NOTHIN’ BUT HITS
Def Leppard preps a Fenway show with everything you love and more
Ifyour all-time favorite albums are Def Leppard's “Pyromania,” “Hysteria” and “Adrenalize,” I will wager album No. 4 on your list would be the band's selftitled 2015 LP.
“Def Leppard” sounds like the band recorded it 15 minutes after “Adrenalize.” It has everything you adore from Lep: layered vocal and guitar harmonies, hooks that recall both Queen and Bryan Adams, earnest songs about parties and sex (and cheeky songs about heartbreak). But as quintessential as “Def Leppard” is, don't expect to hear many of the new tracks at the band's Fenway Park show with Journey tomorrow night.
“We love being out on the road with Journey, but we have to squeeze the show a little bit for this double headlining bill, and the first thing that goes out can be new songs,” singer Joe Elliott said. “Having to decide our set list, this is a fantastic problem to have. We often draw analogies between us and a sports team, and what we have now is a fully fit squad and it's hard to decide who to play each time out.”
Elliott is actually being humble. His outfit of onceworking-class lads from Sheffield, England, has sold as many albums as Bob
Dylan, Stevie Wonder and
The Who. The guys have 15
Top 40 hits and have never left heavy rotation on rock radio.
While some artists don't feel right peddling in pure nostalgia, Elliott happily plays the hits.
“This isn't an open mic night in the basement of some bohemian bar in Greenwich Village where somebody says, `Hey, here are 15 brand-new songs of mine,' ” he said. “We love playing `Pour Some Sugar on Me' every night. We're glad we wrote it because it's a huge celebration. We are in this dream situation now where we've got the hits, we've done the hard work earlier in our career, we still have ambitions to record more songs, but on our own time.
“Let's be honest, we are the hot ticket at the moment, but I don't think people are queuing around the block for a new Def Leppard record,” Elliott added. “And we're aware of that, we're OK with that.”
Elliott still thinks the band has a handful of great records in them — good news for people who dig “Def Leppard” — but he's in no rush to get back in the studio.
For the band's first two decades, when the guys weren't recovering from huge losses (drummer Rick Allen lost an arm in car crash in 1984; Steve Clark died from alcohol poisoning in 1991), they were on tour or in the studio. Elliott still loves playing live and recording, but admits the old pace left little time for anything else.
“I don't want to get off the road and have be forced by management to go into some paltry little rehearsal room to start writing the next album because it's so bloody important,” Elliott said. “It's not. What's important is that when we do sit down to write songs that they can sit side by side with the legacy we have.” Def Leppard, with Journey and Cheap Trick, at Fenway Park, tomorrow. Tickets: $110-$395; ticketmaster.com.