Thursday, 19th June 2014
Pic by dltourhistory
Def Leppard guitarist Vivian Campbell has been interviewed by the Daily Herald in Salt Lake City ahead of the opening show.
Vivian talked about living in Los Angeles, the Summer Tour 2014 with KISS, Salt Lake City, the live show/real backing vocals and his health.
Vivian was asked about his current treatment and gave a very detailed account of exactly what has been going on and as ever sounded very positive.
Daily Herald - Vivian Campbell Interview Quotes
Tour Rehearsals/Setlist
"We actually now, I mean, when I first joined Def Leppard 22 years ago, we rehearsed for two months. I kid you not. Like five days a week, six days a week and intense long days for two months. It was mind-numbing. And ever since then, we're like, "OK, we don't need to rehearse quite as long" and cut it back to a few weeks. And in recent years it's been, "Well, how much rehearsal do we really need?" Now we're down to a few days. And then part of that also is 'cause we're touring with Kiss this summer so we're up against a big, big show, and we're very fortunate that we have a lot of hits. So we're concentrating on the hits, we're not going too obscure on this tour, you know? We'll have a couple of floaters in the set each night to mix it up here and there, but for the most part we've got to focus on the big songs. And, you know, we've been playing those songs for so long now, it's like, "Why do we even need to rehearse?" So we actually start next Monday and we're going to rehearse about four days here in L.A. and we'll get the night before the show, I guess, or something like that, we're flying out to Salt Lake a couple days early. We'll get a run-through on the stage with the full production."
Stage Show
"We've always tried to come up with some different content for each tour that we've done and this tour is no different. I've yet to actually see the stage. We did discuss with our production crew about how we were going to present this year's show and how we were going to start the show -- I've got a picture in my mind of how it's going to be, but I haven't seen it, and I actually won't see it until the 21st when we fly out to Salt Lake."
Health
"I did another surgical biopsy and that showed that the cancer had definitely come back. I'm actually doing this new high-tech chemo treatment, I'm about halfway through it already, and it's really kind of easy going. It's the first new drug that's been discovered for Hodgkin's since 1977 and they made this discovery in 2011, and it's actually being pioneered here at City of Hope, so I'm part of this research clinical trial that's going on. It's very, very benign chemo, actually it just targets -- I don't know how it works, obviously I'm not a medical person, but somehow or other it just manages to target the cancer cells. It's not like old-school, carpet-bomb chemo where it kills all the fast-growing cells, so I haven't experienced any hair loss or any issues with my skin or nails or anything this time around, which is good."
- Read the full interview at - heraldextra.com
- Def Leppard - Interviews 2014
- Def Leppard - Summer Tour 2014
- Previous News - 19th June 2014