http://cities.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=52296 This Leppard changes spots Lalitha Suhasini New Delhi, May 18: The man who belted out songs such as Hysteria and Love Bites that rocked the Billboard charts for weeks is a trite sheepish when you mention how he lip-synced his greatest hits in 1998, for a show in Mumbai. ''Yes it was quite shoddy, but we were fed wrong information right before the show and were told that we were to mime for a 30-minute TV show,'' says Joe Elliott, lead vocalist of Def Leppard. ''Which is why we want to tour India and make amends,'' he adds, saying that no promoter has approached them yet. On a promotional tour across America and Europe for their tenth studio album X, the singer claims that the band has lost none of its Pyromania fire. ''In fact, we've never been better than this. Look at every other band that has been around as long as we have, and you see falling hair and expanding waistlines. But we're here to stay,'' says Elliott. The band admits that X was a pop-rock album reaching out to the masses. ''We never claimed to be a heavy metal band,'' says the singer, confessing that Def Lep would rather be on par with Aerosmith that delivers hit singles than Pantera. ''Even when we started out in '77, we wanted to be like the Beatles or the Rolling Stones,'' he says. X, of course, boasts of a smorgasboard of sounds, ranging from classic rock (Cry, Four Letter Word) to ballads like Long Long Way To Go. Working with pop producers such as Andreas Carisson and Per Aldeheim, the creative factory responsible for songwriting some of the best hits of Britney, 'N Sync and Backstreet Boys, the band took a lot of flak for hitting pop dirt. But the Yorkshire singer pooh-poohs the criticism saying, ''For the first time we were sure of what we wanted to do and had a definite goal. It's also the first time that we experimented with samples and loops in Torn to Shreds.'' Elliott also reveals that his favourite pick from the album is Everyday because of its Beatlesque flavour and the melody on the acoustic guitar. Ask him whether he has spotted a Def Leppard amongst the current breed of rock and he turns cynical on you. ''We were allowed to make mistakes but record companies these days only look at making profit out of the debut album,'' he says, adding, ''So I don't see a Sum 41 or Marilyn Manson surviving as long as we did.''Yes, there was a time when Def Leppard too thought it would die a short death when guitarist Steve Clark succumbed to alcohol and drug overdose in 1991. ''But we knew that as artistes we needed a vehicle to move on in life,'' sums up Elliott.