Page 31 - Classic Rock - The Complete Story of Def Leppard 2019

JOE ELLIOT
30 years old.
“We’ve been through so much as a
band,” Joe Elliott says. “What happened to
Rick, and what happened to Steve, is just
part of our story. With Rick, it was
triumph over tragedy. With Steve, there
was only tragedy. But this is what life is all
about, and we just have to accept it.”
After Rick Allen’s accident, in the
immediate aftermath, did you ever
seriously believe that he could play the
drums again?
We weren’t even sure he would live. He
was in kind of a semi-coma for a while.
But when he did wake up, and he
suggested that he could play again, I
thought he was insane. I’m not going to
pretend that any of us thought, oh, he’ll be
fine – of course he can play the drums.
When he said, ‘I’ve figured out a way
around it’, we all thought he was
completely bonkers. We were like, ‘Okay,
that’s the morphine talking.’
When did you start to believe he could?
About a week after he woke up, he began
tapping his feet on this piece of sponge at
the bottom of his bed. With his feet and
his right hand, he was getting paradiddles
going and all this stuff. It was Mutt who
breakfast of coffee
gave him the confidence that he could do
served on Leppard
this. And then a guy from Sheffield, Pete
Hartley, designed a special kit for Rick.
That kit is now on display in the Hard
Rock Café in Vegas. When you look at it
now, it’s jurassic. It’s kind of laughable to
think that’s what got him back. But at the
time, for Rick, it was fantastic.
Even so, when Rick returned to working
with the band at Wisseloord studios in
Holland, were you all apprehensive
about whether he could cut it?
Well, he came back to the studio six weeks
after the accident – and he was meant to
be in the hospital for six months. That
was pretty amazing. What Rick did was
lock himself away in this small room as he
was relearning to play the drums. A
couple of times we’d sneak up to the door
and hear his playing and go, Hmmm,
yeah. But we really left him alone. You
don’t want to watch somebody fall off a
horse. You had to think of his dignity. He
needed a bit of privacy to recover from
something that’s so traumatic. There was
no precedent for what he was going
International through – to lose an arm and then carry
jet set: a healthy
on being a professional drummer at this
and cigarettes is level. As Rick says, there’s no book of
Airways flights. one-armed drummers to refer to. You’ve
got to make it up as you go along.
So when did you know that he was
ready to play?
He came out of that room one day and
said, ‘I want you all to come and listen to
something.’ So we all went in there and it
was like going in for the reading of a will.
Meaning what?
I didn’t really know where to look or what
to do. But then Rick gets on the kit and
starts playing When The Levee Breaks, and
I’m thinking: fuck me, it sounds like John
Bonham! Okay, it’s not the hardest thing
in the world to play, but in that moment
Rick had the courage to come and get us
and let somebody else finally listen to
what he had. And when he finished, we all
burst into tears.
In the summer of 1986, the band took a
break from recording to play a number
of Monsters Of Rock festival shows in
Europe, the first of which was at
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