Def Leppard by Def Leppard
If you’re willing to look for it, there’s always going to be uncharted territory in music. With ten studio albums and countless sold out shows under their belts, it might seem like Def Leppard have done it all. However, while recording their self-titled eleventh full-length studio album, and first since 2008’s Songs from the Sparkle Lounge, the band members—Joe Elliott , Vivian Campbell , Phil Collen , Rick “Sav” Savage , and Rick Allen —found themselves in a rather new, if not entirely welcome position. “We’d never done an album when we weren’t contracted to do one,” explains Joe. “We’ve been independent for seven years, we’ve loved every minute of it, but we haven’t made an album as such. There were still expectations even when we did our first record On Through The Night. This time, there were none. We personally didn’t even expect to do an album when we first went into the studio! We just wanted to embrace our influences and write a few songs we could be proud of. I don’t think I’ve enjoyed making a record as much as I enjoyed making this one.” In between their seemingly endless tour schedule and following Campbell’s treatment for Hodgkin’s lymphoma (he’s in remission now), the musicians convened at Joe’s home studio in Dublin, Ireland during early 2015. Co-producing with longtime collaborator Ronan McHugh, the initial thought was to just cut a couple of tracks and perhaps release an EP. Teeming with ideas, the band rode an immense creative wave and emerged with Def Leppard’s 14 songs. “Anywhere we looked, it seemed like everybody kept saying the album is dead,” sighs Joe. “It’s like The Emperor’s New Clothes; you start believing it. We didn’t set out to make a full album. It just started to come together so naturally, and we were in such a great place. Because we hadn’t done a record in a while, I guess everybody was backed up with ideas. We had become fertile,” he laughs. As a result, the Def Leppard hallmarks—stadium-size harmonies, bombastic drums, and heaps of riffs—remain as vibrant and vital as ever. That’s evident from one listen to the first single and album opener “Let’s Go,” originally penned by “Sav” early in the process. Driven by a muscular guitar groove, jackhammer backbeat, acoustic bridge, and massive chant, the track ignites their signature spark. “I just remember ‘Sav’ came up to me and said, ‘I’ve written a Leppard song,’” laughs Joe. “That’s what you’d call it. It could be a distant cousin of ‘Pour Some Sugar On Me’ or ‘Rock of Ages.’ ‘Sav’ had most of it together, and it was the most Leppard-sounding song of all the new ones straight away. We wrote it all about being on stage. The lights go down, and the heat goes up. It’s the anticipation of a gig. It’s an anthemic rock song. That’s what we do. For years, we’ve been known for that. It’s something we’re proud of. We don’t try to avoid it. If anything, we try to do more of it.” Meanwhile, “Dangerous” rolls from a razor sharp riff into yet another irresistible refrain amplified by a gang vocal call-and-response. “From a musical point of view, it’s an out-and-out rocker,” continues the singer. “Lyrically, it’s that age old question, ‘Why do guys like dangerous women?’ You can’t just go for the librarian. You have to go for the spiky haired tattooed chick that rides a Harley Davidson.” At the same time, they continue to make musical strides. “Man Enough” weaves in and out of a confident sonic strut on a funky bass line, “Broke ‘n’ Brokenhearted” breaks down into a wah solo, and “Blind Faith” tackles a weighty subject with an epic delivery. “We’ve definitely pushed the envelope a little bit,” affirms Joe. “We want to stretch our wings, so we’re not just doing the same old thing on every single song. ‘Blind Faith’ was a good example. It’s a statement about people blindly believing in something flawed whether it’s those cults in Waco or the corruption in the Catholic Church. Everything is a question.” There’s no question about Def Leppard’s impact and influence though. Since first forming back in 1977, the UK outfit has sold over 100 million records globally and earned two RIAA Diamond Certifications, which makes them “one of only five rock bands with two original studio albums selling over 10 million copies in the U.S.” Whether it’s “Photograph,” “Love Bites,” “Hysteria,” or “Rock of Ages,” their stamp remains instantly recognizable. They’ve consistently sold out venues across the globe and will continue to do so as their marathon of touring ramps up in support of Def Leppard. Choosing to name the record Def Leppard not only nods to their history, but it hints at their future. “The name itself sums everything up,” Joe leaves off. “It’s a misspelled nonsensical mad-looking two words. Everything about rock ‘n’ roll is the opposite of what everybody tries to teach you growing up. That’s what makes it fantastic. It’s loose, it’s wild, and it doesn’t follow the rules. You make them up as you go along. Def Leppard is no different. What does Def Leppard mean to me now? Success, stubborness, and blind faith. We blindly keeping pecking away at things, and it works out. It’s a bunch of guys that like each other and love what they do. That bounces back, and the audience can pick up on it. Musically, we’ve written some good stuff. I hope everyone can listen to it and enjoy it.” This is Def Leppard in 2015. This is rock ‘n’ roll. Let’s go.
