Def Leppard/Mötley Crüe
Marlay Park, Dublin
★★★★☆
Def Leppard and Mötley Crüe are two of the great survivors from the musical asteroid of grunge that killed the dinosaurs of rock in the 1990s.
Their music will forever be associated for better or worse with the 1980s, that decade when hard rock ruled the world. Now, not so much, as evident by the crowd at a showery Marlay Park who were overwhelmingly of a certain vintage.
Mötley Crüe even signed a “cessation of touring” contract in 2014 and promised that they would never ever tour again. In the meantime, Netflix’s The Dirt, the biopic of bass guitarist Nicky Sixx brought their music to a whole new audience as did the Hulu documentary Pam & Tommy. They tore up the agreement and have spent this year in an extremely lucrative tour with Def Leppard, Marlay Park being the penultimate concert on their European Tour.
Mötley Crüe’s opening music is Mozart’s Requiem in D minor, K. 626. The band’s fans, being the cultured music aficionados that they are, would know that without having to Google the band’s set list of course.
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“Who wants to hear the old stuff?” bellowed lead singer Vince Neil. That’s everybody Vince. Mötley Crüe played a crowd-pleasing set beginning with Wild Side and ending with Kickstart my Heart. It is quite the visual spectacle with two pneumatic female dolls and two real-life gyrating women dancers who occasionally sing. Sonically the sound of Nicky Sixx’s bass was too prominent in the mix.
A highlight (or lowlight) is when Tommy Lee emerged from behind the drum kit like a tattooed cadaver and launched into a cod Irish accent. “How the f**k are ya?” He then exhorted the women in the crowd to get their “titties out”. There were few takers.
This was billed as joint headliners but there is no doubt who is the top of this particular cock rock hit parade. Def Leppard have the bigger back catalogue, better songs, better vocalised harmonies and two guitarists – Vivian Campbell and Phil Collen – who perfectly complement each other, the former a more power-driven performer, the latter the one responsible for so many of the band’s most memorable riffs.
“This is almost like playing in my back garden,” said long-time Dublin resident and lead singer Joe Elliott just as the rain started to fall. “I’m feeling right at home.”
Def Leppard rolled out the hits one after the other, among them Let’s God Rocked, Animal, Armageddon It, Love Bites, Rocket, Hysteria, Pour Some Sugar on Me, Rock of Ages and Photograph.
They even managed to get away with the “here’s your cue to go to the bar/toilet moment”, otherwise known as “we’d like to play something from our new album for you”.
As Elliot put it, they were all holed up in their various mansions with nothing better to do than to record a new album and damn it, weren’t they going to play it for their fans.
They got away with it because the new material from Diamond Star Halos is strong, though Elliot sounded a little peeved that the fans didn’t appear to know the acoustic country-tinged number This Guitar, which is as good as anything they have ever recorded.
