You wouldn't think it, but Live, by Cybernauts, is the sleeper Top 10 entry of 2001. Def Leppard’s singer Joe Elliott and guitarist Phil Collen are joined by David Bowie's drummer Woody Woodmansey and bassist Trevor Bolder (augmented by keyboardist Dick Decent), playing old Mick Ronson and David Bowie covers, making songs like "All The Young Dudes," "Suffragette City," "Rock 'N' Roll Suicide," "White Light White Heat," "Ziggy Stardust," "Starman," "The Man Who Sold The World," "Jean Genie," "Five Years," "Changes," and more sound positively energized and ready for rediscovery. Collen's beefy chords sound tasty and authentic. Elliott gives the songs new vocal life. And the double disc almost never came out. the story behind it is as odd as the release itself. Metal Edge recently got the low-down from Def Lep frontman Joe Elliott about the project. And it goes something like this …
Joe: I'm chewing on a carrot.
ME: Then swallow and let's talk … What's a Def Leppard singer doing recording a bunch of David Bowie songs?
Joe: I've always been a big Bowie fan. After Mick [Ronson, Bowie guitarist/collaborator] died, his sister Maggie arranged a memorial show, at the Hammersmith Odeon in London. It was April 30, 1994. I had been working with Mick on the Heaven and Hull album in 1994. [John] Mellencamp was on it too. It was two weeks before he died. After the anniversary of his death, we did the show. When Maggie asked me, I immediately said of course, even before she mentioned Trevor, [Bolder, bassist] and Woody [Woodmansey, drummer] would be doing it too.
ME: That's the original rhythm section from Bowie’s Spider's From Mars band!
Joe: Exactly. I knew Trevor from Uriah Heep, and we stayed in touch over the years. I wound up dragging Phil [Collen, guitarist] along, and we did a bunch of Ronson songs for 35 minutes. Now move on through the years … The Mick Ronson Stage had just been opened in his Northern England hometown, and Maggie again asks us to play to christen the stage. It's in a park on the August afternoon of the Mick Ronson Memorial Concert. We wind up doing three shows. It proved fantastic, a childhood dream. But 35 minutes weren't enough this time. Even three shows wasn’t enough. We wanted more. So we went to Dublin and I knew at the last minute we should be taping this. I had all this stuff at my studio and brought it down to the gig. We recorded the live gig in Dublin and it sat on my shelf in the studio for three years! That's basically how it came about. We taped It pretty much for our own benefit, for prosperity, for old time's sake, for family and friends. In listening to it last summer for the first time, I thought it quite good, a lot better than I had expected. I think Ronson himself would've preferred it to be out there, but not any kind of major release. I didn't see it as one of these releases that would have billboards all over Sunset Blvd. announcing its arrival like a new Led Zeppelin album. We thought there'd be people intrigued enough to hear what we did, and some older Bowie fans who'd want to hear how we treated the songs. We knew it wasn't going to be anything huge. The Japanese got wind of it, however, and begged for us to release it on Universal in Japan. We wound up touring there in January. We then recorded the seven studio tracks of the second disc for a stateside release while in rehearsal [the Japanese edition contains just the live disc].
ME: It's amazing that what I'm hearing is what you had sitting on a shelf for three years!
Joe: The second we finished doing those shows in 1997, we were strained to write the next Def Leppard record, Euphoria. By the time we finished that, literally three years later, we went into rehearsals for the tour, which saw us out on the road until last year with a break of February-to-June. It was June when I pulled those tapes off the shelf. I had just bought Pro Tools and I wanted to see how it works, so me and Ronan [McHugh, producer] pulled it out, loaded it up, and used the Cybernaut session as a learning experience. Phil's playing really made it. He nailed the whole Ronson thing.
ME: Your vocals are also quite good. You in no way attempted to recreate or duplicate the vocals of Bowie. Your style is more accessible, and gives the material a swift kick into the new century.
Joe: I've always loved Bowie's voice. When we were doing these songs, I knew that I couldn't make any attempt to sing like Bowie. It just wouldn't have worked – It wouldn't been laughable, stupid and disrespectful. We were only doing the songs Mick Ronson played on. In rehearsals I kept wondering how to handle vocals. I listened to Bowie's version of "Let's Spend The Night Together" side by side with The Rolling Stones’ original. They were both valid. Bowie didn’t make any attempt to sound like Mick Jagger – Same melody, same lyrics, totally different performance. That's how I thought I had to sing this. I had to sing these songs as though I’d written them myself, yet phrase them as Bowie would phrase them with some of his idiosyncrasies thrown in. It was basically the only way I could approach it. It was totally natural. I just stood in front of the mic and knew these words for 30 years, so it was almost like platinum coated karaoke. Y'know, when you step up to the mic with a song you know and you’re a good singer, people are like, "Wow." It might sound like the original artist, but if you're good, it's good. That was my whole intention: To be as good as could be, to be as much me as I could be. It was Bowie's words and melodies, but me singing. There are a million artists out there who have done covers, and sometimes the final product can be better than the original. We just wanted to do them justice.
