Joe Elliott of Def Leppard: ‘Taylor Swift listened to our music in her mother’s womb’

Back in the 1980s, Def Leppard partied as hard as any of their peers, says frontman Joe Elliott. You name it, they probably did it. But unlike Guns N’ Roses or Mötley Crüe, these supremely catchy hard-rockers, responsible for stompers such as Animal and Pour Some Sugar On Me, kept their wild living out of the spotlight.

“We never made it into a headline, you know?” says Elliott, in advance of the release of Def Leppard’s latest album, a collection of orchestral reworking of their greatest hits titled Drastic Symphonies.

“Even now. I wouldn’t tell anybody what we got up to. We weren’t angels. But we never wanted it to outshine the music. We were very nervous about making that a selling point. Guns N’ Roses lived it and showed it to the world. We may have lived it a bit. We always did it behind closed doors. You get older, things settle down, things change. We barely drink, never mind drugs. It has got to the point of [adopts posh accent] ‘would you like a glass of wine?’ As opposed to, ‘Let’s go and down 20 pints and beat somebody up on Grafton Street’.”

Life has turned circle with Def Leppard, who recently reunited with their old glam-metal contemporaries Mötley Crüe for a tour of South America. They join forces all over again this summer when playing Marlay Park, Dublin, in July.

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The groups share a common DNA. Inhabiting the space between Ziggy Stardust and Iron Maiden, they are headbangers showered in glitter. There is, furthermore, the shared kinship of negotiating death and destruction. Mötley Crüe’s years of excess have left them lucky to still be alive, while Def Leppard experienced actual tragedy when losing their guitarist Steve Clark in January 1991 three months shy of his 31st birthday.

Def Leppard and Mötley Crüe also survived grunge – the great hair metal extinction event of the early 1990s. So the story goes, the angst-ridden Nirvana and their peers swept in and blew away Def Leppard and company. The age of the poodle-permed dinosaurs was over.

“In 1992, we were running on parallel lines. People say, ‘Oh this rock’s dead or that rock’s dead’ Or this doesn’t exist any more.” says Elliott, who feels Nirvana did little long-term harm to Def Leppard. “In 1992, all the kids that didn’t buy a Def Leppard record ever started to buy Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains. And yes, bands like us, Mötley and Bon Jovi were supposedly being marginalised.”

Or so the media felt. The truth was more complex. It’s almost as if there were enough people in the world for both Def Leppard and Nirvana to do perfectly well.

“Bon Jovi were never marginalised. They were still selling records through the 1990s. One of our biggest records [Adrenalize] came out in 1992 and by 1999 was one of the biggest-selling records of the 1990s. We never had an album that didn’t go top 10. So we had an audience. It just ran in parallel. Was it as big as [their 1987 mega-smash] Hysteria? Of course not. What you have to learn is that over your career you’ll get turbulence. ‘Wilderness years’ is another terminology that gets used – even the Stones went through it. And AC/DC. And McCartney. They come out the other side: they become legacy artists and they become cool again.”

Elliott sits at a computer, framed by a wall of Def Leppard box sets and memorabilia. To one side is a sliding door – beyond, an overcast sky which can only mean he is in Ireland, his home since the mid-1980s. He’s been taking it easy as Def Leppard count down to the release of Drastic Symphonies and prepare to go back on the road with Mötley Crüe.

How easy? Well, the other night, he had dinner with a member of U2. A few weeks ago, he did so with “two other members” of the band. His friendship with the group goes back 40 years, when both U2 and Def Leppard, from Dublin and Sheffield respectively, were scrappy outsiders taking on an industry that didn’t necessarily want a lot to do with them.

“Ever since we first set foot on the Emerald Isle they have always been kind of there. As have many other people. U2 overshadow a lot of them. When I first came over here, we went to see Simple Minds at the SFX in ‘84. And because Dennis [Desmond of MCD] was promoting it – and he was our promoter – we were backstage hanging out. This guy walks up and says, ‘Ah, I heard you were in town – here’s my phone number, if you need anything give me a ring’. It was Bono. I was like, ‘This didn’t happen in London!’ It was very similar with Stockton’s Wing and Paul Brady. Anyone want to play five-a-side football? Let’s go out for a meal. Clannad – you wouldn’t think we had anything in common. We get on famously. We used to hang. Maybe because of the oppositeness.”

Sounds silly, but Def Leppard were very influenced by punk. I’d watched these bands and thought, ‘Well if they can do it, I can’

—  Joe Elliott

But it is his friendship with Bono and U2 that is particularly enduring. While you wouldn’t think it from their music, they have a great deal in common.

