It shouldn’t be hard for anyone to accept the idea that Def Leppard is getting a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Oct. 9 alongside other showbiz legends. After all, the band has sold more than 100 million albums worldwide and set an untold number of heads bobbing and fists a-pumping with undeniably catchy anthems like “Photograph,” “Pour Some Sugar on Me” and last year’s glam rock callback “Just Like 73.”
And yet…
“You’re immensely proud of it, but to be a part of it is a little strange, to be perfectly honest, because we’ve always been fans of musical icons and film icons,” says the band’s bass player, Rick Savage, known to friends as “Sav.” “It’s almost like you’re talking and thinking and acting in the third party, so it’s still taking a little bit of time to sink in.”
It’s tempting to dismiss Savage’s comments as false modesty, given the flash and sparkle of the band’s music and image, along with the massive sales and their 2019 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But Def Leppard is, at its core, a brotherhood of working-class kids from the British Isles, raised by parents who lived through the deprivations of World War II. And work they do: they’ve played 2,700-plus shows across six decades and as many continents, carrying on in the face of personal tragedies as they’ve navigated career peaks and valleys, from stadiums to state fairs and back to stadiums again.
Next year, the band will settle down briefly for a Las Vegas residency — its third — at the Colosseum Theater at Caesars Palace from Feb. 3-28. In the meantime, they’re working on a batch of new recordings they hope to release next year.
“It’s a very different situation to touring,” says lead singer Joe Elliott of the Vegas residency. “You’ve got people coming from all over the world, not just all over the country, to come see us, so we try to put on a different show. The first residency in 2013, we opened for ourselves as a fake band called Ded Flatbird, and we did all the really deep stuff for 45 minutes, and then we went off and came back on and did ‘Hysteria’ and [other] stuff. Then the residency in 2019, I generally — ”
Elliots pivots mid-thought, without taking a pause.
“It’s funny, the closer things are to me, the less I can remember them,” he muses. “But ask me about 1980, I’ll tell you everything.”
Nineteen eighty was a milestone year for Def Leppard. Not only did it mark the release of their debut album, “On Through the Night,” in March, it brought them to Hollywood for the first time. Their plane touched down at LAX on May 18, and they checked into the historic Chateau Marmont Hotel on the Sunset Strip. Band members had a day or so to do a few touristy things, like pay a visit to the Rainbow Bar & Grill, famous as a hangout for British rock stars like Led Zeppelin and Keith Moon of the Who, and get scammed by a shop that sold them overpriced, faulty cameras. Then it was time for their show, opening for the Pat Travers Band at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on May 20 — the first concert on their first-ever U.S. tour.
The band moved “Hello America,” the second track from “On Through the Night,” to the front of the setlist, introducing themselves to the audience with lyrics seemingly made for the moment:
Well, I’m taking me a trip,
I’m going down to California
Yeah, I’m going to try
Hollywood and San Pedro Bay
Elliott had composed the words the previous year in his windowless six-by-six-foot basement office at Osborn-Mushet Tools in the band’s hometown of Sheffield, an industrial city 160 miles northwest of London known as a steel production hub. Never having been to the Golden State, he used an atlas to pinpoint the locales he namechecked, unaware that San Pedro Bay, the busiest seaport in the U.S., is hardly a picturesque tourist destination.
“I had a cassette playing all day, just listening to Alice Cooper, Mott the Hoople, all those kinds of [things],” recalls Elliott, who had risen from an £8-a-week apprentice to chief buyer at the company, purchasing everything from stationery to overalls. “But we had the band together by then, and I would have backing tracks to the songs that we’d worked on two days previously and be writing lyrics. And maybe last night I was watching some show that had the beach in Santa Monica on it — the palm trees and the guy roller-skating up and down the path, blah, blah blah — and I’m thinking, ‘God, get me out of here.’ And so all that was kind of a metaphorical ladder out of this factory.”
As the lights went down at the Santa Monica Civic that night and Def Leppard took to the stage, the band was relieved to hear some polite applause.
