Def Leppard still sweet as ever

BY ALAN SCULLEY
Night & Day

September 14, 2006 01:38 pm

— Def Leppard has spent the better part of 20 years trying to explain in interviews that the band has been miscast as a heavy metal acts, and its real roots are more in the pop and glam rock era of rock and roll.
It’s been a rather futile experience. But with the release of the new covers CD, “Yeah!,” singer Joe Elliott hopes Def Leppard — which will perform Wednesday at Darien Lake with Journey — has finally found a way to set the record straight.
“We gone through a tedious amount of time trying to explain to people that we’re not strictly a heavy metal band,” Elliott said in a recent phone interview. “You’re explaining (this) one tour, and 18 months later you go back on the road and the same journalist will headline an article that we’re an ’80s heavy metal band. Was that totally a waste of my time? So what’s the easiest way of making the headline irrelevant is to make an album that’s in the shops, in your hands, in your head, on the radio, that says more than a thousand words ever could.”
Whether “Yeah!” will put Def Leppard’s music into what the band members would consider the proper light remains to be seen. But it is notable that not a single heavy metal act is featured on the new CD.
“The one thing we weren’t going to do was make an album of Sabbath, Zeppelin and Deep Purple covers,” Elliott said. “That’s too easy and wrong.”
Instead, “Yeah!” features Def Leppard’s versions of such songs as David Essex’s “Rock On,” the Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset,” Thin Lizzy’s “Don’t Believe A Word,” Badfinger’s “No Matter What” and the Faces’ “Stay With Me.”
On most of the 14 songs on “Yeah!” Def Leppard sticks pretty close to the most famous versions of the song. Elliott said there was an obvious reason for that approach.
“It’s the old cliché, if it’s not broken, don’t fix it,” he said. “When we heard ‘Stay With Me’ and when we still hear ‘Stay With Me,’ we just go wow, what a song! When you do it, you kind of want to karaoke to a point.”
Only two of the songs actually differ significantly from their signature versions — “Rock On,” which still has much of character of the Essex original but uses a guitar solo instead of strings, and “Waterloo Sunset,” which gets a rocked up treatment.
“Both of these songs, if we wrote them, this is what we would have done,” Elliott said. “With the others, there’s nothing that we would have changed too much, so we didn’t.”
The only criteria in choosing songs for the CD, Elliott said, was that the songs had to come from British acts and had to have been recorded before the end of the 1970s.
That’s when the group from Sheffield, England, got signed by Mercury Records. Def Leppard debuted in 1980 with the album “On Through The Night.”
But it wasn’t until the third CD, “Pyromania,” came out in 1983 that Def Leppard made a major impact. The band, which at the time included Elliott, guitarist Phil Collen, guitarist Steve Clark, bassist Rick Savage and drummer Rick Allen, made its mark in a big way, as “Pyromania” sold more than 10 million copies behind hits like “Bringing On The Heartbreak” and “Photograph.”
The 1987 follow-up, “Hysteria,” was even more popular, and more than 13 million copies of the CD have been sold.
Sessions for next CD, “Adrenalize,” were interrupted by the death of Clark, who had fought a long battle with substance abuse. Vivian Campbell came on board as the replacement before “Adrenalize” arrived in stores in 1992 — five years after “Hysteria.”
As the ’90s arrived, though, Def Leppard’s catchy brand of hard rock fell out of favor as grunge became the dominant style, and CDs such as “Slang” (1996) and “Euphoria” (1999) failed to come close to the popularity of the previous three.
Still, Def Leppard has remained popular enough to continue filling arena-sized venues, and the current tour is no exception.
Fans can expect Def Leppard to play a set filled with hits from a catalog of nine studio CDs that sold 65 million albums overall. That sort of set is a necessity for a tour like this, Elliott said.
“I’m sorry if it kind of rubs people the wrong way, but in a live environment other than a small club, familiarity is a major ingredient,” he said. “People walk out of stadiums when U2 play nine new songs. They walk out of stadiums when the Rolling Stones play nine new songs. If you indulge your audience that much, they will go, ‘I don’t get it,’ because they’re coming to pay homage to what they know.”

Alan Sculley is a St. Louis-based freelance writer.

IF YOU GO
• WHAT: Def Leppard and Journey concert.
• WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday.
• WHERE: Darien Lake Performing Arts Center, 9993 Alleghany Road, Darien Center.
• MORE INFORMATION: Visit ticketmaster.com.

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