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steveinscarlet · 2 years ago

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Presenting for your consideration a gig review and interview with Joe and Steve from 1980. This is the article referenced in the infamous 'Wayne' Rockline interview.

A few points before we begin:

I said it was long!

Apologies that I can't do proper scans - tho given this is 40 yr old newsprint, I don't think that would help much!

Interesting decision to give a cover and centre spread to a band you don't like just so you can be mean to them

The journalist has decided to write all the interview answers in a representation of the Yorkshire accent, because apparently northern accents are hilarious, which makes it kinda hard to read

I can totally see why the band got pissed off with the British music press!

This is 1980 so standard warning that language is used that would have been commonplace at the time but is unacceptable now - I cut one paragraph out of the text version because Joe uses a slur a bunch of times and I just didn't want to have that on my blog. You can still squint at the image if you want to read the full thing. (No Joe-hate, he's just talking the way working class blokes did at the time, there's no malice behind it)

The new Lords of Denim

His ears bleeding from white noise and thick northern accents, Allen Jones debates heavy metal and other apocalypses with Def Leppard, leaders of the HM new wave.

"We're the Dooleys wi' goolies," says guitarist Steve Clark.

Their first rehearsal studio was in an old building near the Sheffield United football ground. A single room, it cost them a fiver a week to rent.

After work on Friday, they'd go down there and rehearse, often until 4am. There were four of them. Pete Willis played guitar. He knew Rick Savage who played bass. There were several drummers in those early months. Then Rick Allen joined. Pete and Sav were 17, Rick was 15. Joe Elliott had never sung in a band before, although he played a little guitar and had depped as a drummer in a local rock 'n' roll band. They told him that he looked the part. He was tall and brawny, with a shock of curly blond hair: an identikit heavy metal frontman, really. They were persuasive. He joined them in October, 1977.

They plundered Thin Lizzy and Bowie albums for songs for their early repertoire, playing "Jailbreak", "Rosalie" and "Suffragette City". They began writing their own songs, too. "Sorrow Is A Woman", which they still play, was written then, though it was called "Misty Dreamer" in those days. Joe wrote the lyrics. Pete and Sav handled the riffs.

There was another song called "War Child". Their faces twist with embarrassment now when they recall "War Child". They dismiss it quickly as being derivative of Black Sabbath. "An 'orrible fookin' mess, it were," Joe Elliott cries, his accent as thick as a girder of Sheffield steel.

They introduced "Emerald" to their repertoire when Steve Clark joined and they realised that he and Pete Willis could duplicate Thin Lizzy's guitar harmonies. Steve met Pete at the local college of further education. They were both attending the same day-release class. Steve saw Pete reading a guitar manual and realised they had a mutual interest. They met again at a Judas Priest concert at Sheffield City Hall and started talking guitars. Pete invited Steve to a rehearsal. Steve was impressed. He was invited to join the group. He accepted.

They called themselves Def Leppard. Their intention was local fun rather than international success; at first they nursed no grand ambition. They debuted in July, 1978, at Westfield school in Sheffield. They say they were dreadful, but copped the promoter for five quid, anyway.

They were not satisfied rehearsing four hours a night, five nights a week; they'd spend weekend afternoons developing and refining their heavy metal assault, their armoury of bone-crunching riffs. And their local reputation grew into a northern cult.

Impressed by the enterprise of young punk bands who'd financed their own recordings, they saved and scrounged enough money to go into Fairview Studios in Hull, where they cut a three-track EP of their own songs. They released it on their own label, Bludgeon Riffola; "Ride Into The Sun", "Overture" and "Getcha Rocks Off". Those who know about such things will tell you that "Getcha Rocks Off" is destined to be remembered as a classic heavy metal performance.

They found an enthusiastic supporter in Andy Peebles, the Radio 1 deejay. Even John Peel played the record. HM aficionados in the music press began to shower them with adulatory notices. People were beginning to talk about them as one of the leading bands in the new wave of heavy metal, future threats to the supremacy of UFO, the Scorpions and Judas Priest.