“They weren’t screaming for us, but it wasn’t total silence,” recalls Elliott. “We could just hear three or four kids shouting, ‘Wasted!’ [their debut album’s first single]. And I remember turning around to one of the guys and going, ‘Oh, my God, they’ve actually heard of us!’”
Variety’s review of the show by the late Cynthia Kirk noted the “respectable response” from the crowd and a “‘long live rock’ anthem or two that suggest the early potency of Foghat,” then zeroed on the band’s youth — at the time, they ranged in age from 20 (Elliott and original guitarists Steve Clark and Pete Willis) to 16 (drummer Rick Allen) — and Elliott’s “apple-cheeked good looks [which] offer more femme appeal than is typical for this mucho macho genre.”
Unlike the Foghats of the world, they weren’t scruffy men pushing middle age who looked like they stank of stale beer and cigarettes — they were as young or younger than many in the audience. They also weren’t pouty New Romantics sporting makeup and frilly shirts like other emerging British acts of the moment, such as fellow Sheffield natives the Human League and Heaven 17. They were pretty, but undeniably masculine, and they didn’t stand stock still, poking out one-finger parts on a synth. They could play, sing, shake, prance and pose with the best of them, as evidenced by a bootleg video of their second show on the tour the following night in Fresno that has surfaced on YouTube.
Above all, they were wildly ambitious.
“We had to dream big, and we did. We dreamed very, very big,” says Elliott, who made a concert poster for an imaginary rock band named “Deaf Leopard” for an art class assignment when he was 16. “So any level that we reached, we’d celebrate it for 20 minutes and then go, ‘OK, what’s next?’”
It would all come together with their third album, “Pyromania.” Released in January 1983, it rose to No. 2 on the U.S. Billboard 200 (held out of the top spot by Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”), eventually selling more than 10 million copies in the U.S. alone. It was helped immeasurably by the emergence of MTV, which played the videos for its singles “Photograph,” “Foolin’” and “Rock of Ages” in heavy rotation, promoting both the band’s music and its youthful good looks.
As a result, unlike most hard rockers of the time, whose shows could indelicately be described as “sausage fests,” Def Leppard attracted a large contingent of female fans, many of whom were eager to get to know its members on an intimate basis.
“We had people breaking in and camping out and sneaking in a couch to get in the dressing room,” says guitarist Phil Collen, a London native who joined Def Leppard from the band Girl late in the recording of “Pyromania,” contributing guitar solos and backing vocals to several songs.
The band kicked off the “Pyromania” tour in February 1983 at the 600-person capacity Marquee Club in London and closed out its North American leg seven months later, headlining Jack Murphy Stadium in San Diego in front of 52,000 people. It was an amazing rocket ride, but their engines were about to sputter.
The first problem was the unavailability of producer Robert John “Mutt” Lange, who came aboard on their second album, 1981’s “High ’n’ Dry,” and expanded his role with “Pyromania,” co-writing all 10 tracks with members of the band. When it came time to record their follow-up, eventually titled “Hysteria,” in early 1984, Lange was burned out by his heavy workload, which included producing The Cars’ just-wrapped “Heartbeat City” album, and needed to take a break.
In his stead, Def Leppard hired Jim Steinman, famous for his collaboration with Meat Loaf on the bombastic hit album “Bat Out of Hell” (1977). But Steinman lacked the meticulous attention to detail they had been conditioned to demand by Lange, going so far as to accept an out-of-tune warm-up take. Elliott reminded his bandmates that Steinman had not actually produced “Bat” – that was Todd Rundgren – he had only written the songs. Realizing their error, they dismissed Steinman and set out to produce the album themselves with the aid of Lange’s engineer, Nigel Green. While band and engineer were compatible, work was still slow and frustrating. Then tragedy intervened.
On Dec. 31, 1984, Allen was driving to a New Year’s Eve party with his girlfriend when he lost control of his Corvette in the English countryside, crashing into a stone wall and severing his left arm as he was ejected from the car. With the help of a nurse and an off-duty cop who happened upon the scene separately — and later married — the arm was retrieved, and doctors reattached it at the hospital. But infection set in, and it had to be amputated.
