Def Dad
by Gerri Miller

Behind a gate, at the end of a tree-shaded drive, a sprawling Mediterranean
ranch-style house is set around a circular driveway wiht a fountain in the
center of it. The garage is open when I drive up, and Rick Allen emerges
from behind a pile of boxes. He's in the midst of cleaning out some
unwanted junk with stepdad Jim, but pauses to greet me and welcome me into
the house, before returning outside to finish his chores.

Meanwhile, I go down a hallway to find Stacy Allen and the newest member of
the family, four-month old Lauren, an adorable blue-eyed, strawberry-blonde
blend of her parents. I spend a while wiht mom and daughter, meet Rick's
mom Kath, in from Sheffield with her husband for a visit, and get a tour of
the house until Rick emerges and escorts me to his studio- a formal living
room now fitted wiht a double-think door and filled with musical equipment.
I pull up a chair and Rick plays me snippets of some demos that he and his
bandmates worked on during a material-sharing session this summer including
part of a midtempo rocker called "Telephone," and a pretty, acoustic ballad
of Phil Collen's called "Spanish Sky."

"This was our first meeting. Some of these will fall by the wayside," Rick
says, stressing the preliminary nature of the material, and noting that the
band was due to reconvene in Dublin in a few weeks at Joe Elliott's house
or at Bow Lane, where some of the Slang rough mixes were done. Whether the
new music will be in a similar style to that album or not has yet to be
determined. "It's kind of up in the air," the drummer notes, allowing that
numerous things have yet to be figured out, including whether or not to
hire a producer- or as he puts it, "a referee. I think we need somebody
that has a concept of a deadline, which we don't," admits Rick, noting that
most producers are usually good songwriters- like Mutt Lange, who "spoiled"
them- good engineers but not good musicians, or all-around talents of the
likes of Trevor Horn, "but I don't think we could afford him."

Financial considerations loom larger these days, with Slang's gold sales
paling in comparison to mega-million sellers like Pyromania, Hysteria, and
Adrenalize. The record, though critically well-received, may have been too
much of a departure from the kind of big chorus, big harmony, melodic hard
rock tunes and ballads that fans expected from Def Leppard. "At a certain
point, everybody needs to get away from the same formula and that's what we
were trying to do...something that we thought was relevant to us, really
exciting for us and at the same time kind of moved on a little bit with the
times," Rick explains; that the band's "popularity sort of went down" and
Slang didn't live up to past success, "some people ar a little
disillusioned," himself, "somewhat" so. "We were fortunate that we had a
really good run," he notes, but to be facing a sort of sophomore slump at
this late stage is discouraging and frustrating. "Now we've got to go into
a rehearsal room and come up with and capture some of the same magic, and
it's really tough."