Culture
Def Leppard guitarist Vivian Campbell talks with WOUB Culture ahead of upcoming shows with Journey and Cheap Trick
By: Nicholas Kobe
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CLEVELAND, Ohio (WOUB) – For decades British rock titans Def Leppard have embodied the over-the-top swagger of glam rock while creating a legacy of nearly universally celebrated music.
The band has produced some of mainstream hard rock and metal’s most successful albums, such as High and Dry, Pyromania, and Hysteria, the latter featuring seven songs that hit the Billboard Hot 100. They’re continuing the momentum with a new song, Just Like 73, featuring guitarist Tom Morello of Rage Against The Machine fame.
As Def Leppard pushes forward with their energetic performances, it’s clear they believe it’s better to burn out than to fade away.
WOUB’s Nicholas Kobe spoke with the band’s guitarist, Vivian Campbell, ahead of Def Leppard’s upcoming show with Journey and Cheap Trick July 30 at Progressive Field (2401 Ontario Street). Find a transcript of their conversation below, edited for length and clarity.
Nicholas Kobe: Alright, so the first question I have for you: if you had to describe Def Leppard in one sentence, how would you?
Vivian Campbell: Larger than life. Everything about the band is kind of bombastic and entertaining. I’m the new guy in the band. I’ve been with the band for 32 years, and when I joined, Joe (Elliott) always told me to think about Def Leppard as a Spielberg movie. It’s about escapism, it’s about entertainment, and that’s what we bring to the music and what we bring to the live performance as well. Everything is sort of larger than life, and the sign of the music from the drum sign to the layered vocal sign is so spectacular and so big that it sort of feels appropriate that we play in stadiums now. And with Leppard, we’ve always grown into the space. The bigger the venue, the more we bring to it in terms of the performance, the lights, just the staging, the show, everything about it. And this tour in particular, this stage is probably the biggest one we’ve done since the Adrenalize World Tour of the early ’90s, so it’s pretty spectacular.
Yeah. Speaking of this tour in particular, what’s it been like to be doing this stadium tour with Journey and Cheap Trick? What’s that been like? What’s your relationship with those two bands?
Campbell: Well, Journey we have toured with twice previously, first in 2006, and then again in 2018 and it’s all really about the hits. There’s a lot of overlap, I think, between people who are Journey fans and people who are Def Leppard fans in terms of just knowing the songs. I remember the first time that we toured with Journey in 2006. Obviously, I was familiar with a lot of their big hits, but hearing them backstage for the first time, I remember being surprised and thinking, ‘Oh yeah, I’d forgotten about that one. And there was another one.’ And the same is true of Def Leppard. I mean, there’s so much depth of catalog. So as a show, this is really a celebration of hit songs that are just embedded in the DNA of people that have been played on FM radio for literally decades. Music always transports people back to a place.
There’s always some memory associated with songs, and hopefully, it’s a good memory. Again, getting back to what I said earlier, it is just a joyous sort of celebration. There’s a lot of bad stuff in the world. When people come to a show like ours, they just want to, I guess, be nostalgic in a way, but also to just celebrate and just have that sense of community and a good time. Cheap Trick, of course, fits right in there. I mean, in terms of hit songs and in terms of being wonderful, wonderful people. I mean, we’ve toured and done many shows with Cheap Trick over the decades, and they’re a venerable band and just lovely human beings, just a joy to work with. So it’s a good way to spend the summer.
Absolutely. What do you think about the songs in the Def Leppard catalog? Why do you think they’ve stood the test of time compared to hit songs by other bands?