“We might be chalk and cheese musically, but I’ve been listening to Bono’s audiobook of his biography [Surrender] and I’m nodding along. ‘Yep, yep ... That’s us too’. Trying to get a record deal in 1979, putting your first album out, negotiating Sheffield as we were, and Dublin as they were. They were parallels to a point with how a band fights through to become the band they become. I see parallels – it’s the period. I dare say, if Dave Gahan from Depeche Mode had an autobiography, I’d be going ‘yep, yep, yep ...’ Same with Simon Le Bon, Steve Harris of Iron Maiden. All these bands started at the same time. And, funnily enough, are still going.”

Playing five-a-side with Clannad was a long way from Def Leppard’s roots in late-1970s British heavy metal. Though Elliott has always been wary of the connection, Def Leppard are regarded as key movers in what would become known as the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, or NWOBHM. Loud, squeezed into tight trousers and entirely silly, it was a movement that also included Iron Maiden and which would inspire Metallica (their drummer Lars Ulrich had a teenage obsession with NWOBHM).

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It was also more Spinal Tap than Spinal Tap. Angle Witch, one of the many outfits that faded away as Def Leppard went supernova, would perform wearing huge crosses; Samson had a drummer, Barry “Thunderstick” Purkis, who wore a catsuit and mask and performed in a cage (which would inevitably start to wobble towards the end of a gig). To quote Geoff Barton, the journalist who championed the scene: “If you want blood (and flashbombs and dry ice and confetti) you’ve got it: the new wave of British Heavy Metal.”

NWOBHM, as Elliott has long pointed out, wasn’t necessarily a natural fit for Def Leppard. Even in their early days, their songs had a pop sparkle that set them apart from the hard-core moshers. Plus, Def Leppard saw themselves as DIY to their boots. “We were actually quite annoyed when we got lumped in with it, because once we started hearing these bands we thought most of them were shit,” the singer once stated.

“I grew up on glam,” he says today. “Then I walked into punk. Sounds silly, but Def Leppard were very influenced by punk. I’d watched these bands and thought, ‘Well if they can do it, I can’. I wouldn’t have had the nerve to tell [Def Leppard guitarist] Pete Willis I could sing if I hadn’t seen people who couldn’t sing on Top of the Pops. It took music back to ground zero. Even before punk, I was a huge fans of the New York Dolls, The Stooges, MC5. Music that wasn’t quite Supertramp. But it had an appeal.”

The big gear shift in the Def Leppard story was in 1983 when they worked with South African producer Robert “Mutt” Lange, who had broken through working on Rat Trap by the Boomtown Rats in 1978. With Pyromania, the goal was to make a hit record. They weren’t the only band to adopt this strategy – on their Black LP in 1991, Metallica pivoted in the same direction. But Def Leppard did it first and most spectacularly with the Lange-produced one-two of Pyromania and then, in 1987, Hysteria – a duo of fizz-bomb odysseys that spawned hits such as Photograph and Rocket.

Rick lost his arm. There were moments we probably thought, that’s that then. For him, for us. And he proved everybody wrong

—  Joe Elliott

Pyromania put Def Leppard on a new trajectory – one their metal peers back in the UK could only dream about. One minute they were denim-jacketed underdogs from Sheffield, the next they were headlining Madison Square Garden. But for Elliott, that journey has continued. He feels that, artistically, Def Leppard have only recently achieved their potential, with last year’s multifaceted Diamond Star Halos, and now with the epic and drama-packed Drastic Symphonies.

“We wanted to be all things to all people. I don’t think we became that band until Diamond Star Halos. I think we’d been working towards it for 40 years. We had massive success with Pyromania everywhere outside of Europe. We had massive success with Hysteria and Adrenalize worldwide. They were a lot of glam-pop three minute songs. With Diamond Star Halos, we could do songs on piano and with orchestra. There was plenty of rock’n’roll and big guitars. But it was like, ‘Why can’t we do a song like Life On Mars as well?”

As with many great rock stories, Def Leppard has had its share of tragedy. In 1984, drummer Rick Allen lost an arm in a car crash and had to learn to play single-handed. And then, in 1991, guitarist Steve Clark died of alcohol poisoning. Such setbacks would have torn many groups apart. Def Leppard refused to be put off course.

“Rick lost his arm. There were moments we probably thought, that’s that then. For him, for us. And he proved everybody wrong. We never ever thought about kicking him out. We always said, collectively, if he’s not in the band, that’s his choice. He proved to the world and himself that he could carry on. So, lesson learned.

