Def Leppard: We’ll write songs during Vegas residency

Write time: Def Leppard

Def Leppard are aiming to write new material while the band spends nearly a month together during their Las Vegas residency – but that doesn’t mean fans can expect a new album.

Frontman Joe Elliott hopes to hire an extra hotel room and set it up as a recording studio in between concerts.

First, however, the band have to complete preparations for performing classic album Hysteria in full – including songs they haven’t played in decades.

Elliott tells Rolling Stone: “It’ll not be too hard; we’re not changing arrangements like Bowie or Tom Waits might do. We’re going to play the songs as they are on the record. We’re going to revert back to the original versions.”

He admits delivering Pour Some Sugar On Me partway through a show, when it’s usually reserved for encores, will be “a bit of a head trip” but he adds: “I think it’s okay. It’s going to be weird, but people are going to be expecting it.”

With the Vegas shows during March and April based on a schedule of three days on, four days off, the band should find time to concentrate on writing material.

“I don’t know if we’ll do an album,” Elliott says. “Maybe the way to go is put one or two tracks out at a time and see how it goes – almost like a seven-inch single.”

That’s not the priority at the moment. “We’ve got a golden opportunity,” the singer reflects. “We’ve got ample opportunity to look each other in the eye and go, ‘What you got?’”

Meanwhile, he’s marked the 30th anniversary of the release of Def Lep’s third album Pyromania, which saw guitarist Phil Collen replace Pete Willis.

“It had been a labour of love to make,” he recalls. “Little did we know, in comparison to Hysteria it was a piece of cake.”

His memories include “multiple studios in London, one guitarist out, one guitarist in, equipment breakdowns, tapes turning transparent because of the thousands of times they were rewound and fast forwarded for multiple overdubs.”

But he continues: “We found our sound on this record, with the help of a great producer in Mutt Lange, the new studio technology that we eagerly embraced – unlike many of our peers – and an incredible enthusiasm to make a record no one else had ever made.

“Whether we did or didn’t isn’t important. What is, is that we made the record we wanted to make. We finally sounded like the us we wanted to be.”