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Def Leppard Tour History Fan Archive.

Media Review - Animal Instinct 1987 - Joe Elliott Quotes

With Steve ready to jump ship any day, Joe asked Bootleg Bill if he could round up a gig for Def Leppard, pronto. Amazingly, Bill delivered. He booked a show for them at Westfield School. located in a suburban area of Sheffield. There was no money in it (a teacher later paid the band £5 out of his own pocket) and Leppard only had three days to rehearse. Still, it was a gig.

On the surface of it, Def Leppard's public debut at 9pm July 18th, 1978 was a modest affair. They smuggled beer into the school in Tony Kenning's drumkit. The show was held in a small auditorium for a crowd of about one hundred and fifty schoolkids, mostly fourteen - and fifteen - year - old girls, and the band's dressing room was a classroom. It took three trips in Andy Smith's father's car to get all of Leppard's equipment - including a borrowed PA - from Bramall Lane to Westfield, a forty minute drive each way. And the opening was a disaster.

"What happened was that just as we were about to go on, we realised we hadn't tuned the guitars, So we had to get one of the guys helping us bring Steve's Marshall amp into the dressing room - he left the switch on standby."

"Steve plugged in and walked to the front of the stage, looking brilliant in his tight jeans and long blond hair. All ready to go into the first song, 'World Beyond The Sky', he did his windmill arm motion, just like Pete Townshend, for the big opening chord and nothing happened. No power. Everybody in the audience was laughing. After a few seconds, we started all over again."

Steve wasn't the only Leppard with problems. Halfway through one song, Joe forgot the lyrics and began singing about carpet slippers, belting out the first thing that came into his head. Despite Steve's technical difficulties and Joe's memory lapse, the Westfield show was a memorable beginning. All but one of the songs they played during the fifty-minute set were originals; they saved Thin Lizzy's "Jailbreak" for the encore. The audience demanded one too. Andy Smith recalls that a number of schoolgirls in attendance fell in love with Joe, who dazzled the dolls in his tight white jumpsuit (on which his mother had embroidered the name "Zeff," short for Joseph, above the breast pocket).

After the show the Leppards plucked roses from a small garden outside the auditorium to give to their girlfriends. Someone took a photo of everyone together, the girls clutching their roses in celebration.

By the time Joe Elliott finally got home that night, his mum and dad were already in bed. "I was sneaking past their bedroom. Unfortunately, our floorboards creak and I woke them up. My Dad came out and said 'How did it go, Lad?' And I just went crazy, 'Oh, it was great! They were cheering for us, it was like a real band. They all clapped and came down to the front of the stage, just like they do on TV on Top of The Pops' "He was real happy for me, too. From then on, I had their blessing to go out and play rock & roll."

By Zomba Books 1987.

The Joe Elliott Show - 20th July 2013 Quotes

"Last week Quebec City in Canada, this week the Emerald Isle. Welcome everybody to the Joe Elliott show on Planet Rock coming to you this week from my home studio, Joe's Garage in Dublin, Ireland. The Def Leppard tour is over. We finished on Wednesday night in Canandaigua, Upstate New York which was one day short of the 35th anniversary of the first ever Def Leppard gig at Westfield school in Sheffield. A gig attended by all of 50 people maybe who stood as far away from the stage as they could possibly get compared to last weeks gig in Quebec where an astonishing 85,000 people came. A bit of a contrast. Talking of first ever gigs we weren't really going down that well until we played this song for an encore."

"I think it's safe to say that it was a bit of a learning curve for Def Leppard when we played that song in front of about 50 kids at Westfield School. They hadn't been remotely interested in anything that we'd play before because we'd written all these weird songs, actually pretty much everything that ended up on On Through The Night, weird to them at least. But when we came out and played that song, that song being Jailbreak. The title track from Lizzy's 1976 album that is indeed the 2010 remix that I did with Scott Gorham, when we played that they went crazy and it kind of gave us a direction to go in."

Reviews/Quotes from the 1978 Sheffield show.