Interview with WOUB Culture by guitarist Vivian Campbell of Def Leppard ahead of their upcoming performances with Journey and Cheap Trick
WOUB CLEVELAND, Ohio – For many years, Def Leppard, the legendary British rock band, personified the ostentatious swagger of glam rock and left a legacy of almost universally beloved songs.
The group is responsible for several of the most popular albums in mainstream hard rock and metal, including Pyromania, Hysteria, and High and Dry, the latter of which had seven Billboard Hot 100 hits. With a new song called Just Like 73, which features guitarist Tom Morello of Rage Against The Machine fame, they’re keeping up the trend.
It’s evident that Def Leppard thinks it’s preferable to burn out than to fade away as they continue to provide intense live performances.
Vivian Campbell: Larger than life. Everything about the band is kind of bombastic and entertaining. I’m the new guy in the band. I’ve been with the band for 32 years, and when I joined, Joe (Elliott) always told me to think about Def Leppard as a Spielberg movie. It’s about escapism, it’s about entertainment, and that’s what we bring to the
music and what we bring to the live performance as well. Everything is sort of larger than life, and the sign of the music from the drum sign to the layered vocal sign is so spectacular and so big that it sort of feels appropriate that
we play in stadiums now. And with Leppard, we’ve always grown into the space. The bigger the venue, the more we bring to it in terms of the performance, the lights, just the staging, the show, everything about it. And this tour in
particular, this stage is probably the biggest one we’ve done since the Adrenalize World Tour of the early ’90s, so it’s pretty spectacular.
Yeah. Speaking of this tour in particular, what’s it been like to be doing this stadium tour with Journey and Cheap Trick? What’s that been like? What’s your relationship with those two bands?
Campbell: Well, Journey we have toured with twice previously, first in 2006, and then again in 2018 and it’s all really about the hits. There’s a lot of overlap, I think, between people who are Journey fans and people who are Def Leppard fans in terms of just knowing the songs. I remember the first time that we toured with Journey in 2006. Obviously, I was familiar with a lot of their big hits, but hearing them backstage for the first time, I remember being surprised and thinking, ‘Oh yeah, I’d forgotten about that one. And there was another one.’ And the same is true of Def Leppard. I mean, there’s so much depth of catalog. So as a show, this is really a celebration of hit songs that are just embedded in the DNA of people that have been played on FM radio for literally decades. Music always transports people back to a place.
There’s always some memory associated with songs, and hopefully, it’s a good memory. Again, getting back to what I said earlier, it is just a joyous sort of celebration. There’s a lot of bad stuff in the world. When people come to a show like ours, they just want to, I guess, be nostalgic in a way, but also to just celebrate and just have that sense of community and a good time. Cheap Trick, of course, fits right in there. I mean, in terms of hit songs and in terms of being wonderful, wonderful people. I mean, we’ve toured and done many shows with Cheap Trick over the decades, and they’re a venerable band and just lovely human beings, just a joy to work with. So it’s a good way to spend the summer.
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