ME: For some strange reason, it hits so right at this particular time. It makes for totally new versions, with you as a different "host" of the songs. It's your personality now stamped upon this obviously timeless material. It make me, as a listener, want to hear them all over again, when I, at one time, truly thought I was done with these particular songs.
Joe: I know what you mean. And others will want to go back and check out the originals – 18-25 year old Def Leppard fans may only know Bowie from Scary Monsters onward. It's a whole cycle. That's the great thing about music. Some people will be like, "My god, I never knew what the '70s sounded like." That's no end to the possibilities that something like this can bring as long as we've done what we have to do – Pay tribute to the fantastic songwriting of Bowie and the obvious genius of Mick Ronson, who had so much to do with the arrangement on these songs. We're celebrating Ronson's contributions as much as we are Bowie. It was done in the right spirit with as much integrity as we could. Hopefully, we turned a few people on to something that was very precious to us. That's what we were after. That's why we didn’t push it down everybody's throat.
ME: I understand you can only buy the Cybernauts CD on your website, not in stores.
Joe: In The U.S., yeah, it's on our own Arachnophobia Records. The fear of spiders, man, I thought that kinda funny. You have to log on to the website. It's www.cybernautsruleok.com, and there's a link form www.defleppard.com.
ME: There's a lot of great music on it. What's "Manic Depression," a Jimi Hendrix tune, on there?
Joe: When we were in the Dublin studio, the day after the live show, we recorded four Hendrix tracks, one of which made the record. It's just one of those things. Woody and Trevor are Hendrix fans from way back, and they used to jam on Hendrix when Bowie was doing photos. Hendrix and Cream …
ME: What do the other Def Leppard guys think of all this?
Joe: They just smile and say it's cool. They all have their own little side projects.
ME: Does this mean that Def Leppard is on hiatus?
Joe: No, not at all. We've already started the new Def Leppard album. We’re in the studio now.
ME: Anything you can say about it at this point?
Joe: We're all here and we're all getting going! Direction? Song titles? Nothing to report. Things will change, so whatever I tell you know probably won't be the case by the time the album comes out. What can I say? It will be a very commercial project. We're looking at recording a brilliant classic original Def Leppard album. We have 15 new songs already written – Four by me, five by Phil, three by Vivian [Campbell, guitarist] and three we composed together. In fact, we're still downstairs right now writing more stuff. We've been together seven days and there's four more things on the go, it's coming together very nicely. We'd like to think we could get most of it done by Christmas. We want to be on the road by next summer. I don't want to give too many clues this soon. I'm not sure what it’s going to sound like once we get our shops into it.
ME: I think there's a new respect for Def Leppard since VH1's awesome Behind The Music on you guys and now their TV-movie, as well.
Joe: Yeah, absolutely. See, the thing is, I have to say it's something like Lynyrd Skynyrd, who really suffered outside the music so the phrase "Behind The Music" really means something. We've had alcoholic problems. Rick [Allen, drummer] lost his arm. We've had one guy die. We've had way too much time away. It's been five years since the last record. There's been a lot of struggle to maintain success this band has seen. I've been told the Def Leppard movie was the most-watched program on VH1 all year.
ME: What did you think of it?
Joe: I thought it was fantastic. They did a great job without a big budget. They sat in a studio and watched video of us. They never even met us! They couldn't get into our psyche. They did it by reading old interviews and watching tele programs. The guy who played Rick was great. The guy who played Steve was stunning. I was very happy with the guy who played me, he's a great actor. The story line was as accurate as a movie needs to be. I know there’s been some criticism from diehard fans, but, hey, it's a dramatic movie, not a documentary. They absolutely had to bed the truth and the rules. The fact of the matter is, five guys got together in Sheffield, England because they didn’t want to work in a factory. They traveled together through the next nine years. One guy got fired for drinking. One guy lost his arm in a car crash. One guy was rapidly going downhill towards death. That's exactly what the film said. There were some inconsistencies here and there. Some of the action may have been wrong, but it doesn't matter. It's a movie. These are actors, not clones. In the movie Nixon, Anthony Hopkins looks nothing like Richard Nixon, but he plays the part fantastic.
ME: It had to be strange watching it.
Joe: Oh yeah! Our fans should just embrace the fact that they actually took the time to make a film about us. I've never seen a film with actors portraying The Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin. People look at it too strongly. In Apollo 13, does Tom Hanks really look anything like the astronaut he played? Does anybody go out there raving on websites about it? Of course they don't. People are little too over-critical about this whole thing. Luckily, we had an opportunity to read the script beforehand – I wanted to offer them the truth. If they chose not to use it, that was fine. For example, in one of the early drafts they had Phil with the band on the High And Dry tour. I said, "You can't do that. He didn't join until after Pyromania!" Things like that. Most things, though, were very accurate. People were like, "The band wasn't like that." I hate to tell you – Yes we were. This film covers '77 to '86. We were like that then. We're not like that now – We've moved on, we've changed, we've mellowed. Those were the early days, warts and all.