When Def Leppard arrived at the follow-up to their mega-selling third album, 1983’s <i>Pyromania</i>, producer Mutt Lange shared his vision with the Sheffield heavy metal crew. He told them that too many bands were copying their sound and they needed to set themselves apart from the pack. They should, Lange said, make the rock version of <i>Thriller</i>. Released in August 1987, the resultant album <i>Hysteria</i> sold over 20 million copies, which tells you all you need to know about how successful the group were in achieving Lange’s aim. “We ended up having seven singles off of it,” lead guitarist Phil Collen tells Apple Music. “It was mission accomplished. Mutt Lange was amazing, a genius, and I don’t say that lightly.” <i>Pyromania</i> had infused the group’s metal anthems with an expansive pop sheen, and here they sought to channel an even wider range of influences into their sound. “There was so much great stuff happening, like Prince, Michael Jackson, Frankie Goes to Hollywood—great-sounding records,” says Collen. “Most rock bands are very narrow-minded and stick within a genre, but to us it was anything that sounded great. It was the first time an album in the rock genre was being presented as a pop album. Mutt and us wanted to make a hybrid of AC/DC, full-on rock, and Queen, who were just magical.” After a slow reception initially, <i>Hysteria</i>’s success was given a boost by the success of glam-rock stomper “Pour Some Sugar on Me”. It kick-started a phenomenon. “It blew up,” Collen recalls. “It was a journey making it; we were trying to achieve something. It was great when it started taking shape. It sounded different to anything else out there.” Let Collen guide you through Def Leppard’s swaggering peak, track by track. <b>“Women”</b> “This was the first single in America. Our former manager Cliff Burnstein was like, ‘We really want to connect from a rock point of view. We don’t want to just be this pop band. We’ve got to keep our credibility.’ It didn’t do great as a single, but I think it kept that credibility thing there because it was a rock song and it sounded very Def Leppard. It had that pulsing, the sub-bass and kind of kick drum and massive snare and all of that. I heard that Stevie Wonder and Prince had commented on how great it had sounded when they first heard it.” <b>“Rocket”</b> “We wanted to do something very different. [Singer] Joe Elliott had this idea of doing a drum loop. John Kongos, this guy from South Africa, had a couple of hits in the ’70s and he would loop up drum parts and African drum rhythms, so that’s kind of what we did on this. We created this drum pattern using Fairlight machines, then I did this weird guitar riff, reminiscent of Siouxsie & The Banshees. Before you knew it, we had this kind of unique-sounding drum rhythm with a Siouxsie & The Banshees thing and chanting, Slade-style vocals. It was really super cool, blending all these different genres.” <b>“Animal”</b> “I remember I did a demo for this when we were all living in a house just outside Dublin, which was hysterical, great fun. We actually ended up going to Paris because we’d moved studios, and Joe did this really amazing vocal—and the backing track sounded dated all of a sudden. So we used some of the stuff that Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Trevor Horn were doing on ‘Two Tribes’ and put it into a rock format. We kept the lead vocal and re-modernised the track, recording everything from scratch. All of a sudden, it was more vital.” <b>“Love Bites”</b> “Initially, Mutt Lange wrote this. He played it to me and Steve [Clark, guitarist] and it sounded like a real countrified Don Henley song. We messed around with it for a while, got these different guitar parts, and then Mutt went to town and made it anything but country. It had these soaring vocals, and you can hear Mutt doing the main backing vocals on that track. You can barely hear anyone else! It was the longest vocals that Joe ever done in the studio. It was a real, real struggle. It was just really hard to get a convincing vocal—which is amazing now, considering he kills it every night.” <b>“Pour Some Sugar on Me”</b> “We were finishing up in Holland in this studio in Hilversum, just outside Amsterdam, and Joe was sitting in a hallway playing an acoustic guitar, going, ‘Pour some sugar on me.’ Mutt said, ‘What’s that?’ And Joe goes, ‘I don’t know, I’m just goofing.’ We were actually packing the stuff away and Mutt said, ‘Guys, I really think we should turn this into a song. I know everyone’s going to be really upset with us because we’re so over budget.’ But we nailed that song in 10 days. Mutt thought it was the missing link. Whenever we play that song, it brings out the inner stripper in every male or female. The album didn’t do great at first, but when this song came out, strippers were requesting it on local radio stations in Florida, because they were dancing to it. It started getting traction in Florida. That’s where it kicked this cult following, and from that, it just took off elsewhere. Same deal in Canada. Anywhere there’s a strip club, or a strip club culture, there was a lot of requests on the local radio stations from that.” <b>“Armageddon It”</b> “This was silly. We actually didn’t really finish the song off. We had some guide vocals, ‘Give me all your loving,’ and it was like a T. Rex kind of romp, a rock ’n’ roll groove thing, and we were still kind of working on it. We’d never quite finished it, but everyone was like, ‘Oh yeah, this sounds great!’ It ended up going to No. 3 as a single in the US. It goes down great when we play it now.” <b>“Gods of War”</b> “We pieced this together in Dublin. Steve Clark came up with this great instrumental part at the beginning, and it was like, ‘Wow.’ I’d never heard anything like it; none of us had. And then I had another part that I stuck on the end of it, that worked, and then Sav [bassist Rick Savage] had a part, Joe had a part, and then Mutt was like, ‘We can do all this. It’s not going to be a single, but it could be a great album track.’ You hit every fret on a guitar fingerboard on that song. It keeps changing, then it’s got a pre-chorus, then it’s got a chorus, then it’s got a post-chorus, and it does this kind of Beatle-esque jangle thing at the end, and we used that as an excuse to use all these special effects, like these rockets to show the awful thing that war is, a sonic version of that.” <b>“Don’t Shoot Shotgun”</b> “Again, a pretty-much-not-finished song. It was like we were trying to get a Rolling Stones-type vibe and turned into something else. The chorus was just a marker. We were singing, ‘Don’t shoot shotgun,’ and I have no idea what it meant, we were just using that until a song started forming but it kind of never did. It was like, ‘Oh, well, it kind of sounds cool,’ so we left it at that. The sillier songs and the ones that weren’t quite that serious made the other ones sound even better, for sure. When you listen to it as an album from front to back, it’s like, ‘Wow, this really, really works.’” <b>“Run Riot”</b> “We tried to get an Eddie Cochran vibe on this, but we did a rock version. Joe’s belting this out. If we’d gone back on it, I think we should have had a slightly different chorus, but you can say that about any song until the cows come home. I love the way it came out. It had an energy to it, and a lot of people really liked it for those same reasons. In the context of these songs on <i>Hysteria</i>, it really worked a treat.” <b>“Hysteria”</b> “This is somewhere between a rock song and a ballad. It’s got such a great sing-along thing to it, it’s lovely to play live. We didn’t know what the chorus was going to be, and I think Rick Allen [drums] said, because we were calling the album <i>Hysteria</i>, ‘Why don’t we call that “Hysteria”?’ And then Mutt and Joe turned the lyrics into ‘Hysteria’. It just really made sense, and it was a definite combined effort, this one.” <b>“Excitable”</b> “INXS were doing a great job of doing a rock-band version of the Stones when they would go a bit funky, but INXS made it more like Prince. We were trying to do that. There was a Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson song called ‘State of Shock’ [by The Jacksons], so we used all of these things as a guide. It was like, there’s INXS, there’s Prince, there’s Jackson and Jagger doing this thing, so let’s aim for somewhere in between. We used all this technology with a Fairlight sampler and programming and all that stuff, and Rick Savage actually came up with the idea of it and the riff and everything. It turned into the song, and it was exciting. We’ve been playing it live some nights on tour, and it’s really fun.” <b>“Love and Affection”</b> “I wrote and demoed this in Paris. I used to have an apartment there, and I had my little four-track cassette thing and was sitting in there and making this riff. In the mid-’80s, there was a lot of rock bands like Journey, Bryan Adams, doing these songs that would kind of tick both boxes. They were rock songs, but they appealed to a kind of a poppy audience. This was a song like that. It was different to the other stuff on the record; it had that kind of songwriter thing. When we gave it the Def Leppard treatment, it obviously sounded very different. It was going to be the eighth single, but we stopped at seven. I think ‘Rocket’ ended up being the last single, and after that it was like, ‘OK, guys, you should probably go away and make another record now.’”
