LEPPARD GIRLS
Joe Elliott talks Def Leppard’s influence on Taylor Swift, Pink and Lady Gaga
SPIN — For 38 years now, Joe Elliott and his bandmates in Def Leppard have, to enormous success, been unabashedly comfortable in embracing their anomalous genre identity: too metal for pop fans and too pop for metal fans. That conundrum has never really dampened their success, anyway, with the band’s two diamond-certified albums, 1983’s Pyromania and 1987’s Hysteria, putting them on a very short list with just four other artists who’ve been able to achieve such a milestone. Record-setting sales aside, Def Leppard’s influence on other artists over the years has proven just as atypical as the band itself, with their distinctive sound finding its way more into the pop world of artists like Lady Gaga, Carly Rae Jepsen, and Miley Cyrus than with anything resembling metal.
Given how the ire of metal fans is so often provoked by the level of actual appeal a band manages to have, Def Leppard’s crossover nature has — to their benefit — put them at odds with their more straightforward be-pentagrammed contemporaries. But Def Leppard have been and always will be a pop band, a fact driven home on with the band’s roundly affirmative and hook-stuffed self-titled LP, released on October 30 via Mailboat Records. SPIN talked with Elliott about the band’s influence on today’s Top 40 artists, as well as what made the band’s self-titled effort their most honest work to date.
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SPIN: One of the most distinctive things about Def Leppard has always been the band’s ability to appeal just as much to pop fans as you do hard rock and even metal fans. It’s even more noticeable now, with many of today’s hugely successful pop stars either explicitly citing you guys as an influence, or doing so implicitly with their music. Is that something you’ve seen more recently as well?
Joe Elliott: I notice when it’s pointed out to me, because I honestly don’t listen to much pop radio. But when I am made aware of it or just happen to be listening to whatever radio station my friend is tuned to in their car, it’s like, “Whoa, that sounds a bit like we could’ve done it.” I started becoming aware of our influence in pop music about 15 years ago when Pink did a radio show with us, and she was standing on the side of the stage singing every word. I was like, well okay, she’s a fan. [Laughs.] We have people like Jewel or John Mayer or the guys in Maroon 5, all of whom are huge fans. It wasn’t just Ratt and Poison we were a part of…. [now] all of a sudden you’ve got Lady Gaga coming out and saying, “I f**king love Def Leppard,” and we had Taylor Swift wanting to work with us six or seven years ago when she was first kicking off.
You are aware of it, and it’s flattering, but I think it’s down to the fact that we’ve always been more pop than metal, much to the annoyance of the metal press and metal fans. We were never Dio or Anthrax or Judas Priest… We’ve always been about [blending] that kind of quirkiness that Queen had with the power of AC/DC. It’s something we’ve always felt was kind of our blueprint. So I absolutely hear it in pop because that’s essentially who we were. Def Leppard became popular not through being a rock band like Zeppelin or Sabbath. We became popular because our singles were on American Bandstand between Kool & the Gang and Michael Jackson. We were the white rock band from the U.K. that people were like, “What? How did they infiltrate the top ten?” And it was because we had these infectious melodies. We weren’t afraid of singing about relationships or love, which is something that metal would never do. We were never Dungeons & Dragons. We never will be.
Read the full interview with Joe Elliott at SPIN
