Page 40 - Classic Rock - The Complete Story of Def Leppard 2019

unday, August 24, 1980: the then crumbling beneath the twin economic perils
final night of Reading of rampant inflation and sharply rising national
festival. Second-on-the-bill unemployment figures.
to headliners Whitesnake, “We were teenagers,” says Savage, “and we had
this should be the crowning this belief that anything was possible. When that
glory of what has been a way of thinking is moulded into the group at that
momentous year for Def very early stage, it never really leaves you.”
Leppard. Instead disaster It would be several more years before a new
awaits them. No longer the generation of British fans would come along that
S darlings of the New Wave had grown up with the same aspirations. None of
Of British Heavy Metal, thanks to poisonous which seemed probable back in the cold, stark
reviews of their debut album On Through The Night, winter of 1980, as Leppard set about writing the
and being lambasted for sounding ‘too American’ follow-up to their provocative debut. The result
– a hanging offence in 1980 – Leppard have was an even more outgoing and determinedly
suddenly taken on the mantle of sell-outs, even America-friendly album called High ’N’ Dry.
traitors. At least to a particularly vociferous section “The trouble was, we were moving so fast, we
of hard-core metal fans, that is. couldn’t see that we were doing anything wrong,”
Party Seven (seven-pint) beer kegs says Elliott. Indeed, it had been the
– some not empty – fly onto band’s energy and colour that had
the stage as the band run about first attracted people to Def
on it, doing their best to ignore Leppard. At the time I first saw
them. Eggs are thrown at them. them play live, opening for
A huge grass sod flies up and Sammy Hagar at London’s
hits guitarist Pete Willis square Hammersmith Odeon, in
in the bollocks. September 1979, I was working
“Some of it was self-inflicted,” as a PR with both old- and new-
Leppard singer Joe Elliott admits wave rock and metal bands such
today. “I went on stage in a pair as Thin Lizzy and Black Sabbath,
of bright-red trousers, and a the Damned and Motörhead.
white shirt covered in hearts. Unburdened by the narrow
That was me going: ‘I’m not parameters of the self-styled
fucking wearing a leather jacket and jeans like NWOBHM scene, as then portrayed each week in
every other bastard band in this movement that Sounds, I saw only a British band with a very
we don’t think we’re in anyway.’” definite international future.
Be that as it may, it hadn’t stopped Elliott and When their greater ambitions led them to fall
Leppard lapping up the attention that their self- foul of the NWOBHM police, they were puzzled.
financed, self-titled EP was given in music weekly As Elliott points out, by the time Leppard set off for
Sounds – birthplace of the NWOBHM – when it was their first US tour, in the late spring of 1980, “there
released a year before. After championing them, was nowhere else left [in Britain] to play”. They
along with Iron Maiden, as the cream of the had played 47 club shows already that year, “from
NWOBHM crop, Sounds had done a 360-degree Aberdeen to Bournemouth”. When On Through
turn on Leppard, accusing them of being more The Night came out in March ’80 and went Top 20,
interested in pursuing the American dollar than in they moved up to theatres, proudly selling out
making it big in their own backyard. That their biggest local venue, Sheffield City Hall. “The
perception was only reinforced by the release of the next logical thing to do was what every great
album’s apparent mission-statement, Hello America. British band has ever done – go to the States and
“I swear to God we really weren’t that see if we can crack it.”
intelligent,” bassist Rick Savage says with a laugh. Iron Maiden had actually arrived in America a
“It was the lyrics of a kid fantasising… I can see month before. “I didn’t see them getting any flak,
how people read into it, but it was way more nor should they have. So why the hell did we?”
innocent than that, way more naive.” The answer, of course, lay beyond the music.
Not that the people throwing crap at them on Leppard had never conformed to the blokey
stage at the Reading festival in 1980 saw things that stereotype of the NWOBHM. Young, exciting and
way. Regarded now as the lowest point of their defiant, with their musical and sartorial influences
career, Reading may have shown the young as much about Queen and
Leppards to be naive; innocent they most David Bowie as about Led
assuredly were not. Zeppelin and Judas Priest,
there was never anything
ormed in Sheffield in 1977, Def Leppard remotely ’umble about their
had always been a band with big plans. ’eaviness. These attributes set
FHence the later ditching of the small-town Leppard apart from the
management team that got them their major inherently parochial mien of
record deal with Phonogram, in 1979, and any so-called movement with
replacing them with Leber-Krebs, the same New the word ‘British’ in its title.
York-based management operation behind the It wasn’t just in the pages of
then-recent Stateside success of AC/DC, and who the music press they were
went on to form Q-Prime. now being attacked, either. It
No wonder they so soon inspired the sobriquet was also on the streets of
‘flash bastards’. Def Leppard had set out to be the Sheffield, where they all still
flashiest bastards around, and by 1980 they were lived with their mums and
well on the way to achieving it. Not least on the dads. Elliott recalls going out
streets of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, which were with guitarist Steve Clark É

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