Def Leppard Turn It Up to X
New York club gig a sort of homecoming for arena-rock vets
The words "intimate club gig" and "arena-rock band" should not go together. The whole point of enormo-dome music is size, of riffs and choruses pumped up to the concrete arches. But long before they became the 1980s kings of year-long coliseum tours and multi-platinum heavy melody — over 24 million copies sold of 1983's Pyromania and 1987's Hysteria combined — Def Leppard played in rooms a lot smaller than New York City's Irving Plaza. In the late 1970s, when they were the prize upstarts of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, the Leppards earned their crust and stripes in tiny pubs and working men's clubs, rattling cash registers and shattering pint glasses with their precocious mix of twin Thin Lizzy-style guitars and Queen-like vocal shine.