Circus 30APR83

Following the voluntary semi-retirement of the Who and the demise of Led Zeppelin, the escalator to the upper strata of the European hard-rock hierarchy has been crammed with hopeful contenders. But while front-runners like AC/DC, Scorpions and Ozzy Osbourne have ridden to prominence these past two years, the suspicion arises that the success they now enjoy may already be peaking, if only because of creeping road-weariness or the looming specter of premature burn-out. Yet some of their would-be successors just don't deliver the goods.

"You can have all the promotion in the world," scoffs Def Leppard singer Joe Elliott. "If your songs are no good, the general public will notice it in the end."

As their spring concert trek across America gets underway and their third Mercury album, Pyromania, blazes up the charts, Def Leppard seem to be a better long-term bet to pick up Zeppelin's mantle. And these days they don't' have to fall back on promotional hocus-pocus or overblown hype to add new fuel to the fire. Barely in their early 20's, they've got time to burn, room to grow and a rabid following that's taken on massive proportions. More than anything else, it's a belief in their own potential, coupled with a close identification with their audience, that's sustained Def Leppard since they first joined forces in Sheffield, England.

"We formed the band at the beginning of 1978, a bunch of kids who were barely old enough to drink," the 22-year-old Elliott recalls, citing group influences ranging from Zeppelin to Queen to Mott the Hoople. "We rehearsed and wrote songs for six or seven months before we even attempted to play live because we wanted to go out and play a full set of our own material. You know what it's like in America, where you go to a bar and they have a band that does all Journey and Bad Company songs? In England, there are also a few places like that. We wanted to shock people. We went on stage and didn't do any songs that anybody had ever heard before. And for some reason, it worked."

Not yet out of his teens, Elliott had fulfilled his most vivid schoolboy daydream: that of an imaginary group playing imaginary gigs, which he'd invented years before and called, prophetically enough, Deaf Leopard. By sending rough tapes to the British music papers early on, the real Def Leppard (Elliott, drummer Rick Allen, bassist Rick Savage, and guitarists Pete Willis and Steve Clark) caught the ears of key critics, upping the number of gig offers in the process

But in a paranoid economic climate, the record industry didn't go for the bait. Borrowing $1,000, the band financed a self-produced and independently distributed EP, "Getcha Rocks Off," which impressed several influential disc jockeys, garnered airplay on the BBC and sold over 24,000 copies in England as a result. When the subsequent storm of big-label interest finally died down, Def Leppard had signed a pact with PolyGram.

But the young band soon encountered its first obstacle: its own naïveté. Leppard's original management, for example, consisted of "two guys who ran a record shop. They said they could help us, which they did," Elliott explains. "They got us support slots for Sammy Hagar and AC/DC in England and signed us to the record deal with PolyGram."

Once they'd completed the AC/DC tour, however, it was evident that a more experienced hand was needed. "Peter Mensch was then managing AC/DC," Elliott says. "He approached us and said, 'Hey, listen...'"

Enter Leppard's new management - Mensch in the UK, Cliff Burnstein in the USA - in time to see the first album, On Through the Night, shoot to a promising #51 in Billboard, boosted by the band's first stateside foray supporting Ted Nugent, Pat Travers and AC/DC. By the time of the second album, 1981's High 'n' Dry, the band had a solid following in the UK, where the LP went Top 20; the Leppard seemed on their way to doing the same in America. While inflated egos often go hand in hand with growing fame, Elliott is proud that the band stayed cool. "Coming from Sheffield," he explains, "we're totally working class. It keeps you down to earth."

But the early British punk bands also swore allegiance to their working class origins, yet reviled this very brand of flashy, heavyweight rock that Leppard call their own.

"The kids who were into punk were below working class," Elliott says disdainfully. "They were in the sewers. They had no respect for themselves - safety pins through the nose, shit like that." Unlike the punks, who were often content to live on the dole, Leppard's members found a working solidarity by taking on such employment as they could get. "I was a van driver, Steve was a lathe engineer, Savage worked for British Rail and Rick Allen was still in school. We'd go see bands at Sheffield City Hall: UFO, Judas Priest and people like that. We were the same kind of kids as the ones who come to see us now."

The past year has seen a change in Leppard's lineup. Weeks into sessions for Pyromania, Pete Willis was cut loose, apparently due to personal problems. His replacement, Phil Collen, comes from another British band called Girl.

With Collen aboard to finish Pyromania, the band has come up with an LP that could propel it into the Top 20. "I would expect it to go that far," Elliott says confidently.

"The music on Pyromania doesn't move at a thousand miles an hour, but it's still heavy rock played with a lot of power, which is what I find a lot of American bands don't have. Bands like Journey are very melodic, but they don't use their guitars much; they definitely play for the radio."

Def Leppard appear to have everyone on their side - the fans, the British rock press, their management and their record label. "We've really got this feeling that they're going to be gigantic," says PolyGram publicist Sherry Ring, adding that the company has offered to fly American critics to Europe to catch Leppard in the act. Industry cutback being what they are, this shows a rare degree of faith, though Joe Elliott take a cautious view of the media buildup.

"When our first album came out, we did get a hell of a lot of piss in England about selling out to America," he says with a little regret. "They thought we'd produced the first album to sell to FM radio - which we didn't."

Elliott stresses that the band wants to break in a huge way and concedes that Leppard still have a way to go in achieving that goal. "We think of ourselves as a universal band that wants to be big all over the world," he says. "Not just in one little territory. With High 'n' Dry we managed to get to number thirty-eight in Billboard, which is good. But we're no Journey." Perhaps Pyromania will be the album to change all that.