Thursday, 14th May 2015
Def Leppard released the Slang album 19 years ago on this day in 1996 in the USA and Canada.
The album was the first to be released with "new guy" Vivian Campbell on guitar who had joined the band in 1992.
It entered at Number 14 on the Billboard Top 200 chart which was its peak position. It sold a reported 59,500 copies in week one.
By week two it had fallen to 27. It spent 7 weeks inside the Top 100 and 12 weeks in total on the Top 200.
Joe Elliott - 1996 Band Biography Album Quotes
"It's the most vibrant and artistically satisfying record we've made," states Joe Elliott. "We've co-produced and written this record ourselves."
"The thing we're trying to achieve with this record," says Joe, "is that you didn't put it on and say, 'This is a great production,' which is what people judged Hysteria and maybe Adrenalize on. That was a big thing for us, we wanted people to hear the group rather than hear the production of the record."
"It's amazing, because we got that sound in a house," laughs Joe. "There was no fancy studio, it was just recorded on a little cheap desk in a house in Marbella."
"It was like going to Summer School," recalls Joe. "It was like Boys Together Outrageously. We got on with doing the job. We didn't have to clock-watch. We could look out the window and see the ocean. We weren't stuck in some poxy studio somewhere, and the clock's ticking away and you don't know whether it's raining or snowing or there's a riot going on outside. We were just in our own non-corporate world. We wanted to do a similar thing to what Zeppelin and bands like that did in the '70s, when they went into a house and just created their own environment, and that's exactly what we did. It was so relaxing that it gave us more energy to be as noisy as we were on 'Pearl of Euphoria' or 'Flesh,' and when we did acoustic guitars on 'Where Does Love Go When It Dies,' they were actually recorded outside at midnight with incense, candles, dogs barking, cars going past. It's all on tape."
"The one thing that anybody in a band hopes is that their audience grows with them,"
- Def Leppard - Slang Single Section
- Def Leppard - Slang Album Section
- Previous News - 13th May 2015