Joe Elliott on a NEW Def Leppard Movie: “We’d have to pull out a lot of truths that were never told” – ‘Drastic Symphonies’ – 2023 – CD/LP/VINYL
Def Leppard: On newsstands now, new interview w/ Joe and Metro 📰 New album ‘Drastic Symphonies’ out May 19th via Mercury Records.
An excerpt from the interview has been provided below. You can read more @ this location.
On Doing a Def Leppard Big Screen Biopic:
Joe Elliott:
There’s always something being discussed, but let’s not forget there was an MTV movie in 1999 that was f**king awful! It was low-budget, badly researched, and I had to intervene at one stage to say ‘you can’t put Phil in the band while we’re doing High ‘n’ Dry’. We’d get slaughtered by our fans. Anything that happens from here on will be a hell of a lot more accurate. There is a story to tell, but the only problem is from a media perspective it’s just about two big things: Rick’s arm and Steve’s death. After that, there isn’t much that would surprise anyone.
I can walk down the street in a Def Leppard shirt on show day and no one knows who I am! We’d have to pull out a lot of truths that were never told to make it interesting.
On the Future of Rock Music:
Rock was always dead until it came back. But bands like us, Bon Jovi, Mötley Crüe, we had MTV. Nowadays kids just shove their headphones on, not talking to their parents or their mates. It’s a very insular world. Which is why I think playing live has become very important because people have to rub shoulders.
These days you get a top 10 album and the next week it’s gone, there’s no build. Hysteria took 49 weeks to reach number 1 in America. That will never happen again because the industry has changed, but our streaming figures are up there with the Beatles and the Stones.
There’s something about familiarity or a respect for our generation. Some of these new bands write great songs and they’re going about it the right way, but they aren’t getting the chance. I don’t think it’s their fault, and that’s the scary bit. Even scarier is that Def Leppard started in ’77 and we’re still talking about us in 2023. Are we still gonna be talking about these newer bands in 2065?
On collaborating with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra on the Upcoming Album, Drastic Symphonies:
It wasn’t ever on my bucket list, and I know we’re far from the first band to do it, but it was special. We’ve done so many things outside of the norm, like working with Taylor Swift, Tim McGraw, Alison Krauss. This felt like the logical next step, but we wanted to get involved. Not just hand over the tapes and say ‘go on, slap some strings on this’. We’d done a lot of work for this before the orchestra was done. I rerecorded some of the vocals and we changed things. We went down to Abbey Road to watch the orchestra recording from the balcony, and it felt really good seeing what they did to our art.
You can read more @ this location.
Def Leppard tour the UK and Europe with Mötley Crüe from May 22 – July 6.
The band’s new album Drastic Symphonies is released on May 19 via Mercury Records.
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