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Iron Maiden weren’t the only superstar band to emerge from the NWOBHM era – Def Leppard emerged from their native Sheffield in the late 1970s to become one of the biggest British rock bands of the following decade on the back of blockbuster albums such as 1983’s Pyromania and 1987’s Hysteria. But their rise was marred by tragedy in the shape of the car accident in which drummer Rick Allen lost an arm and the death of guitarist Steve Clark in 1991. In 2011, singer Joe Elliott looked back on the highs and lows of his band’s stellar career.

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When Def Leppard headlined  the Download festival for the second time in three years in June 2011, they returned to the place where, 25 years earlier, they played the most important show of their entire career.

It was on August 16, 1986, when Donington Park was home to a one-day event known as Monsters Of Rock, that Leppard drummer Rick Allen made a comeback that few believed was possible. Rick had lost his left arm after crashing his Corvette sports car near the band’s hometown of Sheffield on New Year’s Eve, 1984. At the age of 21, it seemed certain that he would never play drums again. But after extensive physical rehabilitation, and with a specially designed, electronically enhanced drum kit, Rick found a way back.

When Def Leppard stepped out on to the Donington stage on that day in 1986, Rick was shaking with nerves. The band had prepared with five low-key club dates in Ireland, but at Donington, before an audience of 65,000, the stakes were so much higher. Backstage, singer Joe Elliott said he wouldn’t make any mention of Rick to the audience. But after a couple of songs, he felt he had to. The crowd responded with an ovation so loud, so emotionally charged, Rick was moved to tears.

As Joe recalls now: “That moment at Donington in 1986 was amazing. It’s something we’ll never forget. Rick had come close to dying in that accident. He nearly lost his other arm as well. It was horrendous. But he’d recovered and gone through this amazing transformation. And when I introduced Rick at Donington, the volume of the crowd was so powerful you could feel it. It was like a hairdryer, it almost blew your hair backwards. It was this huge wave of emotion, and it was overwhelming.”

It was a similar story when Leppard returned to Donington for Download 2009. Again, Joe had decided not to introduce Rick to the audience. Again, he changed his mind. And again, the response of the huge crowd left the drummer in tears. 

“Donington will always be a special place for Def Leppard,” Joe says. “And this year, we’ll kill the fucking place. We’re born to play gigs like this. You’re not around for 34 years, headlining a big festival like this, if you’re not a fucking good band!”

In a history that dates back to 1977, Def Leppard have experienced the highest highs and the lowest lows. On January 8, 1991, seven years after the accident that almost claimed the life of Rick, the band’s guitarist Steve Clark died following a long battle with alcoholism. But Steve did live to see a dream fulfilled. As Joe says: “We always wanted to the biggest rock’n’roll band in the world, and in the late 80s we made it.”

The statistics of Def Leppard’s career are astonishing. They have sold over 75 million albums worldwide, and they are one of only five rock groups to have sold ten million copies of two original studio albums in America – a feat they achieved with 1983’s Pyromania and 1987’s Hysteria, placing them in the elite company of The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Van Halen. Hysteria alone has sold more than 20 million copies, ranking it among the 50 biggest-selling albums of all time. But back in 1978, when the young Def Leppard made their first professional recording, they barely had a pot to piss in.

Long before they spent £2 million making the Hysteria album, Leppard cut their debut EP at Fairview studios in Hull with a budget of £150, borrowed from Joe’s father. “The studio bill came to £148.50,” Joe says, “so we had enough change for a bag of chips on our return to Sheffield!” Joe’s mum also helped out with the cost cutting. She glued together the EP’s cardboard sleeves – all 1,000 of them.

Titled The Def Leppard EP, and later known by its lead track Getcha Rocks Off, it was recorded with stand-in drummer Frank Noon (a replacement for original member Tony Kenning) along- side Joe, Steve, bassist Rick ‘Sav’ Savage and guitarist Pete Willis. The EP was released in January 1979 on the band’s own independent label, which they named Bludgeon Riffola after a phrase from a vicious review of an early Leppard show. All 1,000 copies sold out so quickly that a second pressing of 15,000 was hastily produced. Within a few months, Leppard were at the forefront of a grassroots movement christened by Sounds writer Geoff Barton as the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal.

As Joe states, Leppard were never an out-and-out metal band like Iron Maiden, Diamond Head, Tygers Of Pan Tang, Saxon and other stars of the NWOBHM. Leppard’s primary influences were AC/DC, Thin Lizzy, Led Zeppelin, Queen and 70s glam rock. “We were doing our own thing,” Joe says. “We didn’t jump on board the NWOBHM – we got sucked in! But the buzz around it certainly helped us.”

By August 1979, Leppard had signed with AC/DC manager Peter Mensch and with major label Mercury/Vertigo. Rick, who’d joined the band in December ’78, was still only 15 years old: his parents had to sign the contracts on his behalf. When Rick celebrated his 16th birthday on November 1, 1979, Leppard played at London’s Hammersmith Odeon as support to AC/DC.

The band then headed to John Lennon’s former home, Tittenhurst Park, to record their first album, On Through The Night, with Judas Priest producer ‘Colonel’ Tom Allom. As Joe says, Allom “really captured the energy of the band.” And in contrast to riff-heavy songs such as Wasted and Rock Brigade, Leppard also pushed the envelope with the more experimental, Rush-inspired epic Overture, which Joe describes as “somewhere off in wacky world”. But there was one song on the album that aroused controversy, a pop-oriented single unapologetically titled Hello America. And on March 1, 1980, two weeks before the album was released, Geoff Barton suggested that Def Leppard had sold out in a Sounds article headlined: HAS THE LEPPARD CHANGED ITS SPOTS?

On Through The Night hit number 15 on the UK chart, but as Joe admits, “Geoff’s negativity hurt us.” When Leppard appeared at the Reading Festival in August 1980, they were pelted with missiles from a hostile crowd. But Leppard came back stronger with a second album that Geoff proclaimed “brilliant”, an album on which Leppard teamed up with the producer who’d transform their sound and turn them into a multi-million selling band.

Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange was a perfect fit for Def Leppard. He’d produced pop hits, including The Boomtown Rats’ number one Rat Trap. But more importantly, he’d also produced AC/DC’s two big breakthrough albums: 1979’s Highway To Hell, their first million-seller, and 1980’s Back In Black, the band’s triumphant comeback, recorded with new singer Brian Johnson after the death of his predecessor Bon Scott. 

Recorded at Battery Studios in London, where AC/DC had cut Highway To Hell, Leppard’s second album High ’N’ Dry was a huge leap forward from their debut. “High ’N’ Dry is certainly the most heavy metal record Def Leppard’s ever made,” Joe says. “But it’s also melodic. It’s got the big vocal harmonies.” With the power ballad Bringin’ On The Heartbreak achieving heavy rotation on the nascent MTV channel, High ’N’ Dry sold 500,000 copies in the US. And with the next album, Pyromania, the band and their producer were aiming even higher. “Mutt saw in us a band that he could manipulate, production-wise,” Joe explains. “And we saw in Mutt a producer who was a step above everybody.”

During the making of Pyromania, in June 1982, Pete Willis was fired. A heavy drinker, