down there and not had any sleep and fall asleep in the back of the basement on all the dirty overalls just cover myself in dirty rags and they could never find me and I had a couple of guys who used to cover for me cos they thought it was cool I was in a band so I gat away with murder but after 4 years of working there I got fired for playing cricket in the basement with a piece of wood and like a baker like knob, they use for machine handles, they wear out quick and I got fired, well I got asked to leave so I did and then I got a job as a van driver for 8 months which came in useful cos then I got to take the van home and we used to use it to take the gear to gigs and then I got caught in Menstield ehh the M.D of the company lived in Mansfield and we were playing a gig in a pub beside his house and he saw the van parked outside and that was me gone from there but l actually left there when we got our record deal the original attraction for me was to get out of that whole environment but I was first attracts to music when I was eleven and saw T-Rex on Top of the Pops that's what did it for me, a little spark went and it was either a football or music really. TOM: When you got your record deal, were you determined to make it work? JOE: When we got our record deal, the first thing we wanted was to be bigger than Led Zeppelin because when you're 16,17 years old you have to think like that or what's the point if you don't. To have a record deal at that age is going to make you obnoxious and arrogant if you're not already that we and we were never that kind of band, that would be nasty like, it was just we had an unbelievable self-believe and that's what it was, I mean it was ridiculous y'know he just thought we were untouchable, we thought we were the best thing since sliced bread which was a great attitude to have because we just went into everything full-on, it was very cool, yeh and we did want it to work from day one and I actually did write on the walls of Sheffield City Hall when I was walking past one day, 'we will play here in 1980. and we did and we headlined and we sold out and you think that's it then your ambition is over but its wasn't cos your ambitions change day to day, as soon as you realize one you think of another and that's what we've done all the way through our career. TOM: The sound you have no which is very American where did the attraction come from? JOE: I wouldn't call our sound American, its universal, the thing it certainly isn't British about it if there s ever a movement that Def Leppard IS constantly linked with, It the British glam thing f '72 -- 74 with the Sweets and your Bowies, your T-Rex's stuff like that em the fact is we started working at a very early stage with a producer called Mutt Lange who is renowned for a big, radio-friendly sound but we never tried to sound like Orio Speed Wagon or Boston or Stix or any of those kind of sappy American bands really, actually Boston was alright but Orio and Stix they suck but em I don't see it as an American thing really, I see it as large, its big, its stadium rock but y'know there's stadiums in Britain, there's stadiums all over Europe, we just wanted to be big and larger than life and working with Mutt enabled us to actually create records that we'd like to go out and buy which was basically all we were trying to do. TOM: And how did you actually meet up with Mutt? JOE: He was a friend of Peter Menschs through the AC/DC thing, Peter Menshaw was still our manager, it was in 1979 when he was just about to become our manager, he was managing AC/DC and they just did the Hammer to Hell album and they were about to do Bomb the Black and unfortunately Bonn died and that brought that back a few months. But em Peter brought Mutt to see us in Bentley Hall in Stafford, we were opening up for AC/DC and Mutt came to see AC/DC but Pete had got him down earlier to watch our set and he liked us basically, he saw all the faults but he also saw all the potential as well and eh a bit of this and a bit of that Peter managed to hoodwink him into doing the High 'n' Dry album. TOM: But I heard there was a negative reaction in England - people thought the sound had changed. RICK: When we released the first record, people labelled it I don't know too much geared towards the American market whatever that meant. JOE: Yeh, when that album came out, I'd never even been to America, I'd never been on an aeroplane, I wrote the lyrics to 'Hello America' in the basement of the factory I was telling you about earlier. I mean I was just a kid dreaming, I had to I look up on a map for ryhmes to cities, I didn't know about...all I knew about America was Starsky and Hutch and Kojak. Y'know if that's gearing towards America that's jut a kid crying about the environment he's in and y'know Sheffield industrial dumpy Sheffield as it was in 1978, especially on a cold January/February cold winters morning is not the place to be for me, I'm sorry and the idea after seeing what the Beach Boys had as a backdrop for their environment was much more appealing than Upperthorpe were my factory was y'know even the name Uooerthorne, only in England. It wasn't neared towards anything, certainly not by us, I'm not denying and none or us would In our earlier environment ever Viv in his earlier bands that possibly behind our backs was an A&R man has said to a producer you've got to make them sound good on FM radio in America but they never said it to us and we certainly never went out of our way to do that and yes we were disappointed with the production on the first album. We certainly didn't think it was punchy enough and if that means its not American where does that leave Guns 'n' Roses y'know its still that everything has to be nice and polished because if we polished things up its become...we wanted it that way not for any reason. TOM: So when did you start going to America then? JOE: First time, we went to the states was May 1980 the first gig was on May 1980, at the Santa Monica Civic. RICK: Actually he rang me recently and said its 19 years to the day... JOE: Yeh, it was 20 the May, Santa Monica Civic which to me was like astonishing 'con I'd had this prized vinyl Bowie bootleg from the Santa Monica Civic in 1972 and the thoughts of standing on the same stage as Bowie in a foreign country was very cool to me con I was just a fan, that's all I was, I was a fan that was wearing a rock stars pair of boots that didn't quite fit me properly at the time. TOM: Did America take to yoU pretty quickly, I get the impression they did? JOE: in a small scale, yeh but to US at the time it was phenomenal, I remember the First time we went on stage we were opening up for Pat Travis in the Civic and the lights went down and there was this polite applause but I remember one person 7/8 rows back shouting 'wasted' which was one of the songs of the first album. I remember turning around to somebody and saying, `Holy Shit, they've heard of us y'know 'cos I didn't expect they had 'cos they'd been on rock briquade on the radio, y'know we were a new band, it was we did...in 1980 on a small scale what Nirvana did before they really took off, y'know it was happening in little pockets, it was starting off on a very low level, but it was starting to happen. RICK: but we were starting to fill a void, it was refreshing what we were doing and we were so young so l guess people could really relate to us they just embraced us. TOM: One thing that strikes me - you fired Pete Willis was that a hard thing? JOE: When Pete got fired it wasn't a ruthless decision as in a business decision as in eh we've got to be dominating the world so we've got to kick cut anybody that gets in the way. Pete got fired 'con he basically just was dragging the band down, he couldn't hack it anymore, I mean he really couldn't play his instrument anymore that's the only reason he went, he'd been on the previous tour a complete nightmare. We all know the stories about tellies going out of windows and setting fire extinguishers off and notoriously when that happens theres 4 or 5 of you - you'd have a few drinks a bit of a laugh, he'd be off doing this on his own. he wasn't even doing it with anyone else. it was just him down a corridor with a fire extinguished he wasn't showing off 'cos next morning he didn't even know he'd done it the next day. he was just out of control and as soon as he started doing that in the studio, I mean live, on tour you can forgive a lot of things but as soon as you're doing it in the studio, showing up drunk and not even able to play your instrument, especially with a producer like Mutt, y'know he'd had a thousand warnings y'know one more time and you're oUt and after 999 times being forgiven we just couldn't do it any longer, he had to go. it was affecting everybody's relationships in the band. RICK: Actually Mutt asked him to go home. didn't he... JOE: Yeh. Mutt told him to leave, sober up as soon as it started to affect Mutt, it was like we just said we've been nice enough to the guy for so long its like he's right, he's right we should have done this along time ago, 'cos when he was drunk he wasn't a pleasant person to be around 'cos he was I don't know. I don't want to be sizest here but he was about 5'2" but unfortunately he was about 9'7' when he'd had 2 beers and seriously that's how he did it. he became larger than he thought he was and he'd take on the world and set himself into trouble and it just became a big problem, he became a nasty person when he drank and Unfortunately he drank all day. You can't be around people like that forever sooner or later it gets to you and you crack! RICK: He was fine when we were off tour, it was just when there was any kind of responsibility or netting out there on tour. I think he had a severe case of stage fright or some form of stage fright where he couldn't do it unless he was on the soup. TOM: He left before Pyromania? JOE: He left during it.. or actually halfway through it. The thing about Pete. Pete was a fantastic rhythm guitar player he really was and he'd actually managed to get most of the backing tracks done, most of his parts anyway and it was when we got to do the solos when he lost the plot, so we had most of the record backing track was finished so once he'd left, Steve Clarke could have played all 10 of them but that was never been a part of our sound to have one guitar player and eh we'd known Phil Collins for a while, he'd been a good friend of mine for at least 18 months or so and I'd actually tried to get Phil in about a year