Music: Set List: Joe Elliott of Def Leppard

Jul 19, 2011 Music Avenue

In Set List, we talk to veteran musicians about some of their most famous songs, learning about their lives and careers (and maybe hearing a good backstage anecdote or two) in the process.

The musician: As the frontman for the British pop-metal band Def Leppard, Joe Elliott was one of the biggest rock stars of the 80s, as his band rode a massive wave of worldwide popularity carried by the multi-platinum sales of 1983s Pyromania and 1987s Hysteria. Thanks to MTV, Def Leppard was also one of the eras most visible bands, with Elliotts Union Jack T-shirt (from the video for Photograph) and his ripped jeans (from Pour Some Sugar On Me) becoming iconic images of the time. Def Leppards greatest triumphs were often accompanied by devastating tragedies, including the car accident in 1984 that caused drummer Rick Allen to lose his left arm, and the alcohol-related death of founding guitarist Steve Clark in 1991. But Def Leppard remains one of the most successful and enduring bands of its generation. Even after Def Leppards commercial fortunes cooled with the onset of grunge in the 90s, the band has remained a popular touring attraction, even managing a top five debut for 2008s Songs From The Sparkle Lounge.

Hello America (from 1980s On Through The Night)

Joe Elliott: You know, that first record, Tom Allom produced it, God bless him. Lovely guy and a good producer. But I think his instructions from the record label must have been something like, Just capture the bands energy, man. Wed been playing most of those songs live for 18 months. So, if anybody came along and suggested we change them in any which way, we wouldnt have been able to. Wed lived with them for so long. We just had to leave them as they were and record them as best we could. Because we knew the songs so well, we had the backing tracks down in a day. And then we spent three weeks ruining that record by doing way too many overdubs. That was the thing that we had a struggle with. It was us trying to find our way. You know, a lot of people got a great affection for that record, but as I always say, Yeah, but its hardly the first Van Halen or Boston album, is it?

The one good thing about it was it gave us a launch pad to get better from. And I believe that when we got to High N Dry and on to Pyromania and Hysteria, we started doing the record the first album should have been. We couldnt get Mutt [Lange] to do the first album, he wasnt available. It was fun working with Tom, but we spent most of the time drinking wine and having a good time as opposed to making a good record. I didnt really always enjoy making albums with Mutt, but I certainly enjoyed listening to them afterwards. But its the other way around with On Through The Night.

Its a bit naive and it could have been a better record. I would love the opportunity to take it in the studio and remix it. Sadly, the house where we recorded it, which used to be John Lennons place in Ascot, got bought by some billionaire Arab guy. He took all the master tapeswhich would have been in one of the rooms of the studiointo their outdoor pool, and filled it in with earth and put a garden over the top of them. Theyre lost forever.

The A.V. Club: When you finally were able to get to America, how did the reality match the fantasy that you had?

JE: Hello America was a song written by me when I was working in a windowless factory, just wondering. My view of America was from watching TV, watching Kojak and Hawaii Five-O. The palm trees up and down Sunset Boulevard looked exactly like they did in the movies. It was everything we expected it to be. It was bigger and brasher. Its a great place to try and conquer. Its what every British musician has tried to achieve since British musicians existed. What we read in all the British papers was Stones Conquer America, Zeppelin Conquers America. You think, Oh God, its the next step for us. Were gonna go there. Its like a Viking warrior stepping onto New York from a boat, you know? Thats how we viewed it, like, If the Stones can do it, then so can I.

AVC: Why do you think Def Leppard broke big in America before it did at home?

JE: Infrastructure. Every town in America had at least one, two, or maybe three radio stations that played rock 24 hours a day. In England, we had a rock specialist on for two hours a week. Our kind of music very rarely broke top 40. Songs like Black Betty and Hold Your Head Up and Radar Love, you could literally count them on one hand. There were incredibly few rock songs making it out to the airwaves until the 80s came along. So it was a club, an elitist club. It was like jazz. You were cool if you liked rock. The Who used to sell all the alcohol, but they couldnt sell a record. It was an odd situation, and then we got the States, with billboards all over the place the size of a house advertising the new Def Leppard album, or whatever that was out. It was nothing like where we were from. Everything was so much more underground.

