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Def Leppard Tour History Fan Archive.
Joe Elliott Talks About New Album Origins On The Hysteria Cruise

Friday, 5th February 2016





Def Leppard 2016.
Screenshot by dltourhistory

Def Leppard played a storytellers concert on the Hysteria On The High Seas cruise and Joe Elliott talked about the new album.

The first concert by the band on the cruise took place on 22nd January in the MSC Divina's Pantheon Theatre.

It was hosted by DJ Eddie Trunk and featured the band playing a full David Bowie song as a tribute. Snippets of three other songs were played along with a Joe Elliott interview and Q And A session with fans.

Before the acoustic concert started Joe talked to DJ Eddie Trunk and explained the origins of the new album.

Watch all of the available footage from the show on this YouTube Playlist

Visit the Album News section. For more news on new music (based on band member quotes) dating back to January 2011.

22nd January Hysteria Cruise - Joe Elliott Interview Quotes

Joe Intro

"I thought we were gonna do this show in the pool?. Obviously not today. It would've been interesting that if we'd done it around the pool. Just to see how many people would've turned up. Including the band actually. But here we are it's a great little theatre."

"Never been on one in my life. I've been on ferries that take me from Dublin to the UK and back. But they're only like 90 minutes."

The Ship?

"I think I'd rather reserve judgement until we get off because we haven't really been on long enough to really judge. But so far so good."

New Def Leppard Album Origins

"No, I highly encourage any artist to do what we did even though it was accidental. You know we were out of our record deal in 2008. So we've been what you might call freelance or cottage industry since. The Mirroball album, we owned. We made ourselves. We financed it. Same thing with VIVA! Hysteria."

"When it came to doing the new record. We'd been reading on the internet. We'd be talking to friends and colleagues about the fact that the world was supposedly telling everyone that the album format as it was was dead. And you know you read it and you're thinking. OK I don't like what I'm reading but if that's the way it's going. That's the way it's going. So what do you do about it. And we're well aware there's lots of artists all over the world that sometimes just drop songs on the internet. And that's the only place that they're gonna be. So we kinda thought well maybe that's how its gonna end up with us as well."

"So Phil suggested that we get together because we were itchy about writing. We'd written the three songs on the end of Mirrorball. The three new songs. Three, four years ago. And we enjoyed them. You know we thought they were some of the best stuff we'd done for a while. And so we're still itchy to keep making new music. But we thought maybe we'd just do The Def Leppard EP part two. You know just three songs and put them up online and that would be it."

"But as we got together in the studio and started playing each other our ideas. It just became obvious that we had more than three ideas cooking - [baby interruption] - Has someone brought a baby on?. Wow we have crossed the generations. I hope he or she was conceived to one of our songs. Love Bites is the obvious one. I've heard it so many times over the years."

Writing/Recording Sessions

"But anyway so we were writing away and we took a month to just come up with some songs and we came up with 12. And we were like OK. So then we all went our separate ways for a couple of months and we got back together again in May of 2014 to work on those 12 songs and we wrote two more. So we had 14 and you know we were still considering putting three out but then which three are we gonna choose because we really liked everything that we had. It was Phil that said well why do we have to just out the three out. And that's when we realised we'd made an album without making an album you know."

"We didn't do the usual thing like OK we've just written the fast one. Then a mid tempo so let's do a slow one and then another fast one. And you're always over thinking. And there's normally somebody over your shoulder tapping their watch face. Or we need it delivered by Christmas. And we want a hit. We didn't make that kind of record. You know we just made an album for ourselves that we would enjoy listening to. And hopefully everybody would follow."

"So that's the way it turned out. There wasn't a case of like there was 18 songs and we took four off. Those 14 we were just like I really like these. We didn't really put anything forward that nobody liked. Stage one of every idea when it was just a guitar riff or somebody humming a melody. It's was like you know what that's gonna be a really good song when it's finished - because we know. We've been doing it long enough that you actually start to kind of figure it out after a while."

Hysteria Cruise Fan Videos 2016.

Fan photos and reviews from any past tour can be submitted - Here






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