Sunday, 29th September 2013
VIVA! Hysteria DVD/Blu-ray
Def Leppard members Joe Elliott, Phil Collen and Vivian Campbell were interviewed on a syndicated VIVA! Hysteria radio special yesterday and the full transcript is available.
They talked about the residency, Vivian's illness/still touring through treatment, playing the Hysteria album/relearning songs, the production of the album/Mike Shipley, PSSOM as song 5, Ded Flatbird, show production, live vocals, Love And Affection single and future plans.
The show was broadcast by many stations across North America and featured seven full songs from the new live album.
Read the full interview below.
VIVA! Hysteria Radio Special 2013 - Interview Transcript by DefDazz/Darren
Las Vegas Residency
Joe - "Towards the end of the 2012 American tour is when we were asked by the Hard Rock if we would like to do a residency. It was becoming very kind of cool for a rock band to be in Vegas. You know kind of kicking out the old wood and move over Wayne Newton, step forward Def Leppard you know and obviously part of the deal was they wanted us to perform the entire album Hysteria. We'd been asked to do it many times in the past but we'd always said no because we were on a regular tour where we were normally promoting a different record. A new album so to have been seen to play the entire Hysteria album would've actually taken away from whatever we were promoting at the time so we'd always said no. But with this knowing that the tour was coming to an end in like September 2012 and the chances of us having a new album written, recorded and released in six months were pretty slim. We said that this is the perfect opportunity for us to actually perform Hysteria in a great atmosphere in one stage. You know one building. The audience come on tour and the band stay still. The other way around to how it's been for thirty odd years."
Vivian Intro
Vivian - "Hi this is Vivian Campbell. You know that saying what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas? well not this time. Welcome to VIVA! Hysteria Def Leppard live in Las Vegas."
Vivian's illness
Vivian - "The day we started rehearsals for the VIVA! Hysteria shows was March 11th and that was the day I went under the knife for a surgical biopsy and the next day they told me I had cancer. And nine days later we were stage performing it. So the whole time we were doing that I was kind of getting used to the fact that my oncologist just told me I had cancer and I'm about to start chemo as soon as we were done with those shows. In many ways I had very conflicting feelings while I was on stage. I mean I'm trying to focus on the job and be in the moment and enjoy it but you know the human mind is weird and it kept wondering and I'm thinking god I'm starting chemo and I'd be counting down the days. And you know there's that fear of the unknown and you think the worst when you're about to do something like that. But as I also said before we went on air I mean it actually has been a lot easier for me than I feared so and I've gotten through it fine. But you know I've seen pictures from the show and it's weird to see myself with hair now cause I have none currently so it actually looks like a wig to me."
Phil - "While we were doing this little tour you know he obviously was having the chemo which was working great. He had a cough for a year. He'd been to a couple of doctors and they're going well you know we can't find anything. Then he went to another guy and he said oh you've got Hodgkin's Lymphoma which is a form of cancer. He said if you attack it now there's an 80 percent chance of recovering. Within his first week of treatment the cough went."
Joe - "He'd said to us you know I'm gonna have to be dead not to play these shows that we're doing. And that included all the summer shows that we did when his hair had gone you know. You can not tell one iota that he had cancer when we did those shows. It didn't affect his performance. It didn't affect his voice. It didn't affect his playing. It didn't affect his attitude you know or anything. So he did have a grin on his face you know the size of the Brooklyn Bridge quite honestly and I think that was due to the fact that he actually enjoys playing guitar in this band and singing in this band. I mean to play that 63 minutes worth of music that took nearly two and a half years just to create in eleven nights in Vegas is a pretty intense thing to try and pull off. It was the middle weekend that they filmed so we had three shows under our belt. They were shows four and five. We had it down we knew what we were doing."
