![]() Fuck, really? When we got together in 1977, Zeppelin had been going for around ten years. Because she doesn’t need any more scarves.Īnd this year is Def Leppard’s forty-fifth anniversary. I had a nice present for my mum on her ninetieth birthday: I’d found a tape, recorded in 1968, of her singing ten songs, including the one I wrote when I was eight. Even then I was being moulded to be a singer. I watched her play, singing all these Pete Seeger songs, and I said: “I want a guitar!” My dad said: “You can have one when you’ve learned to play your mum’s.” So I learned a few chords, just enough to accompany my voice. It was your mother Cynthia who inspired you to pick up a guitar. But in 1978, dad cleared out his bank account to lend me a hundred and fifty quid to make our first record. We had an outside toilet till I was eight, no telly till I was ten. My dad was a working-class guy and my mum was a nurse, so we didn’t have much money. Without your father, Joe Snr, the Def Leppard story might have turned out very differently. I wrote my first song when I was eight, so apples don’t fall far from the tree. My son Finlay loves music and has a weird sense of humour like me, and my daughter Lyla is five. While everybody else was having kids I was having a jolly old time. It changes everything – and it comes at you like a fucking express train! It’s not about me any more. But Viv was positive that he’d beat it, and, well, he’s still here! We were doing a Vegas residency, and the first day of rehearsals was when Viv said: “It’s cancer.” We were all in shock. In these past twenty-four years, the darkest days for Leppard were when guitarist Vivian Campbell was being treated for cancer. And with Bowie I thought: “This is mine!” It was a pivotal moment for me, as it was for so many people. When he did Starman on Top Of The Pops in 1972 I was twelve years old, hitting puberty, becoming more than just a kid, discovering my own music. Ian Hunter is my biggest hero, but Bowie is right up there. Lemmy had died at the end of 2015, and Bowie went just a few days later, so that whole time had a big impact on me. ![]() So I put on the TV and – boom! – there it was. I had all these messages saying “Have you heard?” When you read that, you know somebody’s died. I’ll never forget the moment I heard Bowie had died. And it was nice to have the freedom outside of the mothership. It’s not at all like Leppard, more like Elton and Bowie. I wrote those songs on the piano in the spirit of the seventies. It is – and especially so with the last album, because it wasn’t a covers record. ![]() Is that the definition of a labour of love? You formed Down ‘N’ Outz in 2009 as a tribute act, covering songs by your heroes. We ended up recording it completely remotely. Songs From The Sparkle Lounge had some great stuff, like Love.īut we really got our mojo back with the Def Leppard album and songs like Man Enough – which sounded like Another One Bites The Dust, but so what? We’ve always sounded like Queen! And with the new one, we’ve made a great album in bizarre circumstances. ![]() We recorded some of it in ABBA’s studio, dancing around to Waterloo, and maybe that rubbed off. In hindsight, Euphoria was a decent attempt, but the polite word for it would be ‘patchy’. It’s such a cliché to say that, but I do love this new one.
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