Under normal circumstances, in earlier times and, more importantly, with a different band, this would’ve spelled the end of Allen’s career as a drummer. But when the tech-savvy Lange visited Allen in the hospital, he explained how he might be able to carry on using foot pedals to trigger sampled drum sounds via MIDI. Allen immediately began practicing with his feet on pillows, but the big physical epiphany occurred after he checked out of the hospital a month later.
“I was always very right-footed whenever I kicked a soccer ball. And in the first few moments of kicking this soccer ball around, I realized that I could kick with my left foot almost as well as my right without trying anything,” recalls Allen. “All the information that was in my head, it just needed to be channeled where it was usable. Everything that was in my left arm, some of that information went to my right, and some of it went to my left leg, some of it went to my right leg. It compensated. And I think that was to do with new neural pathways in the brain forming involuntarily.”
Recording continued to drag on so slowly that Lange was able to return to the producer’s chair in the summer of 1985. They subsequently embarked on another 18 months of recording at studios in Paris, Dublin and Holland, followed by three months of mixing. During that time, they suffered other, less serious health setbacks, including a car crash that injured Lange’s leg and a case of the mumps for Elliott.
Lange was a notorious taskmaster, rumored to be so exacting that he would sometimes separately record individual strings in a guitar chord. (Elliott insists they did this only once — on a minor chord on the first verse of “Comin’ Under Fire” on “Pyromania,” which sounded too muddy when played distorted through a Marshall amp.) Everything was endlessly rewritten, re-recorded, tweaked, gilded and polished.
“All the instrumentation was done one at a time, to the point where I sometimes didn’t even go in the studio for weeks,” says Elliott. “I would sit in my hotel room in Holland with a Fostex four-track [recorder], writing new stuff, and that’s how things like ‘Rocket’ came about. I was working on drum rhythms and things like this and chords, and I’d go in with the cassette and say, ‘Hey, what do you think it is?’ And they’d go, ‘Wow, cool! Let’s work on that.’”
Envisioned as a hard rock take on “Thriller,” where every track is a potential hit single, “Hysteria” tripled down on “Pyromania’s” pop leanings with a thickly applied, of-the-moment studio sheen and hooks on top of hooks. The perfection came at a price: it cost roughly $5 million to make, meaning they had to sell five million copies to break even, a task made more daunting by the fact that they hadn’t put out new music in close to half a decade.
When “Hysteria” was released in August 1987, the initial returns weren’t good. While the album did well in Europe, scoring them their first British hit single (“Animal”), it underperformed in the U.S., as did their tour, which saw them playing to a less-than-half-full Tacoma Dome in December 1987.
Then fate intervened in the form of some Florida strippers who took a liking to a late addition to its tracklist, “Pour Some Sugar on Me.” Like the rest of “Hysteria,” the song went lighter on their previous albums’ prominent heavy rock influences, such as Led Zeppelin, Thin Lizzy and UFO, and leaned into the glam rock sound of the early 1970s epitomized by groups like T-Rex. It also took inspiration from Aerosmith and Run DMC’s recent rap-rock hybrid reworking of the former’s “Walk This Way.” Most importantly, it had a beat and you could swing on a pole to it.
“It would get requested at the clubs to be danced to, and then people would request it to be played on the radio,” explains Elliott. “And it just literally spread, going west like wildfire.”
“Sugar” hit No. 2 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 in July 1988. It ignited sales for “Hysteria,” which rose to No. 1 on the Billboard Top 200 the same month and, in turn, spawned more hit singles — including their only No. 1 on the Hot 100, “Love Bites” — on its way to selling more than 25 million copies worldwide. When they returned to Washington State in October 1988 for the triumphant 227th and final date of the 14-month tour, they drew a sold-out crowd of nearly 30,000 fans to the Tacoma Dome. It would be guitarist Clark’s last show with the band.
Collen was brought into Def Leppard to replace co-founder Willis, who was fired from the band for excessive drinking. Ironically, he and Clark subsequently bonded through, among other things, their own out-of-control alcohol consumption, earning them the nickname “the Terror Twins.” But, in April 1987, Collen decided to quit cold turkey.