Campbell: There’s a lot of quality there. I mean, there’s quality in everything that Def Leppard does. The work ethic in the band is off the charts. It really is. We set a very, very high bar for ourselves and in every aspect of what we do in terms of the live performance, in terms of our physicality, in terms of writing the songs. That goes to your question. I mean, the songs were so, so well crafted. I always jokingly say, ‘when we are in the studio with Leppard, we’re trying to reinvent the wheel.’ We’re always trying to make something the best that it can be, and we’re not afraid to put the effort in. We’re also not afraid to spend a couple of weeks working on a song and then decide that there’s a better way to do it and just scrap all that and start all over again. It can be very frustrating at times, and I think most bands would just accept the first ideas or whatever that comes along. But in Leppard, we’re always trying to finesse the details and we’re always trying to make it the best that it can be. That quality is ingrained in the recorded music, and that’s why it’s stood the test of time.
Absolutely. Speaking of a recent effort of yours to reinvent the wheel and put out new music, you guys just put out a new single, Just Like 73 with Tom Morello. What was the process of writing that single, the inspiration behind it, and what was it like working with somebody like Tom Morello?
Campbell: Well, the song itself, first and foremost, I mean, we realize some people might say it’s futile for a band of our generation to be even trying to put out new music. We’d love to have a hit song, but that’s not why we put out music. I mean, we sort of do it to exercise the muscle and to stay relevant and creative and celebrate our joy for music.
And this song in particular, is literally is a celebration, an homage to the era that launched our careers and the desire that we all have to do what we do. In the early ’70s, it was the birth of the glam rock era, Marc Bolan and T. Rex, David Bowie, in the Ziggy Stardust incarnation. It was all this great, great music, and you can hear elements of that in the song itself. And it’s a little bit tongue in cheek, but it’s very, very much a celebration of our passion for the music.
It’s been getting some traction on whatever is radio nowadays. I’m not too sure what that encompasses exactly, but we’ve been playing the song live and it fits in well with the other songs because it’s undeniably a Def Leppard song. It has all of those elements of the, like I said, the bombast, the huge drums, the huge vocals, the attitude that we bring and that we have in the music that we write, and people who don’t even know the song seem to be responding really, really well to it because it has all of those elements. So we continue to do that. We continue to put out new music primarily for ourselves. It’s a secondary issue if people actually really like it, it’s a bit selfish, but it’s what we do.
Is that always the way that Def Leppard has functioned? Putting out music for yourselves? Or was there a point in time when you guys decided, ‘okay, that’s the best approach,’ rather than trying to have a hit record or critically acclaimed record or something like that?
Campbell: It’s almost impossible to distill what it takes to have a hit record nowadays, but the music industry is so fractured and so splintered. But there are pros and cons to that. I mean, the cons obviously are, it’s really, really hard to sell records. They don’t actually exist. I mean, the physical medium is essentially gone. There’s been a little resurgence in vinyl, but it’s never going to take up the slack of what has been lost for the music industry in terms of physical units. But the live touring industry has continued to be very, very much alive. And our audience has become multi-generational over the last couple of decades, which is really, really encouraging. We’re a high-energy band. We put on a high-energy show, and to have that more youthful element to our audience, it really drives us because we’re sort of vampires in a way. I mean, when we go out, we feed off of that energy of the audience. We’re playing songs that we’ve been playing for literally decades. So we need that confirmation from the audience. And when you have a bunch of 20 and 30-year-olds, people who are young enough to be our children in the audience, that really sort of drives us.
Absolutely. Is there an album or song by Leppard that you feel is underrated, or wish that you could include in the live set?
Campbell: There’s actually a lot. There’s an awful lot of songs that I feel that way about. There’s a lot of catalog with Def Leppard and there’s a lot of great catalog, even when you go deeper on the album cuts. Maybe selfishly as a guitarist, I appreciate playing the deeper album cuts. Like, take Hysteria, the album, for exmaple. The record yielded, I think it was seven hit singles or something. It was an awful lot of hit songs, so obviously you got to play the hit songs. But going back to that album, the song Gods of War is an incredible song. I think in terms of composition as a guitar player, it’s really, really fun to play. We’re not playing it on this tour, but things like that I think are worthy songs like that are worthy of being in this show. But we try to find a balance between the very obvious big, big hit songs that people want to hear.
