KAOS2000 Magazine
June 5, 2002
Interview with:
Joe Elliott (Def Leppard)

This is an interview with Joe Elliott, I only included the section in which he is discussing SLANG.

K2K: I read an interview with Vivian last year. Somebody had asked him a question, like I did to you, about just going in to jam and write a song. He made a comment about "Slang" being your 'alternative' album. He said something along the lines of, "We tried writing for ourselves, but it didn't work and didn't sell as well, so we're going back to what we are, which is formula. It's not about the music, it's about the formula. We have a formula and that's what we do." Is that really something fair to say, as a musician?

JE: Well, I can't really get inside Vivian's head, but I know what he's trying to get across. I think it depends on how the question was worded.

K2K: The question was, "Do you write music for yourselves?"

JE: If we'd have sat down and said, "Oh, this is what the front row wants." What I think he's trying to get across is... What we did with "Slang" was we tried to make a record that didn't sound like anything that we had made in the past. It was 1994 when we started it. It was 1995 by the time we got going. We were aware that what was going on in the industry at the time was so removed from what had made us successful. It would have been as warranted in the music business as another Dokken album. We knew. We actually sat down once... We [Phil Collen and Joe] were having dinner while we were making "Slang" and he said, "You know, it's a real shame that songwriting has gone out of fashion. I'm too good to play my instrument." If you actually listen to a lot of the bands that came out in the 1990s, the couldn't really play very well. They were more akin to The Clash than to Van Halen. But they went more for the feel. It was more of a Neil Young thing than it was a Van Halen thing.

Once you have enough of that thrown down your throat, that becomes the yardstick and everybody's standards drop, and people forget. They want to hear new stuff, but the new stuff is not as good, or maybe they thought some of the older stuff was overdone. I don't know. That's down to individuals. What we did when we did "Slang" was we tried to make an album that was more like a mid-period Led Zeppelin record with a bit of unusual stuff added into it. Like when we did "Breathe A Sigh," it's very much... Boyz II Men could have done that song. We did "Slang" and it's very hip hop. Then when we did the song called "Truth," it's almost like a pop version of Nine Inch Nails. We did, on that record, what we've done on every album. We listened to what was going on at the time and we stole the bits that we thought were relevant. When we did "Pour Some Sugar On Me," it was only written because Run DMC and Aerosmith had done "Walk This Way." All of the sudden, rock and rap did mix, so we wrote our own.

When it came to doing "Slang," the current music trends and the things that you could steal from weren't from the same bag that we'd been able to choose from before. It was such a radical explosion. It was very similar to when punk took up in Britain. It just blew Supertramp and Rod Stewart and all that rock right off the planet. Yet, as it happens, the biggest selling album in Britain in 1979 was "Breakfast In America." So there were always people there, but the one's that wrote - the Charles Shaw Murray's - what's happening in the Clash and the Buzzcocks, they didn't want to know about Supertramp. Supertramp would sell records, but they wouldn't get front page. Sid Vicious got the front page because he would get his nose broken on stage. Things like that. It was better press. That's what it all came down to. It was, "This is better copy than the bearded twat on the piano." That's what we were up against in 1996. Rather than go, like bands like Styx did when we came along and they rolled over and died, we stood up to the challenge and said, "F*** you lot. We can do better than that." So we used Indian string arrangements on "Turn To Dust." We used dulcimers on "Where Does Love Go When It Dies." We used hip hop rhythms on stuff. We did one song with the drums in the swimming pool so we'd get the John Bonham sound. We literally stole from "When The Levee Breaks."

K2K: How well did that album sell?

JE: Worldwide, about 3 million. In America it did nothing. In Japan and the Far East, South America and Europe, it was great. Some people got it and some people didn't. Classic Def Leppard fans - conservative type Def Leppard fans would go, "Not really them is it." People who were craving for us to do something different were going, "Whoa! Yeah! Yes!" It was our Led Zeppelin "III." I've read all the back stuff that Plant had said. Everybody wanted Zeppelin "II" again, which is exactly why they didn't do it. We like to be awkward as musicians sometimes. We want to throw people a 360°. That was our 360°. It was us expressing ourselves. We had done three albums that were major epic studio things. We were using studio embellishments to make them bigger, larger than life. We were making albums that were akin to a Steven Spielberg movie. Then, all of the sudden, we wanted to make "Trainspotting," just to say that we've done it. It was an experiment. I'm not going to say that it was a failed one because I enjoy the "Slang" record immensely. I stand by it 100%. I can understand why some people didn't get it. It's very, very different. It's more punky sounding. The rock still sounds more like it could have been done by Aerosmith or New York Dolls. "Breathe A Sigh" sounds like it could have been Mariah Carey or Boyz II Men. It's a very mixed bag of stuff. It's just very, very different, but it just didn't appeal to the average Def Leppard fan.

What you have to understand is, when we went in to start doing this new album, it wasn't a case of, like, you could smell the burning rubber from the backpedaling from having to make a copy of "Hysteria." What we did was, we went in there seven years after we last wrote standard pop songs. Most bands don't even last that long. Those seven years, for us to be away from our standard sound, was maybe actually refreshing for us to go - I don't like to say "go back" - but move into that territory once again, and write songs that we'd written that were based on the classics that I had mentioned before.

K2K: We could call it "renewing it."

JE: Yeah. U2 had just done exactly the same thing and they get razed for it. They just have done an album that sounds like "The Unforgettable Fire." It's got bits on it with the classic edged "chika-chika-chika-chika" guitar. The critics love it. They all say that they've gone back to their sound. When people were saying that we had gone back to our sound, they were saying it with a negative connotation. When they were saying it with U2, it was with a positive connotation. Now that is what I find, within the industry, is to be bigotry towards the fact that we are just a rock band and U2 is supposed to be the saviors of the world. You know what I mean? And fine. U2 has that on their side, and more power for it. I don't knock U2. I knock the guy who doesn't give us the same amount of credit for exactly the same thing.

K2K: On the other hand, how many albums did the last one sell for you?

JE: It sold almost three times, in America, than "Slang" did.

K2K: So, in other words, who cares what the critics think.

JE: Exactly. I don't care. I'm just aware. I don't care whether it's raining, but I can explain to you for an hour how it's miserable because it is. It's just something I'm aware of. I'm not holding any bitterness towards anybody. I also understand that sometimes, if a journalist is given six albums to review in four days, he can't possibly get his chops down to the whole meaning of what somebody's spent 18 months doing. He's given, by his editor, 48 hours to review Alannis Morrisette's next album. At the same time, he's got to hoover the apartment, feed the cat, do his laundry, whatever, and be listening to this record. I don't believe that anybody ever sits down, locks the door, turns the lights off, puts on headphones, and goes, "Right. I'm going to listen to this uninterrupted."

To read the whole interview, go to the Def Leppard Archives link on my Def Leppard Obsession page.