Interview Transcript - Joe Elliott/Rick Savage

Joe - We had these little hard drives about the size of of a paperback novel that you can record at least four concerts on and Ronan our co-producer and out front sound guy tells me we recorded over a hundred gigs. And I'm thinking 'wow!'. We didn't listen to all of them, we prioritised them as we did them. He'd come backstage after the show and say what do you think guys? and we'd go 'killer version of Rocket' or 'it was a great version of Foolin' tonight'.

Sav - He'd document it and at the end of the tour he'd have a good starting point of where to get the songs, you know, what to listen to and which ones probably were the better versions.

Joe - Well if somebody's a little bit off you don't use that version. That's the beautiful thing about recording a hundred shows.

Sav - We got to the point where we weren't even aware that we were being recorded any more because there was so many and after a while. The point that Joe was making, back in the day you'd bring in the mobile and you knew that was the night that you're recording and it affects you in a certain way and you can't do the gig properly or on a one hundred percent natural basis. The way it's done now, like I say, we'd forgotten that we were recording these shows and you can be yourself and do the show and if somebody's singing out of tune then.

Joe - They get fired!

Sav on Rock On - Yeah I mean - bass solo? I'll tell ya exactly what it is. It's something that's happening while the other guys go and change their costumes. That's what it is.

Joe - We go off and have a little drinky poohs and a smoke.

Sav - The song obviously was originally done back in the 70s by David Essex. And it's a bass guitar oriented song certainly at the beginning. Now we've adapted it later on to just become a fantastic Def Leppard guitar fest towards the end. And so it kind of made sense, rather than just starting the song cold. Bore people a little more by having a 90 second bass solo at the front.

Joe - Well in fairness it does sound fantastic on the record. You have to see it to believe it. You know it's one of those things where it's theatrical. That whole song is very theatrical. And we worked the theatre into it. When we first did it, when we actually first played the song live in 2006 we actually didn't play it. We did what Queen used to do. I sang it over a backing track. And we just let a tape roll and so these guys could just change their clothes.

Sav - It would just be Joe on stage with the backing track.

Joe - We've just turned it into a piece of theatre. We give these guys a break, I get a break during Switch 625, these guys get a break during Rock On. So I just went out on my own and we just had a tape rolling. And we started expanding it and we expanded it backwards if you like over to the intros. So Sav started it off just to get people to go I wonder what this is. And he plays this thing and we put the subsonic bass on. Which is a fantastic thing because you get so much low end, you can get involuntary bowel movements on the back of the lawn because of that thing you know.

Sav - Not that you'd want to.

Joe - It's so deep it hits you right in the chest. You're not just listening to it, you can feel it. And of course him stood up there lit in white. It's almost like Cirque De Soleil without the cables. And then we all toddle on and then the songs starts off and it's a good piece of theatre.

Sav - It gave us the opportunity to visually do something different where there's a lot of stark lighting just on me and then it'll disappear in blackness and then I'll have suddenly appeared 30 yards away on the other side of the stage. And it's all this, Cirque De Soeil stuff I mean that's a good way of putting it.

Joe on Love Bites - I've got to say I actually prefer it to the album version myself. It's in a slightly different key which makes it a bit easier for me to sing! but I can actually sing it rather than struggling with it, it's a beautiful song.

Sav - They evolve and the starting point that you had obviously from the making of the record it does evolve and it breathes more. It's a different thing from recording in the studio, which obviously you've got to get it right as you can but when you're playing in front of an audience and the audience that grew up with you, certain things evolve where you do end up doing it a little differently. Over the years, not completely changing it but the feel of certain sections becomes a little different.

Joe - We don't sit and listen to our own music, we're not that Narcissistic!, wake up in the morning 'cup of coffee please and put Love Bites on honey will you!'. You know it just doesn't happen but you do, you might be trapped in someone else's car and one of your songs comes on the radio and you listen to it and go 'my god we don't play it like that'. We haven't played it like that for years. Certain things happen. For example when Vivian joined the band, we kind of tagged an ending on. To give Vivian an opportunity to play this kind of solo section. And it's stuck for the last 20 tears that's what he's always done. It doesn't exist on the record but it just gives me time to have a quick drink and towel down you know and whatever and get ready for the next song.

Joe on Undefeated - It was a conscious thing. I'm very fascinated with drum rhythms I always have been. I had that loop in my head and I thought. I really wanted to expand it so I just literally programmed a loop and I had our sound guy Ronan make a fifteen minute loop of that drum rhythm and I just started throwing chords over the top and coming up with like structural ideas. I wanted to come up something that was simplistic for everybody to say 'this'll be great to play live' because you can throw the shapes and not be worrying about where your fingers are. Without trying to over simplify the situation here but I wanted it to be that classic stadium rock anthem and was desperately trying to come up with something that would be different to what we've done in the past but reminiscent enough to keep the old fans going yes more of the same but different. You know it's like they're doing it again. I thought if I just cross over that artistic threshold that nobody dare go and saying I don't mind if this sounds a bit like something we've done in the past but in actual fact it doesn't.

