Def Leppard

The Early Years 79-81

Box set shows that while not always brilliant, Leppard were never less than precocious.

Re-masters of Def Leppard’s first two albums On Through The Night (originally released 40 years ago on March 14, 1980) and 1981’s High ’N’ Dry were included in the 2018 box set Rock Of Ages Vol 1. But the considerable carrot/ excuse for buying them again now are this new box set’s three bonus CDs: a live set from the tour for Leppard’s first album and two discs of collectables.

The live disc is a full set from Oxford, April 26, 1980, when only a fool would have failed to predict the band were going places – if not the Rush-inspired direction implied by opener When The Walls Came Tumbling Down. After that, Leppard (then with Pete Willis and Steve Clark on guitar) power through every other song on the debut, a couple of B-sides, and three brand-new songs as sparkling proof of how rapidly the band had evolved in the year since Phonogram signed them. Of the new songs, only Lady Strange would survive, but Medicine Man was no slouch, and When The Rain Falls contained a riff later re-worked for Let It Go.

Disc 4 is the chronological collection Too Many Jitterbugs: B-Sides And Rarities. That title is presumably in homage to the daftest lyric Elliott ever wrote, in Glad I’m Alive – the first of two previously unreleased numbers. The other is

Phonogram’s rejected take of Rock Brigade, one of four songs produced by Nick Tauber in the band’s original session for the label. Those are preceded by the three on the Getcha Rocks Off EP ,and followed by everything unique to the single format. Ronan McHugh’s remastering freshens things up without trampling on anyone’s memories, but it’s impossible to close the sonic gap between the earliest material and that recorded with Mutt Lange after March 1981. So be it.

Disc 5, Raw: Early BBC Recordings, goes back to 1979 (when the band members’ average age was just 19) to deliver four songs each from sessions recorded for Andy Peebles in June, and Tommy Vance’s Friday Rock Show four months later. Among the latter is Good Morning Freedom which still sounds too good to have remained only a B-side.

Finally there’s the BBC’s broadcast edit of Leppard’s set at the Reading Festival on August 24, 1980, which finally makes your old TDK cassette recording obsolete. Leppard would outgrow the echoes of Thin Lizzy in Lady Strange, and NWOBHM bombast elsewhere, but it’s not difficult to get a sense of all those hit singles and platinum discs gathering over the horizon. ■■■■■■■■■■