By BRIAN GIFFIN
THERE’S plenty to talk about when Def Leppard guitarist Phil Collen connects from his home in Los Angeles near the end of a break in their ongoing World Tour, which will finish in Australia in two weeks.
“It’s not the first time we’ve played stadiums in Australia,” he says after a moment of thought, “but it’s the first time we’ve done a whole stadium tour there.”
Def Leppard have indeed been quite regular visitors to Australia, touching down here on most of their world tours since Hysteria made them global superstars in 1987. Thirty-six years later and the band is riding high again, playing some of the best shows they’ve ever done, topping the Billboard Classical charts with their Drastic Symphonies album and proud authors of the 240-page biography Definitely: The Official Story of Def Leppard. The book tells the ultimate retrospective story of the band from its earliest days to the present.
“It’s the whole thing,” Collen says. “If anyone wanted to find out anything about Def Leppard, that would be the place to go. It’s got photos from earlier on, right up until now.”
Each member of Def Leppard contributed personal stories and insights to Definitive, so it gives a true insider history into one of the world’s most famous rock bands. With the insane highs and soul-crushing lows the band experienced – Rick Allen’s accident that cost him his arm, the appropriately-named Hysteria album smashing all before it, Steve Clark’s spiral into addiction and death – it must have been difficult to look back and revisit some of those times.
“No, not at all,” Collen says without even a pause. “That’s life, really. That’s what we do as human beings. You go through crap one minute, then it’s great the next. If you keep at it, you’ll have more great moments than crap ones. That’s the approach, and we still do that. You look back, some of it fondly, some of it sadly, obviously, but in a nutshell we’re still here, doing it at such a level and the band’s better than it’s even been. Someone was saying, ‘What’s the best gig you’ve ever done?’ There’s been a few… Wembley in July, Munich was insane, so there’s been a lot and they’ve all been within the last year, the best gigs we’ve ever done. So that means we’re doing something right! The singing, the playing, the performance parts, and the actual show keeps growing and getting better. That’s where we’re at, at the moment and we’re really loving it.”
It was a very different story when Collen first stepped into the line-up in 1982 to replace the wayward Pete Willis. The band’s second album High N’ Dry had only just scraped into the bottom end of the US Top 40 and they were playing small rooms as an opening act. The future hardly looked bright. Collen’s band Girl, which featured Phil Lewis who would later join LA Guns, had just released their second album but they weren’t exactly going places either.
“We were in debt!” Collen recalls of the time. “My first gig with Def Leppard was at this place about as big as this room.” He pans his phone around to illustrate. It’s a decent sized room, but hardly big enough for a rock show. “Then we toured, and we played in half-empty theatres. We toured with Billy Squier, then the album kicked in and kind of blew up.”
“It was gamble, more than anything,” he continues. “Def Leppard was playing the same places I was playing with my other band, Girl, and they were also opening up for the same bands. Ozzy… we were opening up for Ozzy in England. So it was a very similar trajectory until ‘Bringin’ on the Heartbreak’ went on this new thing called MTV and that really changed everything for us, because it was the perfect format for this new, young band.”
As a British band, even a struggling one, Def Leppard already knew how to present themselves for video, and the nascent US cable channel found exactly what they were looking for in the clip for High N’ Dry’s previously ignored second single.
“We looked different to the other metal bands. We looked closer to Duran Duran than Judas Priest,” Collen says, “and for MTV that was perfect. The songs were perfect. You could sing along to them … it was a mixture of AC/DC and Queen. That’s really what Def Leppard was, and the timing was amazing. We didn’t realise it at the time when I joined. It absolutely did not feel like that! But when it did go, it went massively. The Marquee Club was the first gig, and nine months later we played Jack Murphy Stadium in San Diego, so it did go crazy very quickly.”
That description of their sound – a combination of AC/DC and Queen – is one the band uses constantly. It was a style developed in collaboration with producer Mutt Lange, who began enhancing the melodic aspects of their music with deep vocal harmonies. Multi-part vocals would go on to become one of the most significant factors in Def Leppard’s music.
Collen is unambiguous in his praise for the South African uber producer.
“A lot of the credit goes to Mutt,” he says warmly. “He made us sound different. He found out I could sing and he started sticking in all these backing vocals, then Joe and I started doing all these two-part harmonies, and it became a thing. Then the vocal style just got better and better and better… Mutt is an amazing singer, he sings on all our stuff with us, and you hear his voice on AC/DC stuff as well, Shania Twain, Bryan Adams, whatever he’s producing.”
Lange would work with Def Leppard consistently as producer and songwriting partner right through to Adrenalize, for which he took an executive producer credit. By then the band had soared to the top of the music world with Hysteria, one of the most sublime rock records of the 1980s. The success that followed 20 million record sales came with the consequences of excess that eventually claimed the life of Collen’s partner in guitar-slinging and debauchery, Steve Clark. Without Lange, who by then had begun working on Bryan Adams’ megahit Waking Up the Neighbours, Def Leppard, shattered by loss, completed Adrenalize as a four piece, with Collen meticulously recreating Clark’s parts along with his own.