“I was blacking out and just waking up in strange places with strange girls and not remembering any of it and driving while I was completely drunk,” says Collen. “That was the reason I stopped, and I’m really glad I did. Unfortunately, Steve wasn’t able to stop.”
Clark died on Jan. 8, 1991, at the age of 30 after ingesting a lethal mixture of alcohol and prescription drugs. The band recorded their next album, “Adrenalize,” as a four-piece, minus not only Clark, but also Lange, who was committed to a Bryan Adams project. But when it came time to gear up for a tour, they decided to hold auditions for a new guitarist.
“It was a lot less of an audition than it was a courtship,” says the eventual choice, Vivian Campbell, who previously did stints with Whitesnake and Dio. “It was hanging out and getting to know each other. The process sort of unfolded over a period of about a week or ten days, where we’d go to a rehearsal, we’d play a few songs, and then we’d go and have dinner or we’d go get a pickup soccer game or something. And we have a lot in common because we’re all of a similar age, and even though I grew up in the Belfast area in Northern Ireland, not in the English mainland like the rest of the guys, we still shared the same culture.”
Released in March 1992, “Adrenalize” did great business — spending five weeks at No. 1, spawning the No. 15 hit single “Let’s Get Rocked” and eventually selling 7 million copies — as did their 18-month world tour to support it. But the writing was on the wall for the band, and it wasn’t good.
“It was increasingly evident as the tour progressed that the musical headwinds were changing dramatically,” says Campbell. “Nirvana was coming up and Pearl Jam and Soundgarden and the whole grunge movement out of Seattle was really making what Def Leppard represented somewhat redundant.”
After giving themselves a commercially unsuccessful — but, in retrospect, highly listenable — grunge makeover for 1996’s “Slang,” they were back to their old selves on their next album, 1999’s “Euphoria,” featuring a trio of songs co-written by Lange, which reached No. 11 in the U.S. But by the mid-2000s, they were reduced to playing downscale gigs like state fairs.
“I remember we played Birmingham, Ala., on this kind of street corner,” says Collen. “It was like a free festival thing, and there was still no one.”
Something had to give, and it turned out to be their management, Cliff Burnstein and Peter Mensch of Q Prime. The band praises how the duo helped them succeed and survive during the first decades of their career, but they needed a fresh approach at this point, and they got it from Howard Kaufman of HK Management.
One of Kaufman’s most transformative moves was putting Def Leppard on a 40-date co-headlining tour with Kiss in 2014.
“Initially, we didn’t want to do that because we thought, yeah, although it was co-headlining, we would be opening for Kiss,” says Savage. “It turned out to be one of the best things we ever did, and it was fun.”
Guided by manager Mike Kobayashi, who took the reins following Kaufman’s passing in 2017, Def Leppard has continued to mount co-headlining stadium tours with bands such as Mötley Crüe and Journey, while regularly releasing new music.
But it wouldn’t be Def Leppard without a terrifying challenge or two, and they got a big one in 2013, when Campbell was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma. He underwent chemo, immunotherapy and combination therapies, and a stem cell transplant from his own body, none of which worked. Then it really got bad. In a last-ditch effort, he was given a donor cell transplant, which appears to have done the trick: he had a PET scan in April that showed he’s in complete remission.
Fortunately, for Campbell and all involved, Def Leppard is far healthier and less decadent than back in the 1980s, when the crew would issue special “Dik Likker” backstage passes to women with groupie potential. Today, band members share the same dressing room, work remotely with a fitness trainer, have a chef prepare them nutritious meals (including vegan options for Collen and Allen), and hone their already-impressive harmonies with the aid of a vocal coach, giving them a blend that’s so good, “it sounds fake,” according to Collen.
While these days Def Leppard may not be mentioned in the same breath as current chart-toppers like Taylor Swift and Kendrick Lamar, they’ve continued to sell, scoring Top 10 albums on the Billboard 200 across five decades, including their most recent full-length release, 2022’s “Diamond Star Halos.”
But Allen believes what’s really important is their “unwritten stats.”
“It’s how a band like us stay vibrant, how we continue to write new music and continue to play even bigger shows,” he says. “The demographic just seems to get wider, so we feel like we’re on to something.”