We also keep in mind that it’s not just a Def Leppard show. Obviously we’re co-headlining with Journey and we have the Steve Miller Band and Cheap Trick there also. So there are going to be people in the audience that are not going to be familiar with those songs. So we sort of have to cater to that and find the right balance. Then also, we’re throwing in on this tour, like you said before, the song Just Like 73, which is brand new. So we have to find space for all of this within a 90-minute time slot. As such, our show on this tour is very, very fast-paced for us. I mean, we really put a lot of thought into it, and we are putting a lot of effort into it every night. There’s not a lot of breathing time. It’s action-packed.
I was looking at the set list and it’s pretty one after the other all the way through.
Campbell: It is, it’s a relentless show, but it fits the nature of what we’re trying to get across in 2024.
Absolutely. We’ve talked a little bit about what keeps the fans coming back to see Def Leppard, but for you as a musician and you and the rest of the band, what keeps you guys as Def Leppard? What keeps you guys inspired to keep pushing this thing along?
Campbell: Well, it is what we do, and I can genuinely say that we honestly do enjoy our work. We don’t take it for granted. There is a deep sense of gratitude in the band that we’ve had such a great successful career and that we’re still on an upward trajectory with a growing audience now that we’re all in our 60s. It’s quite surreal, really. We’ve always looked up to bands like those great British institutionalized rock bands like The Who and Queen and of course The Rolling Stones. We’ve always said, ‘well, we want to be like that.’
We want to aspire to be at that level. And we constantly, like I said, we’re reinventing the wheel in a way where we’re always trying to make each successive tour and performance more spectacular than the previous. And we do put the time into it, and we take great joy from it. There’s no one in the band who doesn’t want to be here. There’s no one in the band who would rather be off fishing or sailing or whatever, or golfing. We work hard at it. We go to the gym in the morning, we travel with a trainer, and we make sure we’re as physically able-bodied as possible to put on the best show. And it’s just a joyous celebration. I mean, what’s not to love?
Absolutely. I guess you’ve already kind of touched on this, but the last question I have for you is what does the future look like for Def Leppard?
Campbell: Well, we’ll continue to create new music because we need to do that for ourselves, and we need to do that to have some sort of relevance. When you look at The Rolling Stones, they are touring currently or were very recently, and I think they were playing about 18 or 19 songs in their show, and they had a new album that came out in the last year that was very, very well received. They’ve played a couple of songs off of that, but obviously they still have a truckload of hits that they’ve got to play, the people want to hear, and they did that. So you find that balance. For us creatively in recent years, we’ve reached a stage where we don’t stress too much about the genre of the song that we happen to write. In particular on the last studio album we had a couple of years ago was called Diamond Star Halos, and the album started off with a bunch of songs that Joe had written on piano. I jokingly called him Elton Joe when he first told me about these new songs, because they weren’t typical Leppard songs, primarily because they were composed from the piano as opposed to the guitar or around a drum beat or a vocal refrain or something.
But we are at that stage in our career where no matter what we do, it’s going to sound like Def Leppard. That’s exciting for us because it takes some of the shackles and some of the constraints off that we’ve had in previous decades when we’ve been making albums and we’ve been thinking, ‘Okay, we’ve really got to focus. What kind of album are we trying to make? What are we trying to say as Def Leppard here?’ And that seems to have fallen by the wayside, and that is very creatively liberating actually. I think we’re all very, very excited about taking that mindset forward into the next studio record and really not caring too much about whether or not we’re going to have a hit song or a hit album. That’s a futile mindset to bring to it. We do it for ourselves and for whatever percentage of our core audience wants to hear it. And if it happens to yield a hit song, well hallelujah. But it keeps us in that forward momentum. And again, going back to the aspect of joy and gratitude that we have,] like I say, there’s nobody that doesn’t want to be here. We still bring that attitude and that energy to our performance. We’re not in our 20s anymore, but we are breaking a sweat. I can tell you when we come off stage, we know that we’ve given 100 percent.