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Def Leppard Tour History Fan Archive.
Joe Elliott 2014 Off The Record Full Interview Transcript

Sunday, 27th April 2014





Joe Elliott Sheffield 2008.
Pic by dltourhistory

Def Leppard singer Joe Elliott was interviewed by Uncle Joe Benson for the Off The Record show which was broadcast yesterday and a full transcript is available.

Joe talked about the second Down 'n' Outz album The Further Adventures Of..., the 2013 VIVA! Hysteria residency, the Summer Tour 2014 with KISS, the press conference, Vivian's health, the KISS/Lep fans, whether the KISS tour will be extended in the USA or world wide and the 2015 Def Leppard studio album.

The interview was done just after the tour press conference so the tour extension part is out of date. Joe has since said it will not be extended or done outside North America.

Joe Benson also posted an extra clip not included in the show talking about the guitar part of 'Photograph' played by Brian May in 1983 at the LA Forum soundcheck.

This show is still being broadcast on various stations today - see show website for details.

Off The Record - Joe Elliott Interview Transcript by dltourhistory

KISS

"There are a lot of people out there that think KISS are just a joke and all this kind of stuff but I'm sorry you're wrong. You can't survive 40 years in make up unless you've got something to back it up. They've written some great songs over the years. They really have."

Down 'n' Outz/Rock And Roll Queen

"They didn't have much of a budget no. That was their first ever single as well back in 1969. Can you believe that it's like 45 years ago. It's like ouch!. I was ten!. But you know what it's a great song still sounds great to this - their version still sounds good and we were pretty faithful to the originals but lyrically it's a little of its time. Let's put it that way you know. Very finger pointing at - 'listen woman!'. I mean it is all tongue in cheek. Yes it certainly does and they're a great band. The thing about the Down 'n' Outz musically. These guys can really play. And it's very, very different to Def Leppard which it needs to be. Not much point in having two bands that sound the same. If you're gonna do something like this it has to be almost a polar opposite. They key ingredient is piano. And Keith Weir the keyboard player is a fantastic player. He's really got the rock and roll thing down. The Jerry Lee Lewis style. He can really do it you know. But the band are great. Paul Guerin on lead guitar. Guy Griffin on rhythm guitar and I play rhythm as well. So there's three guitars so it's real kind of Phil Spector-ish wall of sound. It's just a huge big sound. Phil Martini the drummer is a fantastic player."

"But a little bit like Roxy Music we don't have a full time bass player. I think Roxy Music had about 10 different bass players on 10 albums and at this moment in time we don't really have a full time bass player. A guy called Snake who used to be in Thunder. We used him on half the album. I played bass on one track. Paul Guerin the guitarist plays bass on three or four of them and Ronan the engineer and co-producer with me, he played bass on one of the tracks. So that was the kind of project it was. It's like dude just pick up the bass I'll play this one it's fine you know. It wasn't like no, you can't do that it's my job. It's not that kind of project. It's all hands on deck and everybody does whatever they can."

Original Mixed-Up Kid/Sinead Madden (violin player)

"Yes. She plays all the way through that one. The Original Mixed-Up Kid was a last minute addition. We were gonna do it as a bonus track because the way things are now you put x amount of songs on your album but iTunes and the likes of demand almost tracks for the download that you can't get on the vinyl. And we were doing Original Mixed-Up Kid as a bonus track but it turned out so well that I couldn't do that. I had to put it on the record because it was just too good to just not be on the record. And coincidentally it was the first Mott The Hoople song I ever heard because back in the day when Island Records was THE label. They had Free, Cat Stevens, Mott The Hoople, ELP, Jethro Tull, Doctor Strangely Strange, Nick Drake. They had some phenomenal artists. They used to do these compilation albums and once a year they'd release one of you know the current crop of stuff and the Mott The Hoople song on an album I think it was called LP was Original Mixed-Up Kid. It was the first song I ever heard and I was even as a ten, eleven year old kid I was really attracted to Ian's voice. There was just something fascinating about it and I just loved the song. But it turned out much better than I anticipated and her violin just glues everything together. Paul's playing on the acoustic is great you know."

Uncle Joe Benson - She was working on her violin parts for over a year?

"No, she wasn't working on them. What it was. It's like Leppard were - it wasn't even a year. When Leppard were in Vegas doing VIVA! Hysteria is when I introduced them to her. So it would've been April of 2013 so it was about six months. By the time she was doing the violin part I think it was about October of last year. So she'd had about six months of just listening to it every now and again and then picking up a violin and going whoa this is nuts. I'm going you don't have to copy it exact but it needs to be that kind of mad kind of fiddle like gypsy fiddling. You know it's Eastern European scales or whatever they are. And eventually she says okay I'm ready to go you know so we brought her over. She lives in Dublin. I live in Dublin so it was easy. She came round with her violin. We had a cup of tea and few biscuits and off she went you know it was great fun."

One Of The Boys

"Well One Of The Boys musically - what's fascinating about this if anybody hears it and they say like it sounds a little bit like Can't Get Enough by Bad Company. It does because Bad Co. - Mick Ralphs wrote the music for One Of The Boys. Ian wrote the lyrics. But he wrote that song and when he quit Mott he was never quite satisfied with the way that Mott did One Of The Boys so he basically re-wrote it. The same song. Shifted it into a shuffle feel. Gave it to Paul Rodgers to sing and so if you actually play One Of The Boys and Can't Get Enough by Bad Co. back to back you can hear the the same chords, same order just a slightly different feel from the rhythm section. Yeah that's an interesting story about that. I've always loved One Of The Boys because as much as it's a cliched phrase these days."

"One Of The Boys just summed up what Mott were. They were a gang. You know they were their own little gang. They worked within the music industry in their own little word if you like. It was of its time and in the 70s it was a song that kind of sounded a bit like Slade. It was different to anything that ever came out of the 60s for sure. And it had a kind of a punk or a punky attitude five years before punk. And a snarling vocal performance by Ian but it's not too fast. It's seems powerful but it's not a fast song. It's a slow song. And One Of The Boys is what you might call happy mid tempo. It's that loping kind of slowness to it that just gives it its drive and I think Bowie may have had a lot to do with that because he produced that album and that song. And also their version starts off with a telephone dial and then the song in the middle breaks down and comes back out into a telephone and it becomes HiFi again. And we knew that we had to do something similar to that when we put ours together. So without wanting to copy what they did we used the production techniques having it fading out and come back in - all that kind of stuff. But there's a radio edit where all that nonsense is just taken out and it's just a straightforward three and a half minute rocker."

VIVA! Hysteria

"Oh yeah we enjoyed it immensely. Sleeping in the same room for 24 nights was the swing vote for me. No travel. It was a two minute walk from the stage to the elevator to your room. I filled the bath full of water and had the best humidifier man ever made in my room. And I had my piano brought - not a full piano, I'm not Elton - but I had a keyboard in my room which I could play that all day long. I could rest up. I was - I had so much energy. We were playing two hours and twenty a night and there's a lot of songs. We was doing 7 or 8 or 9 songs as Ded Flatbird plus the 12 Hysteria songs plus the encore. And having to go off, get changed and trust me. I never knew this before god bless the Cirque de Soleil folk. But when you are sweaty and you're trying to take the Ded Flatbird clothes and put the pristine Hysteria stuff on. It won't go on because you skin's damp and you're like pulling your shirt on and your tearing it and you're going I've got 20 minutes, stitch this. You know give me another shirt, that's the only shirt you've got - oh god. The things that we had to learn to do is come off. Towel down, take a breather, have a cup of tea. Take your trousers off out your other trousers on and come out looking like a million dollars and you're like you have no idea what we were doing a minute or two before we were out there going ugh we're not gonna make it in time!. It was hilarious but that was the most frantic part of it was the actual stage time."

"The rest of it what's not to like you know you're sitting around the pool or you're playing golf or you're just resting up. But the great thing was we were able to put on great performances because travel is what knocks you out. You know you're 12 hours on an air conditioned bus and you wake up and your throat is just destroyed. So you can't have the air con on so everybody's going we have to have the air con on we can't sleep, it's 110 degrees in here. So the singer has to take the back lounge, towel it off so everybody can have the cold air and I have to do it with the windows open. So Vegas was superb. We only did gigs Friday, Saturday and Wednesday so you've got Sunday, Monday, Tuesday to just chill out. I did a lot of writing there which was handy. So we did a lot of stuff you know. But it was good fun to do. The most important thing was doing the gigs."

