Leppard – Spot On

Pyjama parties, David Essex, fantasy karaoke and school beatings. JOE ELLIOTT remembers a life in Def Leppard, by Tim Jones.

“I’d been on about it ever since Bowie did Pin Ups. And had we been able to do a double-album, we would’ve. We could’ve included The Osmonds’ Crazy Horses, for instance – we don’t have a problem with credibility. If you want to be press darlings you namecheck The Velvet Underground. We namecheck The Osmonds and David Essex, just to piss people off by being honest. We wanted mainly English artists and we had a lot of fun, to the extent that we delayed the release from last year, purely so we could tour it”.

Who put the tracklisting together?

It compiled itself – we had a list in 2004 and recorded 15 from a shortlist of 17 songs. We didn’t do Sparks’ This Town, and it was just as well, as Justin [Hawkins] did it. We tried to Leppardise it, but it didn’t work. But the rest are total forgeries and they sound like we wrote them – that’s why we did them. You’ll be able to hear certain things in songs and go “aaah, that’s where they got it from”. Like a John Kongos number – definitely where we got the drumming for Rocket. The Sweet’s Hell Raiser is like a lot of stuff we’ve done.

How long did it take to record the album?

Not long at all, though we didn’t do it in one go. We took a gap …

by Tim Jones
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