Playing the album as it was on record
Joe - "We said to each other let's do it as is. Let's not mess with it let's play it the way people know it. So if there are some people that have never seen us live but they've had the record that long they're gonna want to hear it the way they know it so that's how we would be if we were say going to see the Stones doing Exile or the Beatles doing Let It Be or whoever. I sing the songs very differently live to how I did them back in the studio because they've evolved so I had to go back and what we had to make sure that we did was we listened to every littlle nuance that we may have forgotten about. And we came at the songs with a whole new fresh attitude really. It was actually a good kick up the backside for all of us I think. To realise that maybe we'd been playing some of them too fast. We'd been avoiding certain harmonies because they were just too difficult. And we made a point of putting everything back in that really demanded to be there."
Listening back to the Hysteria album
Joe - "Every emotion possible. Some surprising, some not surprising. Some very shocking actually. Like Ooh I've been singing the wrong words for 20 years. Or we've been playing the wrong guitar chords or you know this kind of thing because they - what happens with a song. With all the right intentions when it's brand new and on the Hysteria tour. You start off trying to play it the way that the record is and then over the years it just changes naturally. It just evolves in front of an audience and it becomes further away from the record."
Hysteria Producer/Engineers/Working With Mutt Lange
Phil - "We messed around probably for about six months with Steinman. We done some other stuff with Nigel Green for about a year. Dave Thoener and Neil Dorfsman. Different engineers. And we were trying all this stuff and it didn't resonate. It was OK you know there was some cool stuff but it didn't sound like it was supposed to. When we done the six months of writing with Mutt in Dublin he was painting this picture. And even when we'd perform it on a little four track it still had this essence that we were not getting with all these other people. But when he came back in it was like you know he obviously had a vision for it. And there was no other way that we were gonna do these songs with anyone else. It had to be Mutt. So when he came back in it was actually really quite inspiring cause it just - all of a sudden it just started taking shape and the essence of it was like - it's like Whoah this is amazing!"
Mike Shipley
Phil - "We call him Bat Ears Shipley because he'd go you know there's a note you dropped there. And you'd think no how can he tell?. He can't even hear it. He would hear everything. Frequencies. And I've been hearing and this is a classic - we always made fun of this. Mutt would go there's this frequency in the vocal it's like a - it's above this and he'd say a number, but it's above that and Shipley would go. And he would dial it out and these two - it was amazing. And then all of a sudden then you hear a keyboard part coming out or something else it kind of was getting in the way or you know. So what he hears is like a dog you know. They hear notes that only dogs hear. But very inspiring to be around you know when there's that much talent around. I definitely get a kick out of it and it inspires me. It's wonderful."
PSSOM As Song Five
Joe - "The great thing about having to do Hysteria in sequence is that it kind of messes up if song one is the big hit you're kind of going downhill from song 1. Lucky for us Sugar I think is fifth or something like that and we've never done Sugar fifth. Even back in '87 it came towards the end of the show. So to play it fifth you are taking a chance but the fact is from a psychological point of view the audience also know that that's where it is. And that it's gonna be followed by Armageddon It and then Gods Of War etc etc all the way through. So the first couple of shows we did or the first couple of rehearsals we may have looked at each other and gone. You know it's a bit weird but it works. Only because we're so used to doing it at the end. The more you do something the more it just becomes second nature so by the time we'd kinda got to them filming it. I was kinda saying that more for the crowd than for us cause I think I' probably said it the first couple of nights as well. That you know what it really does work there it's OK. You know it probably gave us the confidence to if in future we ever decide to throw it in a little earlier at least we'll know that we did once before and it was fine."
Ded Flatbird
Vivian - "Ded Flatbird it's actually an in band sort of a joke. Phil Collen his first son Rory was born 25 years ago or something like that. He's definitely in his mid 20s now. When Rory was born. Rory's mother was in labour and the nurse said what's the name of your husbands band again? And she said Def Leppard and the nurse I guess it was an older nurse and she had hearing problems or whatever and she said Dead Flat bird?. You know so that became kind of a thing and at the time we actually had T-Shirts printed that said Ded Flatbird and had a squashed like a road kill bird on it. But it looked like the Def Leppard logo so you really had to do a double take to actually see what it said. So when it came time to do this Joe in particular his mins started churning and Joe came up with a lot of the concepts for the production. But one of those was it's obviously it's not enough of a show to just play the Hysteria album. It's less than an hour's worth of music you know we need to play more songs. But we've gotta separate it from Hysteria to keep that special."
