Def Leppard News - JOE ELLIOTT 1994 Retro-Active Era DEF LEPPARD TV Interview (Video)

Monday, 12th February 2018

JOE ELLIOTT 1994 Retro-Active Era DEF LEPPARD TV Interview (Video)

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Def Leppard singer Joe Elliott was interviewed about the Retro-Active album in 1994 and rare footage is available.

Joe spoke to TV 2 in Denmark in January 1994 during his UK/European Retro-Active album promo tour.

This tour included various TV and magazine interviews tied in to the release of the album and later the 'Action' single.

And the last time he would be seen with his self-named "hate" beard. As seen in the promo videos for 'Action' and 'Miss You In A Hearbeat'. Five months later the band would relocate to Spain to start recording the 'Slang' album.

Joe talked about the band 80s success, early years of the band, band tragedies, record sales, the Retro-Active album, memories of the songs, ballads/quieter songs, making the album, the 1992/1993 period, band success and the next album (Slang).

Watch the full 5 minute video below.

Visit the Album News section for more news on new music (based on band member quotes).

TV 2 - Joe Elliott Interview Quotes

80 Success

"Four years into our career we just became astonishingly huge in America for no apparent reason you know. We put an album out that didn't sell anywhere else in the world. Except America and Canada where it just went mad. And the only album that sold more copies than ours was Thriller by Michael Jackson. But nothing happened here, nothing happened in Britain, nothing happened in Germany or France or Spain or South America."

"Then in 1987/1988 it started breaking over here. So it's happened to us over periods of time. You know it definitely wasn't overnight success. But it was quicker in America than it was in Europe. So because it was staggered, you do get an opportunity to kind of soak it all in a little bit more."

Early Years

"Not really. I think we all had aspirations that it would happen. You do, you dream when you're 17/18 years old. You think wow, I want to be a rock star. Next minute you are one supposedly and then you realise what the hell is a rock star anyway. There's always room to go higher. There's a lot of room for improvement in everything that you do. But if somebody had of asked me back then do you honestly think that you're gonna make it?. I would have said yes. But knowing what I know now I would have probably said Oh I don't know, maybe. ."

Band Tragedies

"We've had tragedies along the way. Rick lost an arm, Steve died. But in reality the band kept Steve alive for a long time. It gave him a sense of purpose. I mean he was an alcoholic the day he joined the band. He would've died a long time ago had it not been for the band. So I don't feel any kind of guilt that the band pushed him over the edge or anything like that. But yeah it's been worth it for me because I'm a much better person than I would've been. I'm a lot happier a person than the guy who would've been starting his 19th year working in a factory."

Album Sales

"The actually sales of our records is nice. It is nice to occasionally be told you've sold 36 million albums worldwide, but it's never been a motivation for us. I mean it's nice, we always wanna sell as many as we can, but it's not the reason that we do it. The reason we do it is because we wanted to get out of that factory life from a kind of very industrial town in South Yorkshire in the North of England. A cold miserable place. And just do something that we were in charge of our own destiny basically. And making the music is the nicest thing throughout the whole thing."

Retro-Active Album

"It's a gathering together of a lot of archive material. Some of it's been released before, some of it hasn't. None of it has ever featured on a Def Leppard album before. So we just thought it would be a good opportunity to take all those songs and put them together on one album and it kind of tidies up that era of the band that featured Steve and gives us an opportunity to clear out the closet. So when we start working on the new album with Vivian, all the old material's gone and we start totally from scratch."

Retro-Active Album Track Memories/Steve Clark

"Yeah some of it I think the thing that would probably have sparked off the most emotion was listening to the tracks that Steve played on. Knowing that he'd been dead for, you know, a year or two. You know we'd put the multi-tracks on and you could solo certain specific tracks like his guitar and just before he starts to play a solo you could hear him actually smoking a Marlboro you know and that was a bit strange. It's funny, we didn't get all depressed or anything. it was like well listen to that, shame we couldn't feature it on the record. But you can't hear that when all the music comes in."

Quieter Songs

"The only reason we do quiet numbers is like everybody else. If we'd just written six noisy ones. Our ears need a break too, you know, and it's like. It's just the way you go. If you're running around all day sooner or later you're gonna wanna sit down. And it's the same thing with music. If you're doing rockers, rockers, rockers all of a sudden you think we should do a slow one."

Making Retro-Active

"For me personally the most fun I've had making an album is the Retro-Active album. The most fun I've had is the Adrenalize tour. So for me 1992 to 1993 have been the best years of the band, really have. I enjoyed those more than any other or any year that we've done it. I enjoyed the success of Hysteria, it was good. But I was struggling a lot on the Hysteria tour. I had a lot of voice problems. Which I didn't really have that many on this tour. I was much more well prepared for it. I was more mentally psyched. Much more relaxed and I had a lot more fun on stage and off stage. And I think that's just s case of it's a growing thing. I just felt more comfortable being Joe Elliott in 1992 than I did in 1988."

Band Success/Next Album

"We've maintained a level of success that keeps us happy and everybody associated with the band relatively happy as well. I mean it's not a motivating factor. I mean the confidence comes. You know the confidence goes and then comes back again. At the moment we're very confident. Getting together, we're writing new material. It sounds great. We're gonna go in the studio in April and start recording and see where it goes from there."