Joe Elliott interview: ‘Adversity doesn’t have to destroy what you have’

There he is, peering out of a Zoom screen, with his long silver hair framing his face. Although he’s a resident of Stepaside in Dublin since 1989, Def Leppard frontman Joe Elliott is chatting with the Business Post Magazine from Los Angeles.

The City of Angels, he says, is more of a crucial hub for the international music industry than anywhere else in the world. Elliott and Def Leppard, the band he co-founded over 45 years ago, are not only rehearsing for their pandemic-delayed tour of US stadiums, but also promoting their new album, Diamond Star Halos.

“We have a fairly extensive rehearsal space here for the band,” Elliott says. “We rent it, but it’s the proverbial aircraft hangar full of equipment. Two of the band live here, and a lot of the tour and sound crew live here, so it’s a central location.”

I ask what the 18-year-old Elliott would have thought if he had known that in a future life he and his beloved band would be rehearsing for a highly anticipated US tour in their LA-based personal warehouse.

Elliott beams. “Oh, I would have dreamed about that. As a kid I was an avid reader of every music paper, except the NME – even at that age, it seemed to me that unless you were Elvis Costello or somebody extremely cool, the writers at NME regarded you as a joke. But in other music papers like Melody Maker and Sounds, I would read about all these bands that had warehouses full of stuff and think: ‘Wow, it must be amazing to be able to walk into a place and choose which guitar you’d like to play that day’.”

The reality is somewhat more prosaic, he admits. “We have many, many instruments but they’re items you use only for a while. You’re not going to throw them out, though, so you store them away because you can, and they just stay there gathering dust until they become useful again.”

It was far from personal warehouses that Elliott was raised. Born in Sheffield in 1959, he was the archetypal child inspired by the Beatles. One of his first memories was singing Love Me Do while inexpertly strumming a plastic Paul McCartney guitar. He was four years of age.

“I was the kid who was barely old enough to stand in front of a vacuum cleaner hose, which to me looked a lot like a microphone,” Elliott says. “I would sing into the handle, songs by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Troggs, the Tremeloes, the Move, the Who – whatever was in the charts in the 60s.

“As the early 1970s arrived, I found my own era of music, which was glam rock/pop – T Rex, David Bowie, Slade. The pivot was seeing Bowie on Top of the Pops singing Starman. That made me and countless others reckon that we had to do music, not just for a living, but as a vocation.

“I remember at school, being beaten up by Slade fans because I admitted to liking T Rex – because Marc Bolan wore glitter on his cheeks and flouncy satin and velvet clothes. I was like, why can’t you like T Rex as well as Slade? Why not? What is wrong with you people!?”

From the beginning, Elliott adds, it has always been about authenticity, commitment and conviction. He reckons he was lucky enough to have grown up as a teenager in a decade that witnessed tumultuous changes in pop culture. It didn’t matter to him and his bandmates whether or not their music was viewed as uncool – while emerging local Sheffield music acts such as the Human League, Heaven 17, ABC and Clock DVA, were being praised to the hilt by NME, Def Leppard were viewed as the desperately orthodox outliers.

“It didn’t matter whether you were the Nolans or Black Sabbath, provided there was an enthusiasm to be real about it. We weren’t jumping on any current bandwagon, and we didn’t think we should buy some synthesisers and put them behind plexiglass. I remember the Human League’s Phil Oakey and I used to hang out in the same record shop in Sheffield, Record Collector in Broomhill. We’d be flicking through the racks and nodding to each other as we both reached for the same album. We were exactly the same at the start of our careers, each of us full of ideas and ambitions, but Phil went towards synths, and I stayed with guitars.”

The guitars have never been forgotten or misplaced, and as the usual early struggles made way for the level of commercial success that a teenage Elliott might not have thought remotely possible, Def Leppard became megastars. Throughout the 1980s, as one album followed another, the band were like an unstoppable rock/pop missile. Two albums, in particular, sealed the commercial deal: 1983’s Pyromania and 1987’s Hysteria. The former sold ten million copies in the US alone; the latter eclipsed it with worldwide sales of over 20 million.

Subsequent albums wouldn’t sell as much (although seven million-plus copies of 1992’s Adrenalize would these days be viewed as a staggering commercial triumph), and so, as the 1990s became the 2000s, the band’s fortunes wavered. How does any music act negotiate 40-plus years of commercial and critical success, however, and how do they avoid pitfalls that inevitably arrive?

Throughout such a lengthy period of time, says Elliott, there are always going to be what he terms (perhaps too casually) slip-ups. He mentions two. In January 1985, following a car crash on New Year’s Eve 1984, the left arm of the band’s drummer Rick Allen was amputated. (With the help of technology, Allen overcame this setback to continue serving as a drummer.) Six years later, in early January 1991, the band’s guitarist Steve Clark died from respiratory failure caused by a lethal mixture of alcohol and prescription drugs.

“Those are extreme, I suppose, and are up there in the headline and trauma departments,” Elliott says. “Without trivialising either of those incidents, they are two-offs, so to speak. If you look at 45 years of any band or musician, however, and you’re asked how it was overall, then for us, apart from those two events it kind of went exactly how you might expect it to go.”

As for Elliott, he remains one of the last standing authentic, unabashed rock star frontmen. A wholly agreeable bloke (and he is very much a ‘bloke’, not quite reconstructed) with opinions on everything under the sun, he has three children. Marriage in 2004 to former Def Leppard tour crew member Kristine Wunschel has brought him one son (Finlay, born in 2009) and two daughters (Lyla, 2016, Harper, 2020). Having kids earlier in life wasn’t for him, he says. “I was 50, and I was ready for it. I wasn’t ready for it at 30 or 40. I wasn’t with the right people, but I am now.”

His Covid experience was as you might imagine. “Were there challenges during the past two years? Yes, of course, but we looked at them from a logical point of view. We couldn’t go anywhere, but we have a nice garden, a gym, a recording studio, a computer, brains, pen and paper, guitar, piano, and a phone. We were fine, and I’m not ever forgetting that during that time people were dying, their relatives weren’t allowed to visit them, or attend their funerals, and so on. All we could do was the best we could to stay safe.”

Touring is the next step in the promotional and performative areas. Is Elliott still up for the repetitive and sometimes health-battering long slog of buses, hotels, gigs, aftershow parties, and meet and greets?

“I have my health and my hair!” he says. “It isn’t that I’ve been without health issues, of course. I’ve had two rotator cuff operations, a knee replacement, and I got double pneumonia twice in 2014 while touring, but I’m in good health, generally speaking.”

Making what he and his bandmates consider a life-affirming new album “is a wonderful thing, especially as we’ve been around for so long. That adds to keeping you healthy, it kept us in good spirits, especially in your head, and anything else doesn’t really matter.”

As a band, he says, Def Leppard has always had a collective mentality “akin to the Knights of Ni in Monty Python and the Holy Grail – he keeps getting limbs chopped off, but he continues to fight or wants to fight, at least. That has always been our philosophy. We learned life lessons through what happened to Rick and Steve, the most important being that adversity doesn’t have to destroy what you have. You can rise above it, take it on and add it to your armour”.

Diamond Star Halos is on release through Mercury/Bludgeon Riffola, and available on streaming platforms