Def Leppard Australian tour: Band influenced Taylor Swift in the womb

It might seem an unlikely pairing, but Taylor Swift was set on the path to superstardom from a bizarre source.

Def Leppard in London last year. Picture: Anton Corbijn

Just three years shy of their 50th year as a band, and with 100 million albums sold, British rockers Def Leppard are still playing teeming arenas all over the world and have won legions of fans – including, in 1989, a baby Taylor Swift.

“(Taylor’s) mum was the Leppard fan, and she was literally born into our music,” frontman Joe Elliott says from his studio in his Dublin home, where he now lives with wife Kristine and three young children. “She was in her mum’s belly, and her mum was playing our Hysteria album all through 1989 … obviously she was listening to Hysteria through the wall, and then grew up with it.”

In 2008, this connection materialised into a one-off double-header gig, where the rising country star, fresh from the release of her second album, played Nashville’s Acuff Theatre with the bombastic, big-haired behemoths, duetting on each other’s songs. The gig was filmed for Country Music Television’s Crossroads series.

“Taylor said, ‘There’s only one artist I would ever do Crossroads with,’ and it was us,” Elliott says. “Me and her talked about which songs we would do – ‘I can’t sing that lyric, my audience wouldn’t have it, you’ll have to sing that line.’ But it was a great show, because all the kids that were Taylor fans looked at us and went, ‘Who the hell are they?’ and all the mums were like, ‘Let me tell you who they are.’ (Now) she is … probably from a technical and a commercial point of view, bigger than the Stones and the Beatles combined, which is just amazing.”

Elliott, 64, is a powerhouse of musical knowledge, and wears his influences on his sleeve, throughout a 40-minute interview referencing not just the Beatles and Stones but Queen, the Kinks, The Who, Mott the Hoople and more as touchstones throughout his long career.

“We’ve never been a heavy metal band that’s gone deep down the Dungeons & Dragons stuff,” he says. “It’s not our thing. I grew up with the Stones, singing things like Angie, and You Can’t Always Get What You Want. Mick Jagger was very sensitive as a lyric writer. So was McCartney. So was Lennon. So was Ray Davis … so was Pete Townshend. So we’ve always wanted to rock, but we’ve always wanted to be able to have the humanistic side of it as well.”

Taylor Swift performs with Def Leppard‘s Joe Elliott at the 2009 CMT Music Awards in Nashville.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Def Leppard were aided in their ascent to fame by South African-born superproducer Mutt Lange, who presided over their second, third, fourth and fifth albums and had a hefty input. Lange, a country fan, also produced his ex-wife Shania Twain’s hit records, and Elliott says he had a subtle way of bringing a country crossover into Leppard’s music.

“When we were arranging our backing vocals on Adrenalize and Hysteria, (Lange) would sometimes throw in a little spanner into the works. He’d say ‘Change that major to a minor’, or vice versa. And we go, wow, that’s kind of cool. And he goes ‘It’s a country harmony, but nobody in rock ‘n’ roll ever does that – maybe the Eagles’. And (country fans) would hear it and go ‘wait a minute, that’s country on a Def Leppard song, that’s cool’. And they became fans. Over the years we’ve worked with Taylor Swift, Tim McGraw. Alison Krauss…”

Krauss in fact co-stars on two tracks of the band’s 2022 album Diamond Star Halos, named after a line in glam giants T.Rex’s smash hit Get It On. Halos was a product of the pandemic. With flights shut down literally on the very day the other four members of the band were due to fly to Dublin to work on the album in Elliott’s home studio, they were forced to find ways to collaborate online in a way they had never done before from their homes across the globe, and the result is one of their best records. Elliott immediately had an emergency phone call with guitarist Phil Collen and within a half-hour, they had bashed out a game plan for working collaboratively in the cloud. Between them, the band had nine songs ready to go – four by Collen, three by Elliott, two by bassist Rick Savage.

“We sent each other the demos and we were just texting or emailing each other,” Elliott says. “We never even did Zoom in the two years we were doing this stuff. We literally never saw each other, but we talked every day and we would hear the tracks and live with them, and then two or three days after I’d been listening to a Phil song, I call him and go ‘Liquid Dust, man, it’s awesome. I can’t wait to have a go at this. I don’t want to rewrite the words, I’m loving this. I’m happy to do the Roger Daltrey thing on somebody else’s songs, you know? And they were the same with my chords, they were happy to play them. It was actually very freeing. If we were in one room, we would be going ‘All right, go on and play it … aah, the chorus could be better”. because that’s what we always do. And with this, it’s like, OK, let’s just trust each other, that we have art here. By the time we’d finished it, we all came to the conclusion that it was the most fun we’ve ever had making an album. And why on Earth would we ever want to go back to doing one the traditional way again? We didn’t even have a record deal when we started the album … so we’re just making this for fun. We’re just being expressive, artistic. When it’s closer, we’ll see if anybody’s interested in releasing it. We were making this record for us. And as it went along, we were like, just literally giggling and giddy.”

Fun and humour are central to the bond between the band members, Elliott says, and they sling endless quotes from Monty Python and Fawlty Towers back and forth at each other in the dressing room. That lightness humour shines through in some of their most memorable songs. True, Def Leppard have endured traumas, like the infamous traffic crash that cost drummer Rick Allen his arm, and the tragic death of original guitarist Steve Clark of an overdose at age 30, but Elliott says using humour is a great way of “shoving the ghosts back down into the coffin”.

“Think about the logistics of putting on a show,” Elliott says. “From standing under a lighting rig that weighs 300 tonnes every night for 40 years, to getting into a cigar tube with wings on it every time you go to another country. The things that can go wrong when you actually get into a room that you hope doesn’t collapse on your head. It just becomes a humorous thing. This life that we live is completely mad, you know? But you can’t dwell on the negatives of ‘what if’. I read in the papers years ago, some guy in England was so absolutely paranoid about Friday the 13th that he refused to get out of bed, and the chimney fell in on him and killed him. And I’ve never forgotten that because, hey, it’s sad as hell, but it’s at the same time quite humorous and comical … ridiculous. No matter how much protection you want to put around yourself, stuff happens and so you just have to ride that wave until the wave’s not there.”

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Like the entire industry, Leppard were delayed in touring by the pandemic shutdown, and Australia is technically the final leg of the Diamond Star Halos tour, playing a trio of stadiums co-headlining with American hard rockers Motley Crüe. Since then, they’ve also released another album, Drastic Symphonies, a collaboration with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra that reimagines some of their greatest songs with sweeping strings, often in quite unexpected ways – perennial raunchy hit Pour Some Sugar on Me becomes a quiet, elegant piano ballad, for example, and it works delightfully. Elliott says some gigs with a live orchestra are probably on the cards for 2024-25. In the meantime, with four decades’ worth of material to draw on for the tour set list, Elliott says the Suncorp Stadium show will not disappoint, with three new songs and a stacked deck of smashes.

“People don’t go to stadiums to be educated. They go to an open mic night to be educated. They come to be entertained. So what do you want to hear from a legacy band, like McCartney or the Stones, or U2, or us, or Maiden? You want to hear the songs that you know. But you’ll forgive us playing some new stuff, because it’s lifeblood for a band like us to keep creating. The thing is, we’ve got so many hits, we actually can’t play them all. It’s like having a football team where everybody’s fit, but you can only play 11, and you’ve got 20 people wanting to pull the shirt on.”

Def Leppard play Brisbane’s Suncorp Stadium with Motley Crüe on Wednesday. Tickets: livenation.com.au

Def Leppard in London last year. Picture: Anton Corbijn