Then, last summer, Phonogram released a single, "Wasted", a blustery performance marred by an indifferent production. Phonogram placed them as support on two prestigious tours: first with the American hard rock singer, Sammy Hagar, then with AC/DC. They estimate that they played to over 40,000 people on those tours.

Their impact must have been considerable. In this paper's reader's poll in November, they were voted into fourth place in the "Brightest Hope" category. In the same category in the NME's readers' poll they were voted into sixth place, above more fashionable contenders like the Undertones, the Pretenders, the Gang of Four, Secret Affair and the Selecter. Def Leppard's first album is released in March.

Follow the moon to the end of Sauchiehall Street. Turn into Tiffany's before you reach the corner; sprint up the stone steps into the glare of the foyer. Past the ticket office, quickly. There are the bouncers in their tight-fitting tuxedos; look at them, with their necks bulging out of their starched shirt collars. The manager leads the way into the pumping heart of the ballroom.

The air is ravaged by the hysterical excess of Rainbow, screaming through the house PA. When the tape finishes, Zeppelin replaces Rainbow on the cassette deck. It's going to be that kind of night.

The manager declares himself pleased with the attendance; at least 700 headbangers so far, he estimates. Not at all bad for a Sunday night, especially for a band headlining its first concert in Glasgow. Mind you, he says, the Specials played here on a Sunday and they had 2,500 rabid kids packed into the ballroom. And the police were squabbling outside on Sauchiehall Street with at least another thousand. He rolls his eyes at the memory. One of his bouncers was struck that night by a girl wielding a hat-pin. He and one of his men dragged her to the back of the auditorium. They tried to calm her down. She stripped off her shirt and, naked to the waist, tried to run off. She was tackled by a police officer. She felled him with a well-timed kick in the balls. The manager chuckles to himself as he tells the story.

Tonight's audience is already pressed tight around the stage, fists clenched, punching the atmosphere in the familiar heavy metal seig heil! Their feet are stamping, their heads shaking violently. The imaginary guitarists are out, too. Just a few for the moment, though: the Deep Purple Formation Dancers will not take to the floor in force until Def Leppard are on the boards and tearing holes in the fragile fabric of the local ozone. The crowd around the stage began chanting. Their message was unclear at first.

Then their ranting become ominously clear. "We hate the mods, we hate the mods, we hate the mods... we hate, we hate, we hate the mods!"

Def Leppard were racing down the narrow staircase from their dressroom to the stage. Joe Elliott must have heard the chant. As the band plugged in and roadies made last-minute checks on equipment, popping up like greasy glove-puppets behind the amplifiers, Elliott grabbed his microphone.

"D'yer want us ter do soom Sec- ritt Afferr songs fur yer?"

The reply was lost in a landslide of noise as Def Leppard smacked out the first powerchord of their set.

That first chord was like a grenade going off in your hand; surviving the rest of the performance was like living through Pearl Harbour.

The drummer sounded like he was shitting amplified house bricks. His bass-drum kicks walloped holes in the chest; each cymbal crash was a sustained opera of alarm. The guitars were a thick carpet of shrieking chords. And Elliott's voice came howling through the debris, like the devil calling in the damned for supper.

And this was just the first number. It left me more confused than a conversation with Robert Fripp.

The boys sure could whack it out with the best of them, as earlier observers have been quick to remark. I saw UFO a year ago at the Hammersmith Odeon. Compared to this lot, they sounded like schoolchildren rattling the railings with their rulers.

As a visual spectacle, Def Leppard are a whirlwind of frantic gestures, arm-swinging, headshaking and microphone twirling. So completely do they epitomise the satin-and- leather flash of heavy metal they almost become caricatures. There were more bare chests on that stage than you'd find in a topless bar on Sunset Strip. Willis and Clark have perfected every manoeuvre in the HM handbook of macho poses, throwing more shapes in one song than the entire front line of Thin Lizzy in an entire set.

One significant distinction should, however, be made between Def Leppard and their HM predecessors. Solos are infrequent, usually quickly despatched, more often tightly contained within the blistering structures of the songs. Willis and Clark prefer to maintain the pace of the attack, which relents only for the obligatory moody ballads.

Of course, this did nothing to deter the denim-swathed ranks of phantasy guitarists. They lined up at the back of the crowd in neat batallions, heads down, right hands scrubbing their chests while the left tore up and down imagined fretboards. They were even more energetic and frantically nimble than the band. Whhooosh! There went one, a vertical take-off from a standing start! Craaammmm! There he went, smacking down on his knees, back bent over in an impossible arch, the back of his head dusting the ballroom floor. There was a marvellous moment towards the end of the set. The guitars dropped out, leaving Rick Allen alone for a brief drum flourish. Suddenly, everyone was an imaginary drummer.

It's difficult making notes with both hands clamped over your ears, and dodging flying riffs that are threatening to tear off your kneecaps rather prevents one's assimilation of individual subtleties. However, I do remember that "When The Walls Come Tumbling Down" was an epic about apocalypse, complete with characteristic HM imagery of doom and destruction. The final encores, "Ride Into The Sun" and "Rocks Off", seemed standard hard rock outbursts, fiercely played and lavishly received.

After the gig it took at least four double vodkas and a sharp slap on the back of the head to recover the power of speech.

"Loud?" exclaimed Pete Willis at the hotel, "We only used half stacks t'night."

He looked at me as if I was the biggest wimp on the planet. I didn't reply. My ears were still bleeding.

Willis, Allen and Savage have gone off with the road crew to the local fleapit. Rather appropriately, they have gone to see "Apocalypse Now".

Eliott and Clark are in their hotel room fielding questions. Elliott is affable, forthright, confident; not at all the offensively cocky individual I had been led to expect. Clark is drunk and getting worse.

"We all knew when we started the band that it were goin' t'be heavy rock," Elliott is explaining. He has the kind of accent you hear on voice-overs for Hovis commercials. "We knew it weren't going t'be poonk. An' it weren't goin' t'be Lena Martell. We all knew it were goin' t'be based around Lizzy, Zeppelin, UFO."

I had wanted to know why such a young band had turned to heavy metal rather than punk, like most of their contemporaries. When they formed punk was, after all, the most fashionable trend. And Def Leppard shared both age and circumstances (bored teenagers, working-class) with the majority of new punk bands storming the barricades in '77.

"We never thought about it," Clark blearily attests. "We just did what we wanted to do. We never thought, 'Well, punk is fashionable, heavy metal is dated - let's be fashionable, let's be a punk band."

"If we'd done that, it would've been unnatural," Elliott elaborates.. "You get certain bands who say, 'We've tried for 18 months at bein' this kind of band. We're not gerren anywhere, let's be summat else. We'll change us name and change us image... Like, apparently, there used t'be a really weird, heavy rock band called Black Widow. Apparently, some of them are now in Showaddywaddy."

He looked suitably aghast, as if someone had just walked over his grave.

"It would've been false for us to pretend we were summat we weren't," he continued. "It would've been wrong for us t'say, 'Right, we'll go and cut us hair and dye it blond and wear bondage trousers with zips all over t'place and be a poonk band. But it's not tha' we didn't like poonk. I though t'Pistols were greet. An' Clash. New wave were greet. It's a cliché now, but it did give music business a kick up the arse. People must've been gerren pissed off wi' bands like Supertramp. I like Supertramp mesel', but I can see kids' point of view - when there's nowt 'appenin' apart from yearly release of a new Supertramp album or Pink Floyd, kids'll get pissed off, look for summat new. So when they gerra band like t'Clash comin' up, they think, 'Wharra great fookin' blast of energy.’"

Elliott is eager to stress the catholicism of Def Leppard's musical tastes. Pete Willis might be more emphatically involved with heavy metal "he only ever listens to UFO and Priest" but Sav was into Queen and Boston, and Rick Allen was deeply into funk, especially Parliament and Funkadelic.

