Part One: The Making Of 'Def Leppard
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MusicTranscript
00:00 [Music]
00:26 The beginnings of the new record, we decided to just get together for one month.
00:33 And some of us had got some songs written, some of us had got just ideas.
00:38 And we just thought, look, we're not going to finish an album in a month,
00:42 but let's get together in the studio, see what comes out of it, but don't go beyond the month.
00:49 Let's try and do as much as we can.
00:51 And it was great. We all got together and listened to everybody's ideas
00:58 and then just picked them off one at a time, the ones that we wanted to go in and start working on.
01:04 We all got in one room together and just laid them down as a band.
01:12 We just flowed. Within two days we had pretty much five or six songs
01:17 and by the end of the week we had like fourteen or twelve songs on the go.
01:21 So we thought, you know what, we're going to make an album for us,
01:26 for the fact that we love music and we like writing songs and making Death Label music.
01:32 [Music]
01:39 It was kind of done in stages of essentially three periods of a month long of building the album.
01:49 And it was kind of nice to do that. There was no pressure.
01:52 You could learn to live with the ideas as they were progressing.
01:56 You weren't losing any perspective by having to day after day after day after month after month
02:03 go through the same sort of songs.
02:06 It was a really nice sort of way of letting the album grow in a natural way.
02:12 We were able to go away and listen to the songs, really listen to them,
02:17 and then with that hindsight be able to come up with the best part that we could possibly come up with,
02:27 whether that was drums, vocals, guitar, whatever.
02:30 So that's been the process.
02:33 We go away, listen, and then the second time we got together we were able to just modify
02:40 and just focus in on what was really important so that we liked the songs as much as we possibly could
02:48 and actually be fans of the music that we made.
02:52 [Music]
03:00 We're actually a really, really good live band, but we're not very good usually at capturing that in the studio.
03:06 And the reason for that is that normally the way the band works is very methodical,
03:11 very piecemeal, one guy at a time.
03:15 And it's very difficult to capture the subtle, nuanced dynamics that a live band has
03:21 when you're doing it one guy at a time.
03:23 So we set up in the studio, the five of us in one room, so we could all make eye contact
03:29 and we started playing some rock ideas and we managed to bang about five or six rock song ideas
03:38 in the first couple of weeks, which was great.
03:40 And that was really easy and we kind of knew that that would be the easy part of the record.
03:43 But then after that we thought, well, we're not really just that kind of band anymore,
03:52 so we're not looking for a straight up rock record.
03:55 We wanted to kind of embrace some of the more diverse elements that the band is known for,
04:01 the production elements, the kind of pop/shame big production thing.
04:07 And so that's when we started scratching our head a lot and thinking,
04:11 "Okay, what kind of song do we need next?"
04:13 Now that inevitably happens with every Def Leppard record
04:16 and that's when it starts getting a little bit more painstaking.
04:20 [Music]
04:30 One thing that I think we were really conscious of is making something that is a little more diverse
04:37 than some of the records and albums we've done in the past.
04:41 We all knew that by this stage we have a certain style anyway.
04:47 Our sound is very much based in the fact that the way that we orchestrate our guitar parts,
04:54 the way that our backing vocals blend together, there's a sound.
04:59 So those ingredients are never going to go away.
05:02 So we knew that whatever we do, it's essentially going to end up sounding indicative of Def Leppard.
05:09 But we also wanted to just not be confined to specific songwriting things that we've done in the past.
05:19 Basically anything that sounded good, regardless of how it came about or what it represented,
05:27 was put forward and was worked on to get to a point where it was good enough to get on the album.
05:36 Even if it was just starting off with an acoustic guitar idea, it was progressed.
05:42 And from that point of view it was great to not really be confined to going,
05:48 "Well we can't really do this because it doesn't really sound like a Def Leppard song at this point in time."
05:53 So it kind of gets left.
05:55 In fact, the first track on the album, "Let's Go," is a combination of three completely different ideas
06:04 that I had from years back, that every so often it just so happens that you put them together
06:11 and it all kind of works in the right environment.
06:14 A lot of things happen like that on the new album.
06:17 We'd work for a month and we'd take the tapes home and Phil would play them to his friends in California
06:23 and I'd be playing to my friends in Dublin and Sam would be playing to his friends in Sheffield.
06:27 Before you put the tape on, somebody would say, "So you've got some new songs. What does it sound like?"
06:33 And we all ended up saying, "It sounds like Def Leppard."
06:37 And I think when we all realised that that's what we'd been saying out loud,
06:41 Phil said, "Why don't we just call the album Def Leppard because we've never done it?"
06:45 So it was pretty simple really why we did it.
06:48 I said, "Let's call it Def Leppard because we're making it for us and no one else, plus we've never had a self-titled album."
06:54 So that's pretty much how that came about.
06:56 It was an EP and it ended up an album for the right reasons, because we wanted to make music.
07:01 [Music]
07:07 I think it played a part, Viv's illness, played a part in pretty much how we approached things after we'd done the Viva Hysteria thing in Vegas.
07:18 Because we found out there, it's like, "Oh, right."
07:21 I've been dealing with lymphoma for the last almost three years.
07:27 I did three rounds of chemo and that didn't take care of it.
07:32 And then exactly a year ago I went into hospital for about three and a half weeks to do a stem cell transplant.
07:39 [Music]
07:44 [Music]
07:53 Well, I'd have to go with "Let's Go" first because it's so classically Leppard.
07:59 Again, it came very naturally. A lot of people might think that we just sat down to try and rewrite "Sugar," but we didn't.
08:05 That's a song that was very close to my heart. It was something that was...