Sav - It's just got all the classic ingredients that the Def Leppard fan is aware of and was brought up with.

Joe - But the lyric came right towards the end I had an idea for the chorus and once I got the chorus down the verses came quite logically afterwards. I needed it to have a massive amount of positivity so the message coming across is you know we're undefeated we're still here, we're still doing it. It's not just about the five of us it's about whoever is listening to it. It could be anybody, somebody that comes out of Walter Reed, it could be anybody that's survived whatever they've survived. You know they may have been knocked down but they've got back up. And I think that is represented in all these three songs.

Sav on the photo book - God, yeah there's so many images from going back from 1979 onwards and as I speak now we're just having a look. I don't even recognise these people!. Whose the drummer with two arms, I don't know!.

Joe - I just recovered from this and now you're sending me back in! Look at this! but at least they're good shots. It is something that we were very aware of that we hadn't done. We were constantly being poked and prodded by other people's books when we checked into these hotels you know it's like a day off, you're in the Four Seasons in Atlanta or whatever and you're like let's go upstairs for the free coffee and croissants and you're up there on the concierge floor and there's all these brilliant books on the Stones or The Beatles and you think why haven't we got one. So we thought you know we'd just bought the rights to these photos so we own all the photos. So let's just do something with them. They can sit in a box over there forever or we can weed through.

So we actually got this uber fan. This little Japanese - little, he's 40 years old now!, but he's been with us since about the mid 80s. We said to Nori, what do you want in the book, he's says 'Everything!'. There was ten thousand, twelve thousand pictures - I'm not going through that. Go through them and narrow it down to twelve hundred sort of thing and then we can narrow that down to five hundred or whatever it was. So he did the spade work for us and then we kind of took something from every era so - for the mad Def Leppard fan that fancies looking and listening it's a great companion to listening to the live album. In fairness because you've got the soundtrack of our lives on two discs and then you've got the visual companion. Seriously there are some fantastic fashion faux pas's. All sorts of things in there.

So Bono had a mullet too, get over it! Ripped jeans, nothing wrong with them!

Sav - I'm still wearing mine!

Joe on cartoon series/anything to do with record companies? - No, not at all! But they will be in it yeah.

Sav - Mickey Mouse and Daffy Duck!

Joe - Or dropping bombs on them from a great height. But the cartoon show is developing all the time you know we've discussed this over the last year or so. That it's gonna be called Rock Of Ages - well it might not be called Rock Of Ages any more so there's at least more development. It's still exists, we don't know what it's gonna be called. Maybe we won't call it Rock Of Ages because they're about to shoot the movie of the stage play of Rock Of Ages so it's gonna get a little too confusing cause we are now involved with that as well. We weren't involved in the play, we wouldn't let them use the songs but they begged so hard for the film we said oh allright then.

Sav - Go on then.

Joe - Tom Cruise is singing Pour Some Sugar On Me so I can't wait for that. It's got to be better than Pierce Brosnan's version of 'Winner Takes It All' or something. My god! . But yeah it's ongoing. It's got many stages to go through but we actually had a meeting this week with a potential writer and the ideas were just phenomenal.

Sav on what he did during the year off - I improved my Golf handicap! Do you know what, it's a bloomin' good question. Looking back the year just seemed to fly by and it's like. It was just nice to get away from the treadmill of you know what we'd got on. Which is still great, don't get me wrong, I love playing shows and getting out and playing in front of people but it was also nice to just spend time at home with the family. And work when I wanted to work. Or when other things allowed me to work. I loved it.

Joe on having something to do with his wife giving birth - How'd you know I didn't! No, my wife had the baby in December of 2009 so I got to spend a bit of time at home which was nice. I just loved the thought that, not just for a couple of weeks, but for a couple of months or however long I wanted to I was gonna be taking my clothes out of a wardrobe and sleeping in my bed and no suitcases and again you know I had the energy to go in the studio for a couple of months to do the Down 'N' Outz record at the beginning of the year. And then just as we were about to start putting the live stuff together I was doing the remixes with Scott Gorham on the Thin Lizzy stuff. Just to do other things I think you can bring that energy back to the Leppard table. It's like eating chocolate, you eat too much you get sickly, step away from it for awhile and then it's OK again you know. We had been on the road for the best part of a lot of the months of five years in a row. And it was time to just take a step back. And we're re-energised.

Sav - Absolutely, yeah, That's the important part, we've come back as hungry and as vital as we've ever been.

Joe - And that's not bad for 34 years together.