"I've gorra case full o' tapes over 'ere," Elliott went on. "You can look through it, if yer like. None of 'em are heavy rock. The nearest thing t'heavy rock in tha' bag is Meat Loaf. I've got Tubular Bells, 10cc. I just like music. It's just that I don't think I'd like it as much playin' 10cc's music onstage."

"Thing about new wave," Clark said, looking up from his beer mug, "were that the bands had a definite feelin' for audience. They were just like audience. There was a sort of rapport. An' it's the same wi' new wave heavy metal bands. Like, wi' old wave heavy metal bands, like Rush, it were 'Look at me. I'm in a band. I'm on a ten-foot stage. I'm above you.’ There isn't the same rapport. I fookin' ‘ate that. We haven't got that attitude, that Sabbath, Deep Purple attitude. We believe that it's t'kids what count. Like, we'll put on show whatever… I could break me back, but I'd still play show even if I had t'be carried onstage. We wouldn't pull out of show just because we didn't have a proper soun'check or bollocks like that."

Whatever their own sympathy for punk, it could hardly be said that the punks had ever displayed a reciprocal sympathy for heavy metal, old wave or new. Didn't that smart a little?

"No doubt some would think so," Elliott replied. "But fact that Johnny Rotten might not like us don't mean it's goin' t'put me off likin' him. If I ever heard an interview where Rotten or Joe Strummer were sayin', 'Oh, Def Leppard - wharra load of bollocks! I'd just say, 'Fair enough, he don't like us.' Tha's no reason fer me to go an' break all me Clash albums in half and say, 'I don't like you any more."

Clark had already made one distinction between the old guard of heavy metal and its more recent, youthful manifestation. Elliott thought there was an even greater difference.

"Frankly," he said, after some pause, "I don't think t'old wave of heavy metal bands are a patch on't new wave. I'm not talkin' just about us now. You compare people like Purple and Sabbath wi' UFO, wi' Michael Schenker. Purple and Sabbath aren't in't same category. I mean, Sabbath weer just really heavy. No light or shade, no melody. UFO and to a certain extent Judas Priest, there's more variety wi' them. It's a totally different sound. Like, wi' us it's more commercial. Some of our stuff, like 'Rock Brigade', if that ever came out as a single, it'd be commercial. It wouldn't just appeal to heavy metal fans. You can't compare summat like that wi' 'Paranoid' or 'Child In Time'. It's short, punchy. It's three minutes. It's straight though. Bangbangbang. Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, guitar solo, stop. That's it."

They didn't, then, approve of the old "Ben-Hur" length guitar solos (and bass and drum solos) much favoured by their predecessors? They certainly didn't.

"Guitar solos are borin'," Elliott stated unequivocally.

"That's why we don't do any," Clark hiccupped. "We don't have half-hour drum solos like John Bonham wi’ Zeppelin. We think it's borin'. We try to strike a balance between what Sabbath were doin' and what the fookin' Clash are doin'."

As far as the press was concerned, though, they were more likely to be treated with the derision traditionally reserved for Black Sabbath than with the often sycophantic reverence afforded the Clash: they would most often be seen as a kind of desperate joke, I told them.

"I can't understand that, to be honest," Elliott said. "In any kind. of music be it punk or heavy rock, or even country and western there's always a brilliant artist and there's always a shit artist. Like, in heavy metal, where you get a really good band, someone like UFO, you'll also get your Motorhead. I think Motorhead are fookin' terrible, I saw Motorhead at Sheffield City Hall. After two numbers I had to put me fingers in me ears (I knew the feeling). Lemmy's not got the sweetest o' voices at best of time. That night he had a cold. He sounded like ferret bein' strangled…”

"Wharr' I'm sayin' is there's good and there's bad in all sorts of music. But the press always seem to slag heavy rock wi'out thinkin'. Do you know why?" he puzzled.

I didn't. I simply pleaded guilty.

