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Saturday, 31st July 1999
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Nisku, AB - Media Reviews

Leapin' Leppards By Mike Ross

Rockers stay true to their fans. It's another lovely summer day in Alberta. With the temperature hovering at single-digit levels, a constant drizzle dampens a crowd of hard-drinking classic rock fans at the Labatt Raceway. They're waiting for the evening's bill o' fare, headlined by British pop-metal icons Def Leppard.

On stage, nothing is happening. Roadies sit and smoke, refusing to work. Backstage, a short English fellow in a mud-speckled suit curses into a cell phone. A group of tense RCMP officers gather for a meeting. The impatient crowd starts to turn ugly.

There is no joy in mudville, for Rockfest '99 has run out of cash. No one is getting paid, not the crew, not the caterers, not the local suppliers, not even the bands. The promoter is nowhere to be found.

Band policy.

It could've been a disaster, a riot, even, but Def Leppard has a policy: "The people were there, so we played," says guitarist Phil Collen in a recent phone interview. "We owe it to whoever is there."

Tonight's gig in the Shaw Conference Centre could be dubbed Rockfest II - the Revenge. Unfazed by the muddy debacle last summer, Def Leppard returns to Edmonton to play for its loyal fans. Opening the show will be Joan Jett, who was booked to play the last day of Rockfest, but the plug was pulled before she got here.

Say what you will about the merits of combining pop with hard rock - watered-down and beefed-up, as their music has been called - Def Leppard is a hardened touring unit that's pretty much ready for anything, even another Rockfest. The band did a similar festival in Australia that went broke, Collen recalls. Def Leppard was one of the only bands that stayed to play. It was just another gig in what turned out to be a very odd decade for the band.

Give them this: The Leps stick to their guns. Where other bands might refuse to change with the times - AC/DC, for one, seems completely unaware of any music but its own - Def Leppard stubbornly continues to react to the flavour of the moment.

Says Collen, "Whatever you do, you've got to be somewhat aware of what's going on around you. That's how bands disband. They completely ignore their environment and before you know it, they're old fashioned. I think you always have to adapt to what's going on around you. Even with Hysteria, when we done Pour Some Sugar On Me, rap had just started getting popular. And that was based on that, really. No one actually said to us, 'wow, you guys done a rap song.' You hear Pour Some Sugar On Me now and it just sounds like Pour Some Sugar On Me. But when we first done it, it was definitely a reflection of what was going on. And I think with the new album, Euphoria, it's been a return to top-40 and fun type of music, whether it's Ricky Martin, Britney Spears or whatever. It's a lot different than what it was in the mid-'90s. It all seemed bit sombre and a bit dark."

Even so, the Leps leapt on the grunge trend with the release of Slang, a sombre and dark album (for them) that is considered one of the band's least successful records. They actually had radio people say to them: "If it was anyone but you, we would've played it."

Hair-metal was out - and so was the pop-rock hybrid Def Leppard had developed with the help of producer Robert John "Mutt" Lange (who has since gone on to hybridize country music with wife Shania Twain; and coming soon: the Mutt-ization of Britney Spears).

Grunge, says Collen, "was a reaction, I think, against bands that had copied our vibe. There was a lot of the '80s hair metal thing, which we've nothing to do with, but we got lumped in with it anyway. It was a bit weird, actually, to bear the brunt of that, everyone going, 'You guys suck!' " He laughs, "I guess it was peer pressure."

Cling to the middle.

It's more than just peer pressure. It must be a strain to walk the fine line between adapting to current trends and jumping on every bandwagon that comes along. Def Leppard is a band that stubbornly stays in the middle.

"I think that was part of our success," Collen says. "We thought a lot of the heavy metal stuff was ridiculous. And we still do. We didn't want to be Duran Duran either, so we were somewhere in the middle. We always felt a little bit different because we were never really part of any movement. People said what we were doing wasn't pure rock and stuff like that. Then we said, yeah, but what we did was better than pure rock."

By Edmonton Sun 2000.

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