KISS/Summer Tour 2014

"We did the press conference at the House Of Blues and it was fantastic you know there was so much respect between the two bands. There is so much history there. There was no one-upmanship there won't be any one-upmanship. I mean of course they wanna do well. We wanna do well. It's not like you're wanting to blow anybody off. You just want to make sure that you don't want to let yourself down. If anything playing with each other ups each other game anyway. You're not following some kind of local 500 dollar a night band or something that just do covers you know. This is a proper double header and you only have to think just anybody listening just think. A Leppard song then a KISS song, then a Leppard song then a KISS song. What you're gonna hear on the night you know this is a classic case of one and one makes not just 3 but maybe like 33."

Vivian's Health

"He'll be fine for this tour I'm sure he will. He was great all last summer. He played well. He sang well. He was in good spirits. He was the only one not moaning about being ill. I had a bad back and I had a sore throat and there's like Phil had damaged his finger which he had to have an operation on. Sav had...and it was like oh me back, oh me leg, oh oh and Vivian's just sat at the back reading car porn. Not moaning and groaning about anything and I'm going Jesus I'm complaining about having you know a bruised back or whatever and he's got cancer - shut up! you know."

Touring With KISS

"Yeah absolutely it is. There is a cross pollination. They'll be a lot of KISS fans that like Leppard and vice versa. The hardcore ones will be easier to spot because when I'm down singing away and there's a kid in the audience with Gene's make-up on I'll know that he's actually there to see KISS and that's fine you know. But if he's singing along to PSSOM dressed as Gene Simmons that's also fine. The Leppard fans will be you know a bit more difficult to spot. There's nothing that you can do other than wear a Union Jack shirt or something. They do have that kind of ace up their sleeve if you like that a lot of their audience will dress like that. Paul was actually telling me a great story yesterday that they did a - they were playing some arena in Los Angeles maybe four of five years ago and it was Halloween. And they were coming back to their hotel you know to get changed back at the hotel. And they got stuck in traffic so they just said let's just get out and walk. So in full regalia they walked the 2 or 300 yards to their hotel door and all the kids that were dressed as you know in Halloween costumes they were like going dude great outfit! We love KISS too. They didn't get molested or anything people thought that they were just kids dressed as KISS. They'll be a lot of that this summer I'm sure."

Extending KISS Tour/Outside North America? - (note Joe has since said no to this)

"Yeah there's a possibility that it could go longer or we could bring it back next year. I mean sooner or later you have to stop and do other things. Like we definitely don't want to avoid finishing our new album that we've just started recording."

2015 Studio Album

"We got together in February with the idea of maybe coming up with two or three songs and we'll do an E.P. Yeah I was at home I had Vivian and Rick stay with me. Sav's got a place there and Phil was in a little cottage 10 minutes away and we just recorded and we went to bed got up we went to bed got up. We stayed in the studio 12 hours a day. We worked six days a week for a month and we came up with 12 songs. And you know we took ourselves by surprise. I mean it's been a while. We haven't done an album since Sparkle Lounge which was 2008. So everybody's got backed up with ideas. But we opened the metaphorical door and they all came tumbling out. It was a case of which one do you wanna do first. We managed to get them all going. We wrote some on the spot. And they're on various stages of undress. Some of them are actually - we could release them tomorrow and there are others that have just got la la la la, la la la la la over the top of the chords and stuff. Which will get worked on. We can write lyrics over the summer that's the great thing you know plenty of time."

"But we're gonna go back in in May and do some more recording. Then there's the tour June, July, August into September. I'm then producing the Black Star Riders in October. That's only about three weeks work and then November we're gonna go in and hopefully finish this record. So that we can have it out for next year. So if there's gonna be more dates with KISS. We're gonna have to jiggle a lot of other things around. Or just move them into doing it next year. I don't see why it can't work twice. I don't see why it can't be an ongoing thing with a six month break if you like. To get other business taken care of. We'll see how it goes but I don't envisage any problems. I'm really looking forward to it. It's nothing that there was any trepidation like I'm not sure about this. You know we were like Def Leppard and KISS. This is massive and with the respect of them being. It sounds patronising when you say this but with them just being that bit older and being around longer I also think that's another fine reason for them to be last on if you like. But we are not the opening act. It's a double header folks."






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