“Steve had died and I had to learn all his parts from the demos to do the record, so there was a lot about it that was weird and unhappy and dark.”
By the time it was due for release, on March 31, 1992, the band had something else to contend with.
“You can’t really go against the tide of a trend, and of course what happened was, Nirvana came, and we were really swimming upstream! Whatever we did, it wasn’t going to be good enough. So what we did, we did the most dates we’ve ever done on a tour to get that thing and break it, and it worked.”
Adrenalize topped the US chart immediately, stayed there for over a month and charted for more than a year. While the critical response was uneven at the time, the album’s esteem has increased over the decades since – “when all the dust settled, a lot of people like that album,” Collen says.
More than 30 years later, Def Leppard hasn’t merely survived – they have thrived. Since Vivian Campbell was added to the line-up in 1992, the band has continued with the same five members, the same team, as Collen likes to suggest. That was an important part of moving on from their tragedy and something that continues to this day.
“The big thing was that we didn’t want to replace Steve. We wanted someone we could add to the band. That was my big thing. I didn’t really want to [merely replace him]. He was my brother. We had to find someone whose character and personality would be able to come into this band, and actually be included in the whole thing. He was great. Vivian fit that mould perfectly, and he had this thing we didn’t have. He had this vocal talent. It was shocking! I knew he could sing, but I didn’t know he could sing that well, and he was a team player. That’s the thing, if you’re in a team, you’ve got to be a team player, and that’s why we chose him.”
For Collen and Def Leppard, their team ethic goes further than just the band. It’s all the people they work closely with to achieve their goals – an idea the guitarist brings up often.
“There’s also the peripheral stuff like management,” he suggests. “Ronan McHugh who’s our front of house sound man is also our producer, he’s done the last six albums with us, and he’s done stuff with Mutt. He’s integral. Mike Kobayashi our manager and Jessica Squire our tour manager – these are all important players in our team, and none of this would work if we didn’t work.”
Without pointing fingers or making the slightest suggestion of any culprits, Collen admits to surprise and wonder at some of the mistakes he sees other bands make.
“We see bands and think ‘Wow, why are they doing that?’ [It’s] why they don’t succeed and why things go wrong for them. You’ve got to be a team, you’ve got to work hard, you’ve got to work even harder and when you’ve got success, you’ve got to work harder still.”
The most important aspect is making sure you’re on top of your game every time you hit the stage, according to Collen, after I tell him about the time in 2009 when my wife jumped in a van with some randos in LA to go see Leppard in Las Vegas.
“That’s brilliant,” he says with a genuine enthusiasm that brings out the Cockney in his voice. “On that point, you can’t disappoint. Because if someone’s put that much stock in seeing your band, you better be great. If someone didn’t bother, if they emotionally didn’t show up or they sucked when they played or they just didn’t care… we have to care! I’ve always thought that. You can’t let them down. If someone let us down, we’d feel terrible. So you have to be better than ever. You have to keep raising the bar, and so far, so good. The best four or five gigs of our career have happened within the last year, and to me, that’s incredible.”
Def Leppard is still hard at work. Along with the book and last year’s Diamond Star Halos, their first album of new material in seven years, they’ve been busy touring stadiums worldwide with Mötley Crüe since June last year and still found time to co-ordinate and release a symphonic album that’s being topping the Classical charts for months.
“We just spent 11 weeks at number on the Classical Billboard charts,” Collen says with the same enthusiasm he has maintained for the entire interview. “I never saw that coming! For the album we did with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra [Drastic Symphonies]. So, yeah, we’ll take that! We’re doing a graphic novel and we’ve been really instrumental in that. I was just up in Nashville last week song writing … all of these amazing things. If someone had told me years ago that at 65 you’d be playing guitar like this and singing like this, and still be fit enough to run around, I would not have believed them. But it’s hard work, and not having an ego is the main thing about it, and having a collective goal that everyone’s a part of.”
Collen’s health regimen is part of Def Leppard’s legend, but he merely grins and offers a humble chuckle at the suggestion that he’s still in great shape for a man in his mid-60s.
“Mick Jagger’s 80,” he points out, “and last year he was still on tour, dancing around and doing all that stuff, doing the rooster, and it’s like so inspiring! We want some of that.”
Is Def Leppard likely to be still rocking at Mick’s age?
“At the moment we’re definitely working on a 10-year plan. We’ve got a plan for 10 years and we’re about two years into that. So when we get to the end of that one, we’ll definitely look at everyone and say, ‘What do you want to do? What’s the goal?’ We still have these goals. We still want to have a number one album. A number one classical album! I’d love to do a tour with a classical orchestra. Writing new songs with different people. I’m constantly doing all this new stuff and it’s really exciting.”
THE WORLD TOUR with MÖTLEY CRÜE
8/11: Suncorp Stadium, Brisbane
11/11: Giants Stadium, Sydney
14/11: Marvel Stadium, Melbourne
