![]() ![]() So he plays it, and now he gets it, through her. “He goes off on the Friday night, and on the Monday his secretary is whistling Two Steps Behind. “He didn’t really hear anything,” Elliott says. They didn’t, but they sent over what was at that point an obscure B-side. Then the US composer Michael Kamen asked if the band had an unreleased song for the Last Action Hero soundtrack. Two Steps Behind was originally a last-minute extra track for a single package (“You’d spend two years making an album with 10 tracks, and then you’ve got to come up with another 18, because there’s potentially six singles”). We’ll go down to state fairs, we’ll play clubs, we’ll build our career back up.’”Īnd there were still hits. Whereas, we said: ‘Knock me down, I will get back up again. When we put out Pyromania, a lot of the bands who were big at time rolled over and died. We were doing two sold out nights instead of three. “We were so big that even though some dropped off, we still had a vast number of fans. “We were lucky, us and Bon Jovi,” Elliott says. The band had to come first.” Animal (1987)īetween Hysteria and the 1992 album Adrenalize, the hard rock landscape was changed by the emergence of grunge. “We all drank, don’t get me wrong, but when we drank we just told dirtier jokes a little louder. Partway through the recording, they had to sack guitarist Pete Willis, who had founded the band, because of his drinking. Photograph’s parent album, Pyromania, went diamond in the US – platinum sales 15 times over – but to achieve that level of success meant putting the band before everything else, even friendship. I remember the first time I heard the riff through the studio wall: me and a couple of the crew went” – Elliott pulls an amazed face – “and when that happens collectively, you know somebody’s hit on something.” We were always aiming to do something like that, but we could never really pull it together until Photograph. “ Rick Savage loved bands like Queen and T Rex I loved T Rex and Bowie and Sweet and Slade. “We always had this inner demon of pop wanting to come out,” he says of the single that turned Def Leppard from an up-and-coming metal band into stars of MTV and the biggest rock band of their era. That’s a whole lot of Leppard to go round this year, and Elliott is in the mood to talk about it. Oh, and a box set of all their 80s recordings has been released. They are on a massive tour of US arenas, then they will perform Hysteria, the 1987 album that became hard rock’s Thriller, in full across Australasia and the UK. He is also delightfully fannish still – we discover a mutual love of the Italian band Giuda, and sing their hit Roll the Balls to each other.ĭef Leppard may have passed into the heritage rock business these days, but that business is big. His physique, reassuringly, is not that of a man who spends eight hours a day in the gym (“I’m not going to go out there wearing a union jack shirt and leather trousers and do a split-jump,” he says). The clothes are expensive, the hair carefully coloured, but the 58-year-old’s face – slightly downturned – could be that of a Yorkshire butcher fretting about his Barnsley chop supplier. ![]() J oe Elliott of Def Leppard has the look not so much of a rock star, but a character actor playing a rock star. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |