http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/entertainment/stories.nsf/music/story/23BCB0E78C573268862571B000656DB2?OpenDocument Leppard spots some classics on new CD By Daniel Durchholz SPECIAL TO THE POST-DISPATCH 07/20/2006 In the opinion of Def Leppard guitarist Vivian Campbell, the longevity of the British pop-metal outfit - which is generating excitement among the fan faithful with a new album of classic cover tunes called "Yeah!" - boils down to one essential thing. "We're a really (explicit) good band," he says. "I know people think that's conceited of me, but there's a very strong work ethic in this band," Campbell continues, by phone from a tour stop in Atlanta. "We have the strongest vocals of any band in the world, bar none. I throw down the gauntlet to anyone. The greatest compliment that people pay us is when they ask if we use vocal samples onstage. But we don't. It's us." That can't be comforting news to Def Leppard's tourmates, Journey, who recently replaced ailing singer Steve Augeri with Jeff Scott Soto. Internet rumors suggested that Augeri was using backing tapes to support his vocals -something Campbell wisely won't comment on. "Oh, I'm not going there, man," he demurs. "Yeah!" is Def Leppard's freshest-sounding record in years, in part because it was a labor of love. Singer Joe Elliott, Campbell says, has wanted to record such an album for two decades. But it also has to do with the way the album was made, which was without a lot of the fussing and fixing that goes on during the typical Def Leppard recording session. "It's like painting by numbers," Campbell says of "Yeah!" "The songs were already written. That's what takes Def Leppard so long to make records. It's not the actual process of recording - it's the writing. We go into the studio with demos and song ideas, but nothing is ever written in stone. We'll change directions during the course of a record at least once. You think stuff is finished, and then some bright spark has a new idea to try and do it in a whole different key. For this record, it was pretty straightforward. A lot of the songs, we did pretty much verbatim versions." Among those songs are the glam-rock-era tracks the members of the band - singer Elliott, guitarists Campbell and Phil Collen, bassist Rick Savage and drummer Rick Allen - grew up on, such as T. Rex's "20th Century Boy," Mott the Hoople's "Golden Age of Rock 'N' Roll" and David Essex's "Rock On." A couple of standout cuts are from other eras, though, notably the Kinks' "Waterloo Sunset" and Blondie's "Hanging on the Telephone." "We couldn't do ('Waterloo Sunset') the way it was originally done," Campbell says. The trick was to stay reasonably faithful to the original and yet make the song seem of a piece with the bombastic sound of Def Leppard's own string of hits, including "Pour Some Sugar on Me," "Rock of Ages," "Armageddon It" and "Love Bites." "The way the song is now, it comes out more Leppard-like," he says. "As for Blondie, they were the only American act we covered, and that's the most recent song on the album. We didn't want to do anything pre-1979, which is when Def Leppard signed the first record deal. Blondie just snuck in there. But it's also there because it represents the fact that we were influenced by the punk and the New Wave movement. We were just as much listening to the Clash and the Sex Pistols as we were Led Zeppelin." Campbell - who joined the band in 1991 after the death (from drugs and alcohol) of guitarist Steve Clark - says that persistence and humility, through good times and bad, has paid off for Def Leppard. "A lot of bands of our generation packed it in during the '90s, when things got rough," he says. "But we didn't quit. We are very much a band. We keep our egos in check, and we've got a lot of respect for each other on a musical and a personal level. "The only thing that's changed is what people want from music. In the '90s, it was a very unhappy time. People were not writing uplifting songs. They dealt with very serious life issues. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. But rock music is supposed to be uplifting and fun. And we've always tried to do that. "Now, the public has come around again, and they appreciate quality songs, and they appreciate music that can help them escape the drudgery of daily life. People need to get away from that. They don't need their music to help them commit suicide." Def Leppard with Journey When: 8 p.m. Friday Where: UMB Bank Pavilion, Interstate 70 and Earth City Expressway South, Maryland Heights How much: $18-$75 More info: 314-241-1888 Copyright © 2006 St. Louis Post-Dispatch L.L.C.