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In the case of the troubled Clark, the consensus was that their fallen comrade would be best honoured by the group pushing onwards. Elliott had a flashback to that tragedy when Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins had a fatal seizure last year, telling Hot Press that Hawkins “had the same sort of vulnerability as Steve Clark”.

“By the time we get to nine years later and Steve passes away, we’re all a little older, a little wiser,” he says now. “We’ve been through the ringer more than once. So did we think of doing a Led Zeppelin [who packed it in after the death of drummer John Bonham]? No we didn’t – we didn’t think, ‘We’ve lost our brother, we’re going to knock it on the head’.”

Their reasons for carrying on after Clark’s death and recruiting as his replacement Lisburn guitarist Vivian Campbell were pragmatic. Def Leppard still felt they had something to say. But they also felt Clark would approve.

“I know it’s a terrible cliche, to say this is what he would have wanted ... We genuinely did think Steve would have wanted us to carry on. He wasn’t in a great place when he died. He’d been through rehab. He was a self-proclaimed alcoholic. We knew that. He would say, in his more morbid periods, ‘You guys would be better off without me’. We would rally around and go, ‘No, we wouldn’t – we don’t want to be without you’.”

Change is inevitable, he says. Especially if you’re in a band that has been around for decades.

“We’re not the same. Of course we’re not the same. The Rolling Stones aren’t the same. They’re still The Rolling Stones. I have fantastic and fond memories of Steve. He was an incredibly creative soul. There isn’t a day he doesn’t come into our consciousness. He’s either on a retro T-shirt design I have to approve, or I walk past a poster that’s got his face on it.”

We closed the 2009 Country Awards with Taylor doing Pour Some Sugar On Me. We love to do things that aren’t what everyone expects

—  Joe Elliott

Def Leppard first crossed paths with Mötley Crüe in the mid-1980s, when the Crüe were on their way to becoming the most infamous force in rock. There was the time singer Vince Neil snorted heroin instead of his customary cocaine. In 1987, meanwhile, songwriter Nikki Sixx nearly died from a heroin overdose – and then left hospital to score drugs. Mötley Crüe weren’t as successful as Def Leppard. They were, however, a lot more notorious.

“The last gig we did in America on the Pyromania tour was a stadium. Mötley were put on the bill,” recalls Elliott. “That was the first time we came across them. And then, in the 1980s, you couldn’t get away from them. They were notorious: and not necessarily for their music. But for everything. They were Mötley Crüe. Seriously, though, there’s some great music – if you can get past the energy they put out.”

Def Leppard and Mötley Crüe are obvious bedfellows. Less expected is the connection between Elliott’s gang and Taylor Swift. When Swift was on her way to becoming the biggest force in pop, she let it be known that Def Leppard were one of her favourite bands. Elliott believes the link goes back to Swift’s mother, Andrea, who was a Leppard devotee in the 1980s.

“Taylor Swift’s album 1989 is called 1989 because that was the year she was born. Throughout 1988 she heard our music in her mother’s womb, non-stop. Her parents are big Def Leppard fans. Someone came up with a laptop to us and say, ‘Have you read this interview?’ It was with Taylor who, even then, was pretty big. She had been asked, ‘Would you ever consider working with another band?’ She said, ‘There’s only one band I would ever work with – and that’s Def Leppard’.

Def Leppard, it transpires, were very much up for working with Taylor Swift too. The love-in blossomed and, in 2008, these two acts from very different worlds appeared together on the County Music Television show, Crossroads. They collaborated on Swift’s Love Story and Def Leppard’s Photograph, one of the big singles off Pyromania.

“The grown-ups decided to talk. Her people and ours. We spent a week learning Love Story – I sang it from a male point of view. It was just fascinating to work with her. They filmed two nights and composed a show out of them. Us and Taylor Swift, it was a 10- day project. The show was nominated for awards. We closed the 2009 Country Awards with Taylor doing Pour Some Sugar On Me. We love to do things that aren’t what everyone expects.”

They’ve continued to surprise fans with their latest two records, Elliott feels. Diamond Star Halos – the title from a lyric by Marc Bolan – is luxuriant glam-pop. And Drastic Symphonies brings orchestral pomp and ceremony to the Leppard songbook. What a great position to be in as they steam forward into their sixth decade.

“We finally got on the right path. I think there’s more to come. We can do it differently. It’s our best makeover and reinvention. It’s the same guys for the last 32 years. We know each other. We know how it works. That’s another similarity with U2. As a creative unit they know their limitations. That’s the great thing. We finally became the band we secretly wanted to be.”

Drastic Symphonies is released on May 19th. Def Leppard play Marlay Park with Mötley Crüe in July