Bringin On The Heartbreak (from 1981s High N Dry)

JE: That song was originally called Hurt And Heartache, and it was Mutt who said, Thats a bit of a wishy-washy title, isnt it? Steve wrote most of the music for that song. We had been inside a paper factory just outside Sheffield in the middle of winter, sitting on crates, freezing our butts off, just trying to come up with songs that were just, you know, stage two of our career. More of the same, if you like. The dynamics that got put into it during pre-production when we were working with Mutt lifted it to a different level. We rewrote the lyricswe sat down with Mutt and rewrote the verses, stripped it apart and rebuilt it. That was the learning curve that we went through with Mutt, but we were just trying to write great songs. It wasnt like we had this vision of, Well, this is going to end up on the radio, because when it came out, it didnt end up on the radio. What happened is that we shot some promo videosthey werent like videos that you saw in the 80s, they were like, 8 mm hand-cam shoots done at a venue in Liverpool in England that made it look like we were playing live, and full of fan club people bobbing their heads around for four hours.

When we toured that record, that song did get a little bit of airplay on the radio, theres no doubt about it, but not like what is has become now. But in 1982, while we were making Pyromania, MTV started kicking in, and they didnt have many promo videos to show. They started playing it and it started to get requested, and then it started to get requested on the radio. It was like tennis between the radio and MTVthe requests were just going over the fence, and then back again and over the net again, and more requests keep it on TV, and more requests keep it on radio. Wed be getting telexesbecause thats what you had back in 1982, it was a machine that would be spewing out paperand it was someone from the label going, High N Dry sold 20,000 copies this week, and we had never sold 20,000 copies in any week when it was originally released.

People started picking up on this song, and by the time Pyromania was released, wed sold 800,000 copies of High N Dry. Bringin On The Heartbreak, by the time we had played it again, which was on the Pyromania tour a year later, that song was going down the way Stairway To Heaven mustve gone down, the tour after it came out for Zeppelin, because it had established itself. It was, Wow! Weve got a hit record on our hands.

AVC: What did you think of that Mariah Carey cover?

JE: I hate being critical about anyone who covers one our songs, because there arent enough people to cover them for me to get blas about it. Im not Paul McCartney, where 5,000 versions of Yesterday exist. Very few covers of our song exist, and the fact that someone of her stature covered one of our songs is extremely flattering.

Photograph (from 1983s Pyromania)

JE: We were actually more into doing videos than we were into making records. Because we grew up on TV and radio. When MTV started taking off, I can actually remember bands like Journey saying, Were not going to make videos. We didnt have to make videos before, why would we have to make them now? Us, Iron Maiden, and Duran Duranwe absolutely just jumped on board this whole new medium. Duran Duran, they reinvented how to make videos. Those guys would rent a yacht in the Bahamas and sit on the end of it and sing Rio and put all these pretty girls and stuff in it. You couldnt take your eyes off their videos. Youre like, Oh you lucky bastards. Were stuck in some old factory shooting videos; theyre on a boat. And Elton John with Im Still Standing; Russell Mulcahy made some great videos. The kind of trilogy, or whatever it was, of videos that ZZ Top made with the car and the spinning furry guitars. These were the kind of things that left an impact on your brain. We were well aware that this was a fantastic way of getting new music across to people other than just radio. It wasnt now just in the car, it was when they got home. We totally embraced the whole video thing. We were really, really lucky. Between ourselves and David Mallet, who directed the Photograph video, we had two different sides of it so willing to do whatever it took to get it right. It wasnt the case where its like, Oh, just film me, and Im done with this. No, we need to place you, sort of align, and all the messing around that you have to do to get it right.

It wore off. By the time we were doing videos for Adrenalize, it was like, Were not doing this anymore. But when we were in our early 20s and late teens, to get the chance to do all this kind of stuff and put yourself in the same situation so youre competing against Michael Jackson, it was like, Are you kidding me? We said all along theres absolutely no doubt that MTV was as responsible, if not more, for our success than radio.

AVC: Video aside, Photograph is a great song.

