Def Leppard: ‘We stuck it out. And we’re really good at it’

“Taylor Swift was a big fan of Def Leppard in her mother’s womb,” says 63-year-old Joe Elliott, Def Leppard’s singer, in a Yorkshire accent as broad as the moors. “She was exposed to us in ’88, born in ’89 and grew up on us.” The point he’s making is that Def Leppard, 46 years after Elliott joined the Sheffield band, aren’t quite the “one for the granddads” act that one might expect of a venerable hard rock band.

American singer Swift and Leppard filmed an episode of the concert show Crossroads in 2008, performing each other’s songs together. The following year they played the band’s 1980s monster hit (and strip club anthem) “Pour Some Sugar on Me” together at the CMT Awards for country music. Last year, Miley Cyrus sang their 1983 hit “Photograph” with them at the Taylor Hawkins tribute concert at Wembley Stadium. Whisper it, but Def Leppard have transcended the vicissitudes of rock fashion and arrived at the exalted status of elder statesmen.

Elliott and guitarist Phil Collen are promoting a book that, to Elliott, proves their status. Definitely: The Official Story of Def Leppard is part oral history (a pretty decent one) and part scrapbook (a very good one). But it’s the publisher, Genesis — purveyor of books by A-list stars — that excites Elliott. “It’s Jeff Beck, it’s Jimmy Page, it’s Peter Green. John Lennon, Beatles, Stones. And they wanted to do dear old Def Leppard.”

There’s also an album of old hits rearranged with an orchestra, Drastic Symphonies. But the most telling fact of all about Def Leppard being back with multiple bangs is that this summer they play Wembley Stadium for the first time, as last year’s US stadium tour co-headlining with Mötley Crüe comes to Europe. Thirty-six years on from Hysteria — the global smash-hit album conceived as a hard-rock version of Michael Jackson’s Thriller — Def Leppard are a bigger live draw than they have ever been.

How have they defied the laws of rock gravity?

“Well, we stuck it out,” Collen says. “We didn’t let the ego thing get in the way. I actually don’t understand how these bands disintegrate. Really? This is a dream job. This is what you dream of as a kid. You want to be a footballer or a rock star and you get to be a rock star. And we’re really good at it.” He also notes something that he says most bands don’t do: they did what they were told by people who knew what they were doing.

Elliott’s answer is rather more discursive. Well, he says, there’s been excellent management since 2005, geared towards rebuilding the band as a live draw. They’ve done that by keeping on the road, usually on cannily chosen bills: there have been a lot of co-headlining tours, especially with Journey, before the jaunt with Mötley Crüe, that offer two complementary shows in one night.

“We’re this untapped source of familiarity, I suppose, that had to become cool again,” Elliott says. “Because let’s be honest, we weren’t ever Depeche Mode or U2 when it comes to the darlings of the press. So we had to work very hard to keep a fan base alive.”

There have been landmarks, too — induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2019 — that have raised the band’s profile. They also attribute part of their surging popularity to the lives of their fans. As Elliott says, the kids who followed them through the 1980s were raising kids of their own through the ’90s and ’00s, “and then they came back with their kids.” There’s also the simple fact that in these post-Covid times, a tour by two huge rock bands promising no reflection on lives rent asunder by war, famine, pestilence, plague, social policy or identity politics has a very simple and hedonistic appeal. “Two bands of MTV superheroes, doing it live,” Collen says, succinctly.

Though known for their troubles — having to sack founding guitarist Pete Willis owing to his alcoholism in 1982; the other founding guitarist, Steve Clark, dying from his addictions in 1991; drummer Rick Allen losing an arm after a car crash on New Year’s Eve in 1984 — Def Leppard are surprisingly free of melodrama.

“We have this working-class thing,” says Collen, who joined the band from London in 1982 following Willis’s sacking. “Our parents lived through world war two, going down the air raid shelters. They had a values system that they ingrained in us, that we all share and we still have. And when I met the band, when I first stayed up at Joe’s house when I was in the band Girl, it was like, ‘Oh, this is up north but it’s the same as my house down in Walthamstow.’ So we all have that heartbeat.”

One of the defining features of Def Leppard onstage down the years has been the certainty that Collen — even into his sixties — would appear on stage topless, with an oiled and ripped torso (he stopped drinking and started exercising more than 30 years ago). One admired his physical confidence and condition. On the other hand, going topless seems more of a young man’s game. Why does he do it?

“Because I can.” He laughs. “I think that’s it, to be honest.”

Do his bandmates never have a quiet word? Just try a shirt for once, mate? “In fairness, he’s been wearing a shirt ever since we came back last year,” Elliott says. “We upped the ante and started working with this lady who brings all these racks of stuff and we try it all on. When we started doing promo, Phil walked in with a beard. He looked like fucking Santa Claus. She went, ‘Lose it.’ He went, ‘All right.’ She went, ‘Put a shirt on.’ And he went, ‘All right.’ And he started dressing up.” Like his band, he did what he was told by people who knew what they were doing.

So why can’t everyone do that, Elliott wonders. “It’s not that difficult. It’s not like you’re climbing Mount Everest on roller skates. You’re actually coming down on a snowboard.”

‘Definitely: The Official Story of Def Leppard’ is published on May 18. ‘Drastic Symphonies’ is released on May 19. Def Leppard’s European tour begins at Bramall Lane, Sheffield, on May 22, defleppard.com