Def Leppard: 'We love what we’re doing – that’s what gets us out of bed in the morning'

Bass player Rick Savage, one of the band’s two remaining founder members, told The Yorkshire Post he visited the venue late last year when Vivas, the group in which his son Tyler plays lead guitar, performed there, and he had subsequently been moved to help out.

Tomorrow, Def Leppard will headline the 850-capacity Leadmill to raise funds for the Music Venue Trust, who are seeking to protect grassroots music venues throughout the UK.

“It’s become quite apparent not just in Sheffield but across the country, venues are having to close for whatever reason, valid or not,” said Savage, 62. “It’s such a heartbreaking situation because at the end of the day, people need these venues to perform, to improve their craft and to be a stepping stone, if you like, to the next level.

“We needed it. In our day it was the Limit Club on West Street in Sheffield. Every town has got at least one or two, and it’s so sad to hear of possible closures of these things because I personally believe that there are still people that want to see bands at that level.”

After Savage and singer Joe Elliott were asked to put a video together to show support for The Leadmill, they decided to play a gig at the venue to tie in the release of their new orchestral album, Drastic Symphonies.

“We’d never played it, it came to prominence just after we went on tour visiting far-flung places and never made it back, so it just seemed such a great opportunity not to miss – and lo and behold, we could do it on release day,” he says.

On Monday May 22 Def Leppard play at Bramall Lane, home of Sheffield United, with the American rock band Mötley Crüe. The show is extra special for Savage because he was on the books at the club as a junior – despite being a lifelong Sheffield Wednesday fan.

“I’m an Owl through and through, but in the mid 70s when I was 14 doing very well playing for South Yorkshire Boys and Sheffield Boys etc, I signed schoolboy forms with Sheffield United and played for their intermediate team, so I’m used to playing on that ground,” he says. “I’ve actually scored for South Yorkshire Boys and Sheffield Boys on that ground.

“To play in any venue in your home town of that size is fantastic. I’m really, really looking forward to it.

“I think what’s important at our age, to think that we can still do it it’s such a great achievement for us internally. It’s something to be very proud of. That and the fact that we’re actually doing Wembley Stadium as well later on in the tour (on July 1), again it’s all these little milestones, you just keep ticking them off and moving on to the next one – what else can you do, how many more albums can you create, and how many more concerts can you do. We take it in our stride and we love what we’re doing – that’s what gets us out of bed in the morning.

“We’ve still got respect and love for each other, it’s still fun. I can’t imagine not doing it.”

He and Elliott remain proud of their Steel City roots, he says. “Regardless of wherever you go in the world, there’s an element of Sheffield that Joe and I take with (us) – and (drummer) Rock Allen, to a certain extent, even though we still class him as a North Derbyshire man because he was born in Dronfield. We are known as a Sheffield band, that’s where we originated and it’ll always be that way, and to actually go back and play a gig, it doesn’t get any better than that.”

As regards the new album, which comes only a year after the top 10 success of Diamond Star Halos, Savage says the idea to work with an orchestra had been “thrown at us more than once over the last five or six years, or maybe even longer”.

It might not have happened though had Covid not hit and “wiped out” plans for a stadium tour of North America, “the biggest tour we’ve ever done in our career”, in 2020.

“During that period we thought rather than sit around, let’s just make a new album, so we did, we came up with Diamond Star Halos, worked really hard on that, that was really great fun,” he says. “We got that ready to be released in 2021 with the rescheduled tour, but that got cancelled as well because of the pandemic, so we didn’t want to put that out with any promotion or not tour...We were sitting on a brand new record but we’d still got the year in front of us where we thought what else can we do.

“It just became the obvious thing – remember that record that the record company or management or somebody has kept asking us to think about, now’s the time to do it. In a way it was time management and time well spent creating what we consider to be a legit new album. Even though it’s old songs, to us it feels like a fresh new album. In our world, we feel like the songs have been given a whole new lease of life and they’ve really flowered into something bigger than was first intended.”