JE: It sounds brilliant on the radio. At the time we made Pyromania, we were actually trying to create songs that would sound great on the radio. That was the whole point. By then we had vaulted to another gear. We got the High N Dry thing out of our system, which was kind of like the homage to AC/DC. Now we were starting to bring in the pop elements. We did them on High N Dry, but they didnt get noticed. People picked up on the title track, they picked up on Let It Go, and things like Another Hit And Run. They didnt pick up on things like You Got Me Running off side two, which is a total pop songprecursor to Photograph, maybe. But when we did Photograph, we just knew the way that that riff sounded, and the way that the drums sounded, and the melody, and the lyrical content, we knew that this was what it took to make a hit single. The rest is up to the people whether its a hit or not. Theres nothing else we can do. We can advertise it, which is what we did with the video. We can get it to radio and hope that theyll play it, which they did.

It took on a life of its own, then, because all of a sudden were now in there with your Elton Johns and everybody else whos established. Theyre now peers, if you like, as opposed to heroes. Theyre always heroes, but you know what I mean. All of a sudden, were on the same playing field and given the same opportunities. We used to go out and buy their albums, Queen, all that kind of stuff. We were there. Its not that wed made it, but we were at least now through the door, and it was a different battle that you were going to be fighting, trying to stay in there.

Love Bites (from 1987s Hysteria)JE: It was a play on words. When somebody chews on your neck, you get a bruise. Were aware of the fact that in Britain, love bites, you guys call them hickeys. We call them love bites. The idea of it was that its like, love bites, love bleeds. It was a case of taking it and just showing how the English language is an awkward beast. Many words mean many different things.

AVC: Love Bites, as of now, is your only No. 1 hit in America. It was written with Lange, and it originally had more of a country sound to it. Def Leppard has been an unlikely influence on contemporary country musicyouve worked with Tim McGraw and Taylor Swift, and Lange was very successful guiding Shania Twains career. Was country music an influence on Def Leppard at any point?

JE: I dont listen to it at all, and its not because I dont like it. I just dont. I hear it if it comes on and Im in an environment, like Im in the back of somebody elses car and theyve got the country channel on. Occasionally were on the bus and one of the other guys has got CMT on, and you just happen to be down there making a cup of tea and you see three and a half minutes and you go, Thats pretty cool. Because it doesnt necessarily sound like a country song for a start. We used to laugh at country like everybody else. We used to crack all the jokes: What happens if you play a country song backwards? You get your house back, you get your wife back, you get your truck back. All that kind of stuff. In England, rock music very rarely infiltrates the charts, but country music even less so. The only songs that we ever got to hear were things like, Stand By Your Man, by Tammy Wynette, Convoy, by C.W. McCall, those kind of novelty songs. Occasionally Glen Campbell, but I dont really think Wichita Lineman is a country song, its just a great song. Jimmy Webb, I think, wrote it. He was just a great songwriter.

Thats the way that we always looked at it. So when youre actually talking about sitting down and owning a collection of Lyle Lovett albums, or Garth Brooks, no, I dont. But I was fascinated when I first started seeing the country bands, when they first got their own MTV. Looking at their videos, they were looking like Poison or Van Halen videos, with the enormous lighting rigs and all that kind of stuff. Youre looking at it, and its just like late 80s/early 90s, but with a cowboy hat on. That was the big differencethe cowboy hat, or maybe the cowboy boots.

Pour Some Sugar On Me (from Hysteria)AVC: Im guessing for the last 25 years that youve sung this song every night that youve performed for Def Leppard.

JE: I dont think theres been a gig that we havent played it.

AVC: Is there a part of you that wishes that you wouldnt have to sing this song ever again?

JE: Absolutely not. If you cant handle the responsibility of a hit single, dont write one. It stayed a hit, thats the thing thats great. Weve had loads of hits that went top 10, but nobody remembers them. Pour Some Sugar On Me stayed a hit. Its our Brown Sugar, or Every Breath You Take. Its one of those songs that just remains a hit. Its such a cool song, it actually never gets old. It can get a bit tiresome with rehearsals, at the beginning of the tour when you havent played for 18 months. The first time you play it, you go, Cool. The 10th time you play it, you go Ugh. But it never gets old in front of an audience.

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