Joe Elliott's Q & A with Spin Magazine
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.
To Read More visit SPIN