Savage says their criteria was that the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra’s new arrangements had to bring something new to familiar songs such as Pour Some Sugar On Me, Animal or Love When Love and Hate Collide. “From way back when we always had this tendency to write what we call the epic songs, the ones that take you on a journey, it’s not just three or four minutes like a single. We’ve always had it in us to create the dramatic type of song. It’s almost like even first time around those songs should have been recorded with an orchestra but in the moment it’s a ridiculous thing to do for a rock band, you do have to have a little bit of compromise.

“But now that we were given this whole new canvas to play with, it was like OK, this is what we wanted to do with this song 20 years ago, well now we can. The only thing that we did say was that we would never put out them out just because they were obvious songs; we felt that we had to be improving the song or making it so different that it became valid. There had to be a good reason for doing it, which is why certain songs that people maybe hoped or thought we would put out like Photograph form the Pyromania album, or even Rock of Ages (aren’t on there). We did try to incorporate the orchestra within the original vibe of the song but it just didn’t sound right, we weren’t improving the song, so we went ‘let’s just work on the songs that are going to lend themselves to this sort of treatment’.

“Pour Some Sugar On Me, the original version, was again in that same boat, it just didn’t work properly the way that we wanted it, which is why we said ‘do a completely different vesion’. It’s amazing what you can do with the bones of a song and that’s a great example of why we called the album ‘drastic’ because some of them are drastic re-recordings and reinventions of the originals.”

The band will be signing copies of their new album at HMV in Sheffield on Saturday, and have also released a new book, Definitely, telling the band’s history in their own words. ​​​

“If we can’t do it nobody can,” says Savage. “We have access to all the little pieces of memorabilia. It’s quite in-depth, it’s very detailed and it does go back pretty much to day one. I think we have to say thank you to Mr Elliott for hanging on to just about everything that ever existed​​​​​​​ with the band, because he’s just a hoarder like that​​​​​​​. It’s really come in handy just for the nostalgia​​​​​​​ and it really does tell the story through the years – different albums, different situations, great photos, well written and very detailed. It may well be for the real anorak Def Leppard fan but if there’s going to be something out there, that’s what it should be and we’re happy to put our name to it, because there’s a lot of stuff out there that wasn’t done with our approval. This is the real deal that tells it how it was.”

It’s 46 years since Elliott joined the fledgling band that Savage had formed with friends at Tapton School in Sheffield. In the late 70s and early 80s they found themselves bracketed in the new wave of British heavy metal with the likes of Iron Maiden, Saxon and the Tygers of Pan Tang – to their own bemusement. Savage says their inspirations really hailed from glam rock and even punk.

“When you’re 12 or 13 from a music point of view you’re just like a sponge and they become your influences – whether it’s David Bowie or Marc Bolan, Sweet, Slade, I could go on forever, but that was probably a bigger influence,” he says.

“The punk thing was cool because it kept things real, and while I could never at the time appreciate the fact that while there was not much musicianship to it, there was an intention to it. I think the glam rock thing had that as well, you may not have liked the intention but there was an intention there, and that’s what makes it real.

“For me, that’s what makes music good. Forget the musicality of something, that’s got its own value, but it’s how you put it across that’s important. I think the punk thing came along because music, not such much the pop side, but the more serious side, was getting overly bloated and into itself. So yes, it was more so those two genres – and definitely glam rock – than heavy metal.

“There was a lot of heavy metal bands that were up and coming (at that point), we played the occasional what would be calssed as a heavy metal song and it was convenient for journalists to put all of us in that bracket. You know what, it’s fine. It became a phrase and if it served a purpose for some people, that’s fine, but who’s the last men standing? There’s us, there’s Iron Maiden, I’m struggling after that.

“And we were the real deal back then. If you stick around long enough you do prove your worth. I think at the end of the day, people recognise Maiden for what they are and how good they are, in the same way that hopefully they would view us. You’ve recognised now that both bands are completely different, we may be good mates, and they may be West Ham fans, but we both recognise that we were never, ever musically alike, but we were in this same bucket, apparently.”

Drastic Symphonies is released on Friday May 12. The Leadmill show has sold out but tickets for Def Leppard’s gig at Bramall Lane are available from ​​​​​​​www.ticketmaster.co.uk.