"I just don't see why they do it," Elliott continued, immersed now in the argument, giving his tonsils a hell of an airing. "I can't see how they do it. The Clash might be great, excitin' an' that - but musically they're not a patch on UFO. In my opinion, heavy rock is the second best music for the actual musical competence of people in't bands. Jazz rock I'd put top. People like Chick Corea and Billy Cobham, musically they're brilliant. To listen to I think they're borin'. I mean, one like John McLaughlin - now he's probably t'best guitarist in't world. I dunno, but I couldn't watch him play live, sittin' cross-legged on't bloody floor. I'd rather watch Chuck Berry play three notes and duckwalking, you know. I mean, you go to a concert, you expect summat to be goin' on. You don't want to see someone sittin' cross-legged on a bit of carpet sayin' prayers for audiences before he starts playin' guitar. I'd rather watch Clash, frankly."

Elliott pauses for breath. I rinse out my ears.

"I think," he says, "the majority of heavy rock bands are musically more talented than the majority of new wave bands, And probably put on a better show, too. I'm not sure, though - I imagine a band like the Boomtown Rats might put on a good show. But bands like the UK Subs, I imagine they'd be totally useless live, 'cos they're totally useless on record. That Charlie 'Arper, I think he's a waste of time. He looks old enough to be me grandad.”

So you resent the fact that the press characterises heavy metal bands and their audiences simply as moronic headbangers?

"Course I do," Elliott said. There is a lot of talent there. "It really does annoy me that the press will knock band cos they're labelled heavy rock. They say they're just another joke band, they can't play. But if they took the time to be totally unbiased and watched the bands they'd see a lot of people who can really play. Like Steve 'ere." He threw his thumb over his shoulder at Clark who was trying to light one of the two cigarettes he could obviously see in his mouth. "Steve can really play."

He paused dramatically.

"Steve were trained classical," he declared like a triumphant parent, commending his child on his first heart transplant operation.

I wondered, though, whether he thought that most heavy rock/HM bands didn't actually invite ridicule with their costumes, light shows, lasers, dry ice, leathers, perms and juvenile mysticism.

"There's summat in that," he said, sounding like Len Fairclough pondering a foreign body in his pint. “But I don’t think the songs and the music do.”

Clark took his nose out of his beer.

"I don't know what the kids think or what the press thinks," he said, his words sliding down his tongue like runaway toboggan down the north face of the Eiger, "but when we do a gig, we don't think we're heavy metal. For me, someone like Black Sabbath, Motorhead or Van Halen - that's heavy metal. We're not into noise. We like volume, but it's got to be nice. We're trying to make music that's appealing and exciting. If you like quiet bits, we've got quiet bits in our show…”

I told him I couldn't hear them for the noise. He ignored me.

“...if you like loud bits, we do that, too."

Elliott jumped in quickly to stress the variety of Def Leppard's material.

"You can't say all our songs are the same. There might be a basic similarity because they're all hard rock songs - so you're going to get your guitar solo and your wailing vocals an' all that nonsense. But we do all sorts of different things. Some of the songs we do are slow, some we do are ridiculously fast, some we do are quiet, some we do are loud. And we do some that are fast and slow in the same song."

A veritable Noah's Ark of variety!

I was prepared, after an incoherent outburst from Steve Clark about the virtuosity of mad Kraut guitarist Michael Schenker, to go on to the next point on the agenda. Elliott had been thinking, though.

"Frankly," he said, "I can see your point, where you say bands like us might be inviting criticism. because of the dry ice and the leather trousers and smoke bombs. But there's a certain obligation, certain unwritten rules you have to stick to. People expect things of you. If we ever did a tour of your Hammersmith Odeons and what have you, we no doubt would use dry ice in slow bits and open with an intro tape and have fookin' explosions every other second. It adds to the visual side of it. That's what people expect.”

"But," he said darkly, "the music press would just go, Phahblahblah - it was all dry ice, leather trousers, open-necked shirts, gold medallions, wailin' guitar solos, all the usual stuff - let's get back to the bar…”

I wondered where he had seen me in action.

"Thing is," he said, and I could sympathise with him, "because heavy rock has always been knocked, it will be knocked."

“But," said Clark, "it'll go on. It's existed for ten years, despite all t'other trends. And it'll last longer, than mod or ska, or whatever revival it is.”

This was unusually coherent for the guitarist. I asked him if he might explain the continuing appeal of heavy rock.

He tried, rather bravely in the circumstances.

"People who listen to heavy rock are workin'-class kids. They're not interested in fashions and trends. They don't give a shit about what's happenin' in't papers. They stick by what they know they like. They don't change image every week. Just 'cos there's supposed to be a mod revival, they won't sell all their Judas Priest albums and rush out an' get Secret Affair's album. They'll think, 'Fook it, I'll listen to what I want to listen to.’ They won’t change clothes just 'cos it's fashionable. If they want to wear flares, they'll fuckin' well wear 'em.”

Clark's fleeting reference to Secret Affair had conveniently brought us into the Eighties. I wanted to know what Def Leppard thought of various performers. With no real idea in mind I reeled off a few names: Springsteen, Costello, the Pretenders, the Specials.

"We don't dislike any of 'em," Clark smiled cheerfully.

"The Pretenders," grinned Elliott. "Chrissie Hynde. I'd like to marry 'er one day."

"We don't dislike anybody, really," Clark belched. "We like everythin'."

"I can't stand bands like Specials," Elliott blurted, destroying Clark's magnanimity. "An' what's that other load of tit tha's just coom out? The Beat. Can't stand 'em, either. Tha's mod. Don't appeal to me. As far as I can see they're just revampin' an' ruinin' old songs. Tears Of A Clown' by Smokey Robinson were brilliant, but Beat have done it and I think it's a load o' rubbish. Same wi't Specials. An' Madness, I don't know if I like 'em or 'ate 'em, 'cos every time I watch 'em I just crease up. They're really funny t'watch. They remind me of Split Enz to be honest, the way they kind of lumber about like idiots."

Clark is awake again. "Bands like Specials and Madness and the mods and th' parkas an' all that shit," he said, "all they're doin' is just re- vampin' what was happenin' in 1966. But what we're doin' isn't revampin' 1969 heavy metal. We're takin' them roots, but we're buildin' on 'em."

Exactly the same could be claimed for the Specials and ska, I protest.

"I don't know that much about ska," Elliott intervened tartly, "all I know is that they're revampin' summat that's older than heavy rock and they're not gettin' slagged for it. They're revampin' 1964 or whenever... Like the mods. Like, two or three year ago, the 'Oo were borin' old farts. Now they're t'heroes of all t'mods. Does that mean in 18 months their mod audience of now is goin' to be walking about wi' kind of Indian waistcoats wi' long dangly tassles?

"I reckon." Elliott calculated, "that by about 1983, we should have all these parkas thrown on't fire and they'll be gettin' headbands owt of cupboard again."

This argument had a certain logic; but weren't they really deluding themselves. Didn't even their kind of new wave heavy metal actually depend upon its predictability? The closer they stuck to the established clichés of the genre - in appearance, sound and presentation - surely the greater the chance of success? They weren't really straying too far away from classic HM themes of sexual dominance, celebrations of hedonism, macho posing, apocalyptic rantings about the end of the world.

"All right," Elliott argued, "So there are clichés in what we do. At same time I could run through thousands of punk songs that are all about the same old punk clichés. There they are, singing 'I wanna be an anarchist, I don't wanna conform, I'm on the dole. I've got no money an' life's so hard…’ All that crap. So you get some heavy metal band singing about death and destruction, astral trips t'moon an all that. But we haven't got songs about death and destruction… wi't exception of 'When The Walls Come Tumblin' Down'. That's the only one. Most of our songs are more poppy than anything else.”