before the American tour because Pete was just being such a nightmare, I couldn't deal with him any longer but as soon as the actual split happened in '92, Phil was literally in the next day em because the band 'Girl' he was in at the time, they were really going down so he was looking for an out anyway and this was the perfect thing for him and the reason he got the job wasn't just because of his guitar playing was the fact, I knew him more than anyone else, it was a friendship thing really, I just had a feeling that he as going to fit in well, even though he wasn't from Sheffield that was a big break for US getting some bloke from London in the band but he was perfect, he really was. TOM: Did you have any inkling how big Pyromania was going to b? JOE: em, probably not actually I mean you hope, but when you've been in a studio with Mutt for 9 months and you really are going through a mains learning curve, the previous album had taken 3 months to make, we'd spent 9 months making Pyromania which at the age of 21/22 is an astonishing long time much more so then it would be now and we couldn't understand how it was taking so long but we had committed before we started to record it to try and make an album that had never been made before which meant that we had to 50 down a lot of avenues and explore them and then turn around and come back cos they weren't going to work. we were just going to record the songs, we were going to try and create a sound that nobody else had managed and that was going to take along time t do but but the time we got it finished we were so glad that it was done. I don't think we could even see past the end of our noses for a while but once we'd done the video for 'Photograph' and the video for 'Rock of Ages' and started to hear the feedback from America were is where it happened first about how much airplay 'Photograph' was getting then it started to make sense that we had made a great record and that given a bit of good fortune, and grind timing and hard work this record could actually make it. TOM: What was that time like? JOE: Well, when Pyromania came out we toured Britain which is always something we do first, again there this, theres always an emphasis put on this American slant but when we put an album out we always tour Britain first emm including the album after 'Hysteria' we always toured Britain was always the first, but it didn't sell, the tour was terribly attended, the record didn't sell in England, it got great reviews but no-one bought it em but America is a different place y'know culturally rock'n'roll is part of their furniture whereas in Britain it's a little club that anybody can join but not many people want to .. and they have 24 hour rock n'roll radio stations whereas we used to set the Alan Freeman show for 2 hours a week and Tommy Vance on a Friday night when everybody's in the pub em its 3 or 4 stations in every town at least 2 that play some form of rock music all day, every day so y'know Photograph has much more of a chance of being a hit because of the amount of radio stations over there then it has in Britain, and consequently it did take of and the success in America all through the summer of 83, something I don't think any of us ever thought we'd experience it was pretty full on I mean it was literally it went like that, we went from in April opening up for Billie Squire to May headlining and starring of 2,000 people in a 10,000 seating venue within 3 weeks and the gig being sold out in 6 weeks in advance and we were playing 20,000 seater venues and it just went completely like a rocket, I mean it just went so fast that we couldn't keep up with it, it actually effected us personally for a while I think we all lost the plot, we couldn't handle the shoving and pulling and go here and do that and this and that and the other y'know camera's in your face everywhere you went. People asking for your autograph when you're half way through eating your breakfast and taking pictures while you're eating it. I just find it astonishingly rude and em I hadn't learnt the em I don't think any of us had learnt the em ability of diplomacy with people who weren't exactly being diplomatic with you, and that takes a while to get used to, you have to step back from it, but generally we had a great time didn't we. RICK: Yeah. absolutely it was excellent TOM: Like winning the lottery RICK: Em. well for me being the youngest guy in the band it was, it was I don't know lust this huge, huge candy store. And... JOE: ...and the door was wide open RICK: It was yeah, it was quite an experience JOE: it was better than winning the lottery though because there was although there was a certain amount of luck involved you'd actually done it, y'know you'd actually drawn the bails out yourself as it were, which was cool, we'd put a lot of hard work in as well, y'know as much as a lot of people out there think that rock 'n' roll is just an easy way out, we've worked harder probably in the last 2 years when everyone was wondering were we where, then we would have done if we had have been in day jobs for 50 years but you're working for yourself so you don't mind, you're not working for the man and you're always willing to pelt in the hours if it's y'know your own little baby. Continued...