Part One: The Making Of 'Def Leppard
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00:00The
00:27beginnings of the new record, we decided to just get together for one month. Some of
00:35us had got some songs written, some of us had got just ideas, and we just thought, look,
00:40we're not going to finish an album in a month, but let's get together in the studio, see
00:44what comes out of it, but don't go beyond the month. Let's try and do as much as we
00:50can. It was great. We all got together and listened to everybody's ideas and then just
00:59picked them off one at a time, the ones that we wanted to go in and start working on. We
01:04all got in one room together and just laid them down as a band. We just flowed. Within
01:14like two days, we had pretty much five or six songs, and at the end of the week, we
01:18had like 14 or 12 songs on the go. So we thought, you know what, we're going to make an album
01:24for us, for the fact that we love music and we like writing songs and making Def Leppard
01:31music. It was kind of done in stages of essentially three periods of a month long of building
01:47the album, and it was kind of nice to do that. There was no pressure. You could learn
01:52to live with the ideas as they were progressing. You weren't losing a perspective by having
01:58to day after day after day after month after month go through the same sort of songs. So
02:05it was a really nice sort of way of letting the album grow in a natural way. We were able
02:12to go away and listen to the songs, really listen to them, and then with that hindsight,
02:20be able to come up with the best part that we could possibly come up with, whether that
02:27was drums, vocals, guitar, whatever. So that's been the process. We'd go away, listen, and
02:35then the second time we got together, we were able to just modify and just focus in on what
02:42was really important so that we liked the songs as much as we possibly could and actually
02:48be fans of the music that we made. We're actually a really, really good live band, but we're
03:03not very good usually at capturing that in the studio, and the reason for that is that
03:07normally the way the band works is very methodical, very piecemeal, one guy at a time, and it's
03:15very difficult to capture the subtle, nuanced dynamics that a live band has when you're
03:21doing it one guy at a time. So we set up in the studio, the five of us in one room so
03:27we could all make eye contact, and we started playing some rock ideas, and we managed to
03:34bang about five or six rock song ideas in the first couple of weeks, which was great,
03:40and that was really easy, and we kind of knew that that would be the easy part of the record,
03:43but then after that, we thought, well, we're not really just that kind of band anymore,
03:52so we're not looking for a straight-up rock record. We need to kind of embrace some of
03:56the more diverse elements that the band's known for, the production elements, the kind
04:03of pop, sheen, big production thing, and so that's when we started scratching our
04:09head a lot and thinking, okay, well, what kind of song do we need next? Now, that inevitably
04:14happens with every Def Leppard record, and that's when it starts getting a little bit
04:18more painstaking.
04:19One thing that I think we were really conscious of is making something that is a little more
04:36diverse than some of the records and albums we've done in the past. We all knew that by
04:44this stage, we have a certain style anyway. Our sound is very much based in the fact that
04:51the way that we orchestrate our guitar parts, the way that our backing vocals blend together,
04:58there's a sound. So those ingredients are never going to go away, so we knew that whatever
05:03we do, it's essentially going to end up sounding indicative of Def Leppard, but we also wanted
05:11to just not be confined to specific songwriting things that we've done in the past. Basically,
05:21anything that sounded good, regardless of how it came about or what it represented,
05:27was put forward and was worked on to get to a point where it was good enough to get on
05:35the album. Even if it was just starting off with an acoustic guitar idea, it was progressed.
05:43From that point of view, it was great to not really be confined to going, well, we can't
05:49really do this because it doesn't really sound like a Def Leppard song at this point in time,
05:53so it kind of gets left. In fact, the first track on the album, Let's Go, is a combination
06:02of three completely different ideas that I had from years back, that every so often,
06:09it just so happens that you put them together and it all kind of works in the right environment.
06:14A lot of things happen like that on the new album. We'd work for a month and we'd take
06:19the tapes home and Phil would play them to his friends in California and I'd be playing
06:24to my friends in Dublin and Sam would be playing to his friends in Sheffield. Before you put
06:29the tape on, somebody would say, so you've got some new songs, what does it sound like?
06:34We all ended up saying it sounds like Def Leppard and I think when we all realised that
06:39that's what we'd been saying out loud, Phil said, why don't we just call the album Def
06:44Leppard because we've never done it. So it was pretty simple really why we did it.
06:48I said, let's call it Def Leppard because we're making it for us and no one else plus
06:52we've never had a self-titled album. So that's pretty much how that came about. Yeah, it
06:56was an EP and it ended up an album for the right reasons because we wanted to make music.
07:07I think it played a part, Viv's illness, played a part in pretty much how we approached things
07:15after we'd done the Viva Hysteria thing in Vegas because we found out there, it's like,
07:20right. Yeah, I've been dealing with lymphoma for the last almost three years. I did three
07:28rounds of chemo and that didn't take care of it and then exactly a year ago I went into
07:35hospital for about three and a half weeks to do a stem cell transplant.
07:51Well, I'd have to go with Let's Go first because it's so classically Leppard that, again, it
08:00came very naturally. A lot of people might think that we just sat down to try and rewrite
08:03Sugar but we didn't. That's a song that was very close to my heart. It was something that
08:08was...