The Making Of 'Def Leppard' Part One | Classic Rock | Louder - video Dailymotion

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Part One: The Making Of 'Def Leppard

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00:00 [Music]

00:26 The beginnings of the new record, we decided to just get together for one month.

00:33 And some of us had got some songs written, some of us had got just ideas.

00:38 And we just thought, look, we're not going to finish an album in a month,

00:42 but let's get together in the studio, see what comes out of it, but don't go beyond the month.

00:49 Let's try and do as much as we can.

00:51 And it was great. We all got together and listened to everybody's ideas

00:58 and then just picked them off one at a time, the ones that we wanted to go in and start working on.

01:04 We all got in one room together and just laid them down as a band.

01:12 We just flowed. Within two days we had pretty much five or six songs

01:17 and by the end of the week we had like fourteen or twelve songs on the go.

01:21 So we thought, you know what, we're going to make an album for us,

01:26 for the fact that we love music and we like writing songs and making Death Label music.

01:32 [Music]

01:39 It was kind of done in stages of essentially three periods of a month long of building the album.

01:49 And it was kind of nice to do that. There was no pressure.

01:52 You could learn to live with the ideas as they were progressing.

01:56 You weren't losing any perspective by having to day after day after day after month after month

02:03 go through the same sort of songs.

02:06 It was a really nice sort of way of letting the album grow in a natural way.

02:12 We were able to go away and listen to the songs, really listen to them,

02:17 and then with that hindsight be able to come up with the best part that we could possibly come up with,

02:27 whether that was drums, vocals, guitar, whatever.

02:30 So that's been the process.

02:33 We go away, listen, and then the second time we got together we were able to just modify

02:40 and just focus in on what was really important so that we liked the songs as much as we possibly could

02:48 and actually be fans of the music that we made.

02:52 [Music]

03:00 We're actually a really, really good live band, but we're not very good usually at capturing that in the studio.

03:06 And the reason for that is that normally the way the band works is very methodical,

03:11 very piecemeal, one guy at a time.

03:15 And it's very difficult to capture the subtle, nuanced dynamics that a live band has

03:21 when you're doing it one guy at a time.

03:23 So we set up in the studio, the five of us in one room, so we could all make eye contact

03:29 and we started playing some rock ideas and we managed to bang about five or six rock song ideas

03:38 in the first couple of weeks, which was great.

03:40 And that was really easy and we kind of knew that that would be the easy part of the record.

03:43 But then after that we thought, well, we're not really just that kind of band anymore,

03:52 so we're not looking for a straight up rock record.

03:55 We wanted to kind of embrace some of the more diverse elements that the band is known for,

04:01 the production elements, the kind of pop/shame big production thing.

04:07 And so that's when we started scratching our head a lot and thinking,

04:11 "Okay, what kind of song do we need next?"

04:13 Now that inevitably happens with every Def Leppard record

04:16 and that's when it starts getting a little bit more painstaking.

04:20 [Music]

04:30 One thing that I think we were really conscious of is making something that is a little more diverse

04:37 than some of the records and albums we've done in the past.

04:41 We all knew that by this stage we have a certain style anyway.

04:47 Our sound is very much based in the fact that the way that we orchestrate our guitar parts,

04:54 the way that our backing vocals blend together, there's a sound.

04:59 So those ingredients are never going to go away.

05:02 So we knew that whatever we do, it's essentially going to end up sounding indicative of Def Leppard.

05:09 But we also wanted to just not be confined to specific songwriting things that we've done in the past.

05:19 Basically anything that sounded good, regardless of how it came about or what it represented,

05:27 was put forward and was worked on to get to a point where it was good enough to get on the album.

05:36 Even if it was just starting off with an acoustic guitar idea, it was progressed.

05:42 And from that point of view it was great to not really be confined to going,

05:48 "Well we can't really do this because it doesn't really sound like a Def Leppard song at this point in time."

05:53 So it kind of gets left.

05:55 In fact, the first track on the album, "Let's Go," is a combination of three completely different ideas

06:04 that I had from years back, that every so often it just so happens that you put them together

06:11 and it all kind of works in the right environment.

06:14 A lot of things happen like that on the new album.

06:17 We'd work for a month and we'd take the tapes home and Phil would play them to his friends in California

06:23 and I'd be playing to my friends in Dublin and Sam would be playing to his friends in Sheffield.

06:27 Before you put the tape on, somebody would say, "So you've got some new songs. What does it sound like?"

06:33 And we all ended up saying, "It sounds like Def Leppard."

06:37 And I think when we all realised that that's what we'd been saying out loud,

06:41 Phil said, "Why don't we just call the album Def Leppard because we've never done it?"

06:45 So it was pretty simple really why we did it.

06:48 I said, "Let's call it Def Leppard because we're making it for us and no one else, plus we've never had a self-titled album."

06:54 So that's pretty much how that came about.

06:56 It was an EP and it ended up an album for the right reasons, because we wanted to make music.

07:01 [Music]

07:07 I think it played a part, Viv's illness, played a part in pretty much how we approached things after we'd done the Viva Hysteria thing in Vegas.

07:18 Because we found out there, it's like, "Oh, right."

07:21 I've been dealing with lymphoma for the last almost three years.

07:27 I did three rounds of chemo and that didn't take care of it.

07:32 And then exactly a year ago I went into hospital for about three and a half weeks to do a stem cell transplant.

07:39 [Music]

07:44 [Music]

07:53 Well, I'd have to go with "Let's Go" first because it's so classically Leppard.

07:59 Again, it came very naturally. A lot of people might think that we just sat down to try and rewrite "Sugar," but we didn't.

08:05 That's a song that was very close to my heart. It was something that was...

The Making Of 'Def Leppard' Part One | Classic Rock | Louder

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