Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott On The Band’s New Book ‘Definitely’ And Album With The Royal Philharmonic

If there was ever a rock band whose story deserved to be told in book form, it would be Def Leppard. Not only has the veteran British group sold over 110 million albums worldwide (among them the classic records Pyromania and Hysteria), charted many memorable hit songs, and been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—but Def Leppard has survived personal tragedy and changing musical trends. Today, they still continue to make records and tour after nearly 50 years since their formation—a career that has now been captured in their new book titled Definitely.

“It’s been a hell of a journey since COVID,” says Def Leppard singer Joe Elliott about working on the book during that period. “It’s been a total reinvention, total kind of reload, whatever you wanna call it. We came out of the box in 2022 [after] sitting around for ’20 and ’21. We managed to pull together [the albums] Diamond Star Halos and Drastic Symphonies, tidying up our back catalog a bit, and put the book together—which was an incredible relief to be able to do something positive in what was a negative time period. We think the book’s a great addition to our legacy.”

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Definitely, which is out via by Genesis Publications, is an oral history told by the band members themselves—Elliott, bassist Rick Savage, drummer Rick Allen and guitarists Phil Collen and Vivian Campbell. In addition to the reminisces, Definitely contains a trove of images such as archival onstage and candid photos, press clippings, and memorabilia that really paint a portrait of the band from growing up in Sheffield to becoming stadium rock gods during the ’80s and early ’90s.

“As a kid then, knowing the history of rock and roll [in] ’77,” says Elliott, “they were maybe a handful of bands that had been around for more than 10 years: the Stones, the Who, the Kinks from the early ’60s. I would keep archiving things because you just didn’t know how long it was gonna go on for. I would just save stuff. We didn’t have a lot to save, obviously, but over 44 years it just grew and grew and grew. So we always had the tools to do this book. I sat down with the guys at Genesis and I must’ve done 26-30 hours of recording with them over a three-four month period.”

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With its emphasis on words and images, Definitely follows the style of previous and lavish Genesis music titles, which led to the partnership between the band and the publisher. “I am a big fan of all the Genesis books,” says Elliott. “My coffee table is creaking at the weight [of those books]—Ronnie Wood, Rolling Stones, Pete Townshend, Jeff Beck type stuff—that they put out. We just started talking job with [our] manager about this kind of stuff, how it would be great to do a coffee table book. And lo and behold, when we started investigating the possibility of it, Genesis was really interested, which surprised me. Because let’s be honest, Def Leppard being what Def Leppard is: it’s a working band. It’s very popular, but we were never exactly what you can call media darlings. So the idea of a company like Genesis taking on a band like Def Leppard was, ‘Nah, I don’t think that they would be interested.’ But they were. They were very interested.”

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“I think I’m probably selling ourselves short with the amount of credibility that we got within the industry. But you never shy away from remembering how tough the ‘90s were to survive. Now, we’re actually really cool these days because we survived the stuff that we went through as kids, the things that we went through as adults: Rick [Allen] losing his arm, Steve losing his life, Vivian’s cancer, me losing my voice. There’s a catalog of a thousand things that most human beings will have gone through. But collectively, it’s under a magnifying glass a lot more when you have five individuals. So we have the stories. And I think they [Genesis Publications] recognize that. So that’s how pretty much it came about. It was just making ourselves available to an incredible company that was actually very keen on doing it in the first place.”

Among the many interesting stories from the book include the band members dispelling the categorization of Def Leppard as a heavy metal group when they first came on to the scene during the New Wave of British Heavy Metal—and then lumped in with the hair metal groups of the late 1980s. Rather, Def Leppard saw themselves somewhere between Queen and AC/DC.

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“I would suggest a hearing test to anybody that can actually distinguish the difference between us and a lot of the wannabes,” says Elliott. “We were gone for four years from ’83 to ’87. It left a huge hole in the industry. [Pyromania] sold 6 million copies and flooded MTV with the “Photograph,” “Rock of Ages” and “Foolin’” videos. But then we went away to make Hysteria, which took a lot longer than we thought. And then the market was flooded because A&R men at every other company went, ‘Sign me a band that sounds like Def Leppard.’ And there were lots of Def Leppard soundalikes out there.

