http://www.bangkokpost.com/en/Outlook/02Jun2005_out28.php Def Leppard on the prowl again The slightly older face of the new wave of British heavy metal GARY GRAFF After 38 years in the ``Rock Brigade'', Def Leppard are still ready to Rock Rock (Till You Drop). Last month the English hard-rock quintet, which formed in 1977 in Sheffield, released a new retrospective, Rock of Ages: The Definitive Collection, featuring hits, favourite album tracks and one new recording, a cover of Badfinger's No Matter What. The group will promote it all summer on tour, mixing its own dates with shows at minor-league baseball stadiums that will also feature Bryan Adams. An all-covers album is also in the works, and singer Joe Elliott says that, if all goes as planned, Def Leppard will succeed in bolstering its popularity, which has slipped since the 1980s heyday of multiplatinum albums such as Pyromania (1983) and Hysteria (1987). ``It's a great way of reintroducing us, I think, to the masses who may have forgotten we exist,'' the 45-year-old Elliott says. ``The hard core we're fine with, they're good. But it's the ones who stop you in the airport and go, `Hey, you guys still around?' This kind of lets them know we still are, on a slightly bigger scale.'' The truth, of course, is that Def Leppard has never really gone away, despite long lags between records. The group has sold more than 65 million albums worldwide, and its biggest hits _ such as Bringin' on the Heartbreak (1981), Photograph (1982), Rock of Ages (1983), Animal (1987), Armageddon It (1987) and Pour Some Sugar on Me (1987) _ have reached the stature of rock-radio staples alongside the band's own idols, artists such as David Bowie, Led Zeppelin and Queen. The band has weathered its share of hardships, too, including drummer Rick Allen's loss of his left arm in a 1984 car crash and the drug-related death of guitarist Steve Clark in 1991. ``We were always pretty good about getting around the obstacles that were thrown in front of us,'' Elliott says. But more recent Def Leppard albums such as Slang (1996), Euphoria (1999) and X (2002) haven't added additional platinum to the walls of Elliott, Allen, bassist Rick Savage and guitarists Phil Collen and Vivian Campbell _ which, Elliott says, isn't so surprising. ``It's human nature not to latch onto new stuff,'' the singer says. ``Let's be honest, not many people go to see a Rolling Stones concert hoping that they're going to play something off the new album, and that's no disrespect to the Stones at all. But most people go to see Jumpin' Jack Flash and Satisfaction and Brown Sugar, and that's just the sad, tragic fact. ``It's hard to listen to the new stuff,'' Elliott says, ``because you can't get the old stuff out of your head. I think the only artists that have managed to kind of buck that trend are U2 and Sting. That's all I can think of off the top of my head.'' Still, he and his bandmates aren't giving up on their more recent music, and they view Rock of Ages as a second chance for some of that material. ``I think we were concerned about not eliminating any part of our career,'' Elliott says. ``It would've been so easy for us to focus on the Hysteria, Pyromania and Adrenalize trio of albums, but I think it would've been a little unfair on us as artists and on the hardcore fans to not put anything off, say, Slang or off our first album, On Through the Night, on there. We wanted it to be balanced.'' The group even polled its fans and checked out web sites and message boards, he adds, in trying to ascertain which songs, apart from the obvious hits, should be included in the package. There were a few surprises in that process. ``We didn't realise how much On Through the Night and Slang still mean to a certain amount of our fans,'' Elliott says. ``Songs like Work It Out on Slang, for example, were quite high up on the list of `This has to be on the record.' The same thing goes for Rock Brigade and Wasted.'' Ideally, he adds, those songs will steer fans toward those less-celebrated Def Leppard albums. ``If there's two or three songs on there that they haven't heard,'' he says, ``all you can hope is that, when they stick the CD on and they're stuck in traffic, they don't scoot past the song but leave it on and go, `I missed this one. This is really good.' And they might go back and revisit the album. ``There's a lot of good stuff we did after '93,'' he says. ``We stand by those records as much as any album we've made.'' There are also new Def Leppard albums on the horizon. The first will be the covers album that the group put aside to assemble Rock of Ages. Elliott says that, in addition to No Matter What _ and the Kinks' Waterloo Sunset, which appears on European editions of Rock of Ages _ Def Leppard has also recorded favourites by Blondie, David Bowie, Electric Light Orchestra, the Faces, Mott the Hoople, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the Police, Queen, T. Rex and others. ``It was a lot of fun,'' he says. ``It's going to be a great record when it's finished. We've still got to do the final mixes. There's little tracks that we've got to pull out _ I have a couple of vocals I'm going to revisit, we've got some guitar stuff to still go on it. The meat's pretty much all done now, we've just got to put a bit of icing on it.'' There will be an album of new material as well, as the group reassembles after 2004, which Elliott terms one of Def Leppard's periodic ``gap years'', in which the band members engage in other projects: He himself produced singer Ricky Warwick's second album, while Campbell has been working on a blues album. But the singer expects some new material to emerge from rehearsals for Def Leppard's summer tour. ``It's one of those things we'll probably do in the evening, when we're just chatting, and we'll play each other the demos we've got,'' Elliott says. ``We're constantly working. It's like the analogy of the old swan: It's all beautiful and serene on top but, if you look underneath the water, there's things flapping around at 50 miles per hour. ``That's what we're like, always splashing around and working on something or other.'' NYT SYNDICATE