Tour Diary - By Joe Elliott

"Don't fancy yours much..." ...especially when "yours" is an hairsute Irish guitarist in an ill-fitting dress. Always the open-minded one, Def Leppard's Joe Elliott takes on South East Asia at karaoke, drinks his own body weight in Scotch and worries about his father, lying in an intensive care ward back in Sheffield.

Monday May 27 - Bangkok, Thailand, day before first gig.

They're not well down here. The drivers that is. We're in the van going to the gig and on at least three occasions we experience a near-death situation and all this with a police escort!

Sounds very flash and I suppose it is really, but believe me it's totally necessary. Fourteen million make up the population of this ever-expanding city and the traffic has to be seen to be believed. We get to the arena in a matter of 20 minutes (normal travel time, one hour and 15 minutes) and re-acquaint ourselves with some members of the crew that we haven't seen since the last tour. One of them, Frenchie (Bruce French, our sustenance co-ordinator!), gets a serious hip hip hooray from all for his efforts over the last two and a half years: travelling on various boats in The Whitbread Round The World yacht race, he had a tattoo done by some cannibal/witch doctor type in the middle of a jungle and, as well as cooking up a variety of culinary delights for the ship's crew, he kept a day-to-day diary of the entire event. He'd mail his memoirs to a pal who photocopied them and sent them to everybody in the Leppard set-up - a fantastic read on the bog. Someone please publish them, he'd make a fortune! After a bit of grub we get down to the serious job of last minute panic rehearsals.

The gig is tomorrow night so we just run through the ones that need tidying up. Everything goes well apart from the fact there's no air conditioning, so it's a total sweat-box. We reconvene in the dressing room and return to the hotel. Jet lag kicks us in the balls at various points in the evening so I end up in the bar five minutes before it closes, for one quick drink and a hello to two competition winners (from Chesterfield!), one in a Sheffield United shirt!. Top man.

Tuesday May 28

Here we go again. Our driver thinks he's Damon Hill and we lose the Police escort, but we do arrive in one piece and after a handful of interviews we run through a couple of songs just to be sure. We're on at 8:30 tonight, our first "electric" gig for two and a half years and remarkably no nerves yet!. It's so hot, Phil and Viv decide to go on in shorts. I, on the other hand, opt for the less sensible but much more rocking black leather trousers and black shirt. Sets off my bottled blonde locks swimmingly! Viv tries on a dress, a lovely little blue denim number which he picked up in LA. Maybe I should explain: apparently when we play in Singapore the government don't allow "kissing other band members or members of the audience... No jumping around on stage in a threatening way" and we must be clothed "from the shoulders to the knee", "Ah-ha," said Viv, "they omitted the small print."

No such rules here though, so the near-naked Phil and Viv (and the rest of us) take to the stage and rip into Gift Of Flesh, which goes down great considering hardly anybody has heard it. The album has only been out a week or so, Deliver Me goes down like an old favourite (can't figure that one out), Truth?, on the other hand, goes down like a pin in a rubber johnny factory. The arena is too echoey to deal with a song so sparsely arranged. We play it well enough but we'll have to rethink this one.

All the old ones go down as you'd expect and everybody leaves happy. We're relieved that nothing drastic went wrong, so everybody except yours truly goes out to celebrate. Me, I want to rest my pipes and I tend to get very loud after a couple of Scotch & gingers. One show down, 199 to go. Goodnight.

(To read the next part of this diary go to the Singapore show page.)

By Joe Elliott in Q Magazine 1996.