"If you listen to 'Walls’" Clark said, "you'll realise that it don't revive all those things about death and destruction that you had in '69. It's lookin' forward.We wrote tha’ songs perhaps a year before all this crap came around in Iran and Afghanistan. If you listen to the words: 'All the people came together in fear of the end…’"

Yes?

"Well, it means something." Clark insists. "It's a prediction. It's not going back over that old Black Sabbath shit.”

"It's in the future tense," Elliott added, trying, presumably, to be enlightening. "If you ever get the chance to read t'words when album comes out, you'll see that they explain exactly what would happen if there's a massive atomic war. If there is ever an atomic war, I reckon that 90 per cent of those lyrics will prove to be accurate about what'll happen." He paused for a moment, considering this.

"Give or take the odd thing," he said at length. "Like the women bein' 'captured an' chained"."

"That's a cliché," Clark said, farting wetly.

"Maybe," said Elliott. "But the bit about 'national suicide'... you will get a lot of people killing themselves. And, like - ‘America fell to the ground' - you're goin' t'get buildin's fallin' down, you're goin' t'get kids left crippled, whether it's wi' atomic rays or wha'ever."

"Whole cities fallin' down," re-peated Clark dreamily.

"A lot of it'll be like that. Of course," Elliott added modestly, "I'm not sayin' that I'm some kind of messiah who can see into the future."

“I’d like you to know that I haven't got one Black Sabbath album," Clark admitted suddenly, as if this had been haunting him since childhood.

I quickly asked Elliott what Def Leppard thought about the other bands with whom they've been associated in the vanguard of the new wave of heavy metal. I mention Japan and Girl.

“I don't think Japan are heavy metal," he said authoritatively. "I don't think Japan are anything near to heavy metal. Japan to me are a brilliant band. I've got 'Adolescent Sex' and I think it's a great album. But it's not heavy metal. The fastest song on it's a Barbra Streisand song, 'Don't Rain On My Parade".

"I've never heard Girl. I can't really comment on them. But to be honest, I don't think they've got a future. Their image is all wrong."

Paragraph omitted. Starting back again with Joe...

"I've been in trouble before for sayin' that birds don't buy records. But I don't believe women buy as many records as blokes. An' I reckon they'll appeal more to birds. An' I don't think birds go to as many concerts or buy as many records. Of course, you've got your exceptions wi't Rollers where it were totally all birds. An' a lot of birds probably buy disco records. There are bound to be exceptions. But I think there's percentage of't lads that go to concerts”.

Elliott is convinced of Def Leppard's commercial success, though he admits it might not have been possible without the commercial breakthrough last year of both Judas Priest and UFO, I ask him why he thinks those bands finally found commercial success after years (15 between them) of unsuccessful stabs at the chart.

"They got airplay for a start," he said. "They tried to be more commercial. They made better records. They made commercial records. They didn't try to do in the studio what they do onstage. They made really good heavy rock albums instead of average heavy rock albums."

"They realised," added Clark, "that people don't want to see Jimmy Page playin' a 20-minute guitar solo wi't violin bow. It's out now. At same time, you don't want to go t'see t'Damned who don’t play a guitar solo all night. They want summat in between. Summat between the Dooleys and Black Sabbath."

“The fookin' Dooleys?" Elliott asked, utterly confused. "Wharra yer talkin' about now?"

"We're the Dooleys wi' goolies," Clark attempted to explain.

"Why do you keep bringing up the fookin' Dooleys?" Elliott demanded, still confused. "What 'ave we got ter do wi’t Dooleys?”

“We’re in't middle,” Clark struggled to clarify his statement. "People fed up wi’ bands shoutin’ about anarchy. There ‘as t’be a balance between bands like Rainbow, bands wi' ripped knees in't jeans and Genesis. An' I think the balance is us. We can play but we can still roar.”

Elliott looked at Clark, looked at me, looked confused. I was going to ask Clark to elaborate upon this point, but I didn't.

He'd fallen back upon the bed, unconscious.

#def leppard #joe elliott #steve clark #press cutting

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