Instead they pushed ahead by working remotely from their homes, recording song ideas and individual parts on laptops. But the pandemic nixed that plan, the first lockdown beginning in the week when the band were due to get together in Dublin. Rick Allen is in London attending to band business, taking a break from family life in California, where he lives near the town of Monterey with his wife and their 11-year-old daughter.įor the recording of Diamond Star Halos, the original plan was essentially the same as it’s been since 1999: to work at Elliott’s home studio, named – with a nod to Frank Zappa – Joe’s Garage. Vivian and his wife Caitlin, who married in 2014, recently moved to New Hampshire, on America’s eastern seaboard. Guitarist Vivian Campbell is in the Irish town of Donegal, in the house where he spent his summers growing up, now owned by his brother John after their parents passed away some 12 years ago. He has a grandchild, and another on the way “another invasion,” as he jokingly puts it. Bassist Rick Savage – known to all simply as ‘Sav’ – is in Sheffield, the band’s home town, where he has remained except for a 15-year period when he lived in County Wicklow, 10 minutes from where Joe lives now. Phil Collen is in Los Angeles, his house now filled with the noise of his three-year-old son, an echo of times gone by for a man whose eldest daughter is in her thirties. Joe Elliott is at the home in County Dublin that he shares with wife Kristine and their two young children. When the five members of Def Leppard talk to Classic Rock – about the new album and all that has led up to it – they are spread far and wide. But if you hang in there, you might just pop out the other side…” “If you stick around long enough,” Joe Elliott says, “you will go through a drift period – the wilderness years, as people like to call it. Def Leppard have come a long way since Phil Collen lost his shit at that state fair. And now they're part of the biggest US rock event of the summer, The Stadium Tour, co-headlining with another superstar act from their original purple patch in the 80s, Mötley Crüe. May saw the release of Diamond Star Halos, the most anticipated new Def Leppard album since Adrenalize back in 1992. In 2022 their stock is as high as it’s been in decades. The change that Phil Collen demanded – and that every member of the band agreed upon – would lead, in time, to a late-career renaissance. “What I thought,” he says, “is that we’re in a rut and we need to change. The thought of leaving the band never entered Phil Collen’s mind. But in 2005 they found they were fighting a losing battle. The band had also weathered the storm of the alternative rock revolution of the early 90s, which had destroyed the careers of lesser 80s stars. Sheer force of will had seen them through the darkest times: drummer Rick Allen losing his left arm after a car crash on New Year’s Eve 1984 guitarist Steve Clark succumbing to alcoholism and dying at the age of 30 in 1991. For a band that had sold millions of records during the golden days of the 80s, it was a bitter pill to swallow. I just thought: ‘I don’t want to do this any more.’”Īt the time, the humiliation of their predicament burned deep. Like: ‘Are we going on before the puppet show?’” I was so pissed off. They put fucking deck chairs out! It was full-on Spinal Tap. “It was like a carnival,” he says, “if you can imagine doing a gig at a carnival.
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