“We didn’t wanna be part of a movement. We instinctively knew when a movement dies, everything inside it dies, so you’ve got to really kick against…We just wanted to be a band. We wanted to stand alone so if everything went away, we stood alone, like all the bands that we grew up with. Bowie was head and shoulders above everything around him. Queen— a great rock band that turned into a pop band, who could do a song like “Tie Your Mother Down” and then follow it up with “We Are the Champions.” But it isn’t about the magical lightning-in-a-bottle thing that these bands had. I’m not saying that we’ve got it, but we just strive for it so that we’re an independent band that is just thought of as Def Leppard.”

One of the poignant aspects of Definitely is the photographs of Def Leppard’s original co-guitarist Steve Clark, who died at the age of 30 in 1991. “Steve was an incredibly important cog in the history wheel of Def Leppard,” Elliott says. “Vivian understands that, and he’s at peace with it, He always has been, which is why he was always the right guy to join the band. Steve will always be an integral part of the band, so he’s gonna be an integral part of the book because we have great memories.”

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The publication of Definitely coincided with Def Leppard’s release of their latest album, Drastic Symphonies, in collaboration with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. It’s a collection of the band’s songs from their catalog—remixed and reimagined drawing from the original tapes and in some cases featuring new vocal performances from Elliott himself. The idea for the new record emerged around the time the band had completed Diamond Star Halos but was forced to initially postpone that release due to the pandemic.

“While we sat around at home twiddling our thumbs,” Elliott recalls, “the record company said, “Do you guys feel like would it be a good idea to revisit your back catalog with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra?” So the email came in from our management—they’d been talking to the label—and said, ‘They’ve come up with this idea of doing some of your greatest hits with the Royal Philharmonic.’ It was their suggestion because [the orchestra had] done it with Elvis, the Beach Boys, Queen. And we went, ‘Oh, that’s good company. Absolutely.’ But the caveat was we’re not just gonna do a greatest hits and just put butter on the toast—slap strings on the songs. We want to be able to dissect these things and deconstruct or reconstruct. If a song doesn’t work, we’re not putting it on so that the back of the sleeve looks better. So we said, ‘We will try everything in our power to make every song that everybody obviously wants work. But if they don’t work, you’ve got to trust us that they don’t work.’”

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In addition to containing several of Def Leppard’s best-known hits, it also features some deep cuts such as “Gods of War ” and “Too Late for Love.” “The fact is that we’ve got some very symphonic songs in our back catalog that aren’t obvious. And they are the ones we need to focus on, so that’s why we pulled out things like Kings of the World and pulled out “Turn to Dust” from Slang, which has already got Indian-type strings anyway that Eric [Gorfain, our arranger] just took to the next level, things like “Paper Sun” off Euphoria, which again can be very dynamic cinematic songs, and “Switch 625” sound like something off a James Bond car chase. That became the mantra: every song got to sound like John Barry doing the Bond theme. That’s what we wanted. So some of them are similar in that kind of arrangement to the originals like “Hysteria,” “Love Bites, “Have You Ever Needed Someone So Bad.” But on “Animal,” we took the drums off and changed it all to timpani. On “Too Late for Love,” the vocals were way too bombastic, so I sang it again.”

Among the tracks that benefitted from the orchestral treatment is a drastically reworked and intimate-sounding arrangement of the band’s iconic hit “Pour Some Sugar on Me” featuring both Elliott and singer Emm Gryner, who previously recorded a piano version of the song almost 25 years ago that impressed Elliott and the band. An earlier attempt to record “Sugar” using its original arrangement for Drastic Symphonies didn’t pan out, so Savage suggested revisiting Gryner’s interpretation.

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“So we sent it to Eric,” recalls Elliott. “’Do you think you could work with this?’ And Eric went back to us and said, ‘Are you kidding?’ He said this could be the standout track of the record because it’s literally upside down, inside out, back and front different to the original. With “Sugar,” once you put the strings on it, it’s beautiful with piano. I just had to work out a harmony. She’s singing the same melodies, so I had to comp her harmony vocal. That’s what we did.”

Fittingly, both the book and the new record come on the 40th anniversary of Pyromania, the album that elevated Def Leppard’s popularity in America; meanwhile, the band is currently on tour in Europe. “I tell you, at 46 years into our career, to be this busy is insane,” Elliott says. “Talk about having to pace yourself. The fact that we’re talking about such positive uplifting things, it makes it worthwhile.”