Beauty and the beast
Def Leppard proves rock ages gracefully
Mike Warkentin



If Joe Elliot has ever told you to fuck off, he’s sorry.

The Def Leppard frontman has handed down a few F-Os in recent years, and it’s a sign that the music business is changing.

Once autograph seekers were bright-eyed kids looking for a signature on a beat-up copy of Hysteria. Now the kids have been replaced by scores of slick businessmen aiming to flip signed material on eBay.

In fact, it’s getting so bad that Elliot posted the following in the ‘backstage’ section of defleppard.com:

“This whole eBay thing is getting out of hand, to the point where we are having to tell a lot of autograph hunters to fuck off... If any of us mistakenly think you, the fans, are one of them, we apologise!”

When asked about the growing problem of commercial autograph seekers and even fake signatures, Elliot is blunt.

“It’s so unbelievably annoying,” he says over the phone from Peoria, Ill. “I get so angry when I think about it.

“There’s no real way around it. It’s a complete loophole. I mean, you don’t sign any (autographs) at all, you’re a twat. And if you sign them all, they’re selling them and making a profit.”

Elliot says the band members — guitarists Phil Collen and Viv Campbell, drummer Rick Allen, and bassist Rick Savage — are planning on sitting down in the future and autographing a truckload of merch to be sold for cost to ensure fans get genuine goods at reasonable prices.

That’s a good thing, because Elliot’s glam metal/hard rock outfit is making a comeback of sorts, even if Pyromania, Hysteria and Adrenalize — a trio of massively successful discs released between 1983 and 1992 — are well in the past.
“You can’t help but get a thrill because you don’t feel like you’re treading water,” Elliot says of playing sold-out arena shows on the band’s current North American tour in support the 2005 Rock of Ages compilation. “You don’t feel like, ‘God, I shouldn’t be here.’ Without rubbing salt in anybody’s wounds, I do feel sorry for these bands that kind of get themselves together for a four-band tour of some bowling-alley circuit.”

DL shouldn’t have to worry about playing beside Warrant at Summerfest anytime soon, and Elliot thinks the band’s current popularity is a result of the cycles of rock.

“Not that we’re in the same league as the Stones, by any means, but the fact that we’re kind of moving into that kind of territory, y’know, this is about where they were during Steel Wheels, I imagine, and the audience is growing — or I say it’s coming back.

He adds: “Rock ’n’ roll ages gracefully, by the looks of things.”

Elliot — who turned 46 on Aug. 1 — et al. are indeed ageing gracefully, and the band’s next project is a covers album designed to pay tribute to the artists who influenced Def Leppard before it signed its record deal in August 1979.

“They were huge influences on us as people growing up — the kind of things that made us tug on the sleeves of our parents, saying ‘I want a guitar,’” Elliot says of David Bowie, Mott the Hoople and other ’70s staples to be featured on Yeah!

“I really believe it’s the most honest record you can ever make because you’re making it for yourself,” he continues. “There’s no agenda. We had nobody at the record company saying, ‘You have to put on a song that’s this style.’ There was none of that. We picked 14 songs that we collectively, completely, utterly fell in love with as kids. And if nobody else likes it, that’s just sad.”

Yeah! was scheduled for release in September but is now marked to hit shelves in early 2006.

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