"So Joe came up with the idea for us to be our own opening act. To be Ded Flatbird. And basically Ded Flatbird played anything other than Hysteria. But in particular we went deep. They dropped the big red velvet curtain in front of the Hysteria set. And Ded Flatbird would set up right in font of our back line. A little one foot drum riser. They'd literally only be a couple of feet between the back line and the end of the stage. So you're kind of trapped there. And then you know there'd be an intermission where they'd be a video and that lasted for 7 or 9 minutes or something. And then the big red velvet curtains would part and reveal this big, big, big stage set. And we'd come back on stage as Def Leppard."
Joe - "You'd be amazed we had guests of ours come in and seeing us when we first went on going well it's not much of a production is it. It was fun to do. We became five totally different characters which made us act differently. It was almost like being in a movie for 35/40 minutes. But it gave us license to have a good bit of fun with the crowd you know we get to wind up up. Tell them how the headline act wouldn't let us have any sound checks or use the lights and stuff you know. It was like a throw back to the 70s. It gave the VIVA! Hysteria set an element of largeness if you like. It gave it a gloss because we purposely played down the opening act set. And although those songs are not in the movie they are on the Blu-ray/DVD that's coming out in October so again for us playing the same 12 songs in the same order 11 nights in a row as it were probably would've been a soul destroyer. So to be able to mess around with the opening act and the opening set and play a different set every single night was just a godsend for us."
Live Vocals
Vivian - "The challenge in Def Leppard has always been for me it's always the vocals. I mean that's always the hardest part because there's so many vocals in the songs but it requires a bit of concentration and a lot of practice for us as a band. We do pride ourselves on our vocal ability live you know. I mean people still think that we're miming which is a backhanded compliment that we'll always take cause we don't see any hard drives back there you know. It's definitely coming out of our mouths"
Joe - "It's absolutely 100 percent live. There's not an overdub on it. You know the only thing that's not live is the stuff that we use all the time like the sequence sounds at the beginning of Rocket or the keyboards at the beginning of Love Bites which Sav plays on pedals. There's samples off the record but all the singing and playing is real."
Love And Affection Single
Joe - "It was gonna be the next single but we actually said enough already. Which with hindsight we maybe shouldn't have done. But it was just getting a bit crazy because it's like well if we release another single we're gonna have to make another video which means we're gonna have to add another 8 weeks to the tour which has already gone of for 14 months. And everybody was just falling to pieces and dying to go home you know. I would've forgotten this fact but it was brought to my attention through either Rick Savage or Phil that it would've been the next single. So that's why we decided to go with Love And Affection now because it kind of rounds the circle if you like."
Future Plans
Joe - "To be quite honest the movie is doing the work for us right now. You know we're in a holding pattern. We are writing but not in any particular rush to write. We'd rather write well than quick. But at this moment in time more concerned in just getting the band well. You know Vivian's about to undertake his final chemo session. Phil's just hand his hand operated on so he's gonna be out of commission for a couple of months. And it gives us the opportunity to just chill."
"I mean I've spent my first summer at home in 20 odd years and it's been an absolute pleasure to be able to watch some things in my garden bloom that I didn't even know I had because I'm normally out in Boise, Idaho or Chicago or wherever. Rockford, Illinois doing a gig somewhere you know. That's been nice and I'm also working on the second Down 'N' Outz album and just having a bit of fun and family time. So we're gonna just chill out for a little while. Let the movie do the talking and we'll reconvene with a bit more energy and gusto probably some time early next Spring."
- Def Leppard - VIVA! Hysteria Radio Special 2013 Show Page
- Def Leppard - Radio 2013
- Previous News - 29th September 2013