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Just this side of Britney
Def Leppard is comfortable with new album's commercial bent

  JORDAN ZIVITZ  
  Montreal Gazette 

  Thursday, July 25, 2002

	Many hard-rock acts would slap you upside the head with a double-neck 
guitar for suggesting they have anything in common with Britney Spears. Def 
Leppard isn't one of them.

	When vocalist Joe Elliott and guitarist Phil Collen previewed the 
group's 10th album, appropriately titled X, for Montreal media last week, they 
made no bones about their intentions to "make a very commercial record," as 
Elliott put it. Of course, the meaning of "commercial" has been revised since 
the late 1980s, when Def Leppard's behemoth Hysteria album found a home in 16 
million households. That's where the group's collaborators on X came in.

	X was recorded with several producers, including longtime associate 
Pete Woodroffe and Marty Frederiksen, who the group admired for "taking 20 
years off" Aerosmith on last year's Just Push Play album. But the collaborators 
who have raised eyebrows are Andreas Carlsson and Per Aldeheim, the Swedish 
writers who unleashed Britney Spears and NSYNC hits upon the world.

	"When we were having hit singles in 1987 and '88, it was because we 
had an album that crossed over and sat comfortably between Madonna and 
Prince," Elliott said. "And now we're in a position where we've got a song 
that could sit comfortably between Britney and Backstreet Boys, which would 
be today's versions of Madonna and Prince (in commercial terms)."

	Sure enough, Unbelievable, the track co-written by Carlsson and 
Aldeheim, sounds like Def Leppard covering NSYNC, with the group's natural 
edge diluting the saccharin. The song doesn't come off as a blatant grab at 
the charts, which backs up Elliott and Collen's assertion that Def Leppard has 
always been as much a pop band as a rock outfit.

	The AC/DC-style stomper Four Letter Word balances out the poppier 
material, as does the addiction lyric of Cry. "There's a reputation that we 
have that the only lyric we've ever written is, 

	'I suppose a rock's out of the question,' " Elliott said. "(Our 
serious lyrics) normally get ignored.

	"We've often ventured into the land of addiction (lyrically) - not 
our own, I hasten to add, but being in the industry that we're in, you see 
enough of it. At the Freddie Mercury (tribute) we did in '92, the state of 
some of the artists backstage before they went on was just unbelievable. 
You were surprised they even made it on stage before they died."

	Given Def Leppard's own trials, it's a minor miracle the group has 
made it to 10 albums. The 1991 death of guitarist Steve Clark (from mixing 
alcohol and painkillers) and the 1984 car accident in which drummer Rick 
Allen lost his left arm made Def Leppard as famous for its tragedies as for 
its triumphs, and provided enough human interest to fuel a VH1 docudrama 
(Hysteria: The Def Leppard Story, filmed in Montreal last year). Still, the 
group's most formidable challenge was the 1990s.

	While its contemporaries either altered their sound by slight degrees 
and kept their multiplatinum level of success (Bon Jovi), carried on in a 
niche market (Iron Maiden) or got fat, bald and irrelevant (just about 
everyone else), Def Leppard went through a personality crisis.

	Slang, which came out in 1996, was a noble attempt to change with 
the times after Nirvana torpedoed the shiny, happy state of popular music. In 
a reversal of fortune, critics bought the album, but fans didn't.

	"We wanted to stay being a band, but we knew we couldn't survive 
doing what was big in the '80s," Elliott said. "Melodic albums with harmonies 
(had) gone so much out of fashion."

	Elliott and Collen stand behind Slang and say it was a necessary 
album for the band. "You can stay true to your course to a point, but if you 
stay too close to it, you end up sounding like Yes, who just keep doing 
10-minute songs," Elliott said. "There has to be a time when you go, 'We 
don't need another Siberian Khatru.' When they worked with Trevor Horn and 
they did Owner of a Lonely Heart, they got it right. As soon as they'd done 
that, they went back to not doing that."

	There's a parallel between Yes's lapse back to prog-rock and Def 
Leppard's 1999 album, Euphoria. "We tried to do what we did in the '80s - 
18 tracks of backing vocals and big guitars and big drum sounds," Collen 
said. "It was cool and everything, but it wasn't very natural."

	All told, X is the first Def Leppard album in a decade on which the 
band sounds comfortable being Def Leppard. The 21st-century production 
quirks don't sound forced, nor do the bombastic choruses and harmonies come 
off like mere trademark moves, as they did on Euphoria.

	"In the '90s we made our music slightly based on ... other people's 
expectations of us," Collen said. "We wanted to be liked or accepted or 
post-grunge and all that. With this album it was like, 'You know what? We 
don't give a f--k what anyone thinks. We believe in this.' And I actually 
think you can hear it."

	- X is scheduled for release Tuesday.

	- Jordan Zivitz's E-mail address is jzivitz@thegazette.southam.ca.

	Copyright  2002 Montreal Gazette