Page 111 - Classic Rock - The Complete Story of Def Leppard 2019

ROCKS

OFF

In the post-grunge 1990s, traditional hard rock was on the back
foot – and so were Def Leppard. The solution would be to strip it

all down then build it back up again with Slang and Euphoria…

Words: Paul Elliott

t was a gamble and they knew it. In 1995, fuck is going on here? As far as I could understand
during the recording of Def Leppard’s sixth it, the only clear directive was that we couldn’t
album, Slang, it had a bleakly humorous make a Def Leppard-sounding record.”
Iworking title: Commercial Suicide. “We knew that Vivian cites Soundgarden’s 1994 album
people would wonder what the hell we were doing,” Superunknown, and the song Black Hole Sun
singer Joe Elliott says. “But we couldn’t make especially, as an influence on Def Leppard in the
another album like Adrenalize. We had to do making of Slang. A deeper influence was in what
something else. So we did something that nobody the individual members of the group were
expected. Slang was our grown-up album.” experiencing in their personal lives.
A change in Def Leppard’s music had begun with “There was a lot of emotional turmoil going on,”
the 1993 album Retro Active, the follow-up to Joe says. “Death and birth, marriage and divorce.
Adrenalize. The sound of it was leaner, harder, less None of this stuff existed when we were writing the
slick: partly in reaction to Adrenalize, which was, in other records. Those records were all about rocking
guitarist Phil Collen’s words, “a little mechanical”; out and having a good time. It was very different
and partly in reaction to how music was developing with Slang.” As Phil says: “The mood of the album
in the early ’90s, as alternative rock had a seismic was kind of dark, and it wasn’t something we did
effect akin to the punk explosion of 1977, the year on purpose, it was just how it turned out.”
in which Def Leppard formed. For all that, Joe recalls the recording of the album
According to bassist Rick Savage, the band’s as a time of fun, as the band lived and worked
approach to Slang was not clearly defined from the together at a house in Spain that had been the
outset. “We weren’t totally sure exactly what the setting for the second series of British comedy
direction was,” he admits, “but we knew what the drama Auf Wiedersehen, Pet. “That was our home and
direction wasn’t. We didn’t want to try to recreate our studio,” Joe says. “And we had a ball out there,
Hysteria again, and we could never be Nirvana, but enjoying the sunshine and creating these songs.”
we could make an album that was representative of Co-produced by the band with Pete Woodroffe,
the five of us that would fit in with the times the album was recorded in “an old-fashioned style”,
without us looking like stupid old farts.” as Rick Savage calls it. “We were playing as a band,
Not everyone was quite on the same page. basically,” he says. “The backing tracks were almost
Former Dio guitarist Vivian Campbell had replaced live – how we sounded in a rehearsal room – and
the late Steve Clark in 1992. This would be the first then we enhanced it from there.” Central to this
full album he recorded with the band. more organic approach was drummer Rick Allen’s
“It was very confusing,” Vivian says. “I was reversion to a semi-acoustic kit. “It was another
making a record for the first time with the mighty challenge,” he says, “but I loved the feel of it.”
Def Leppard, and it was almost as if Def Leppard In this environment, new ideas came into play.
was afraid to be Def Leppard. I tried not to rock the “It was great for us to flex our muscles in a different
boat or ask too many questions – just go with the way,” Phil says. “We had an orchestra playing
flow of it. But deep down I was thinking, what the Indian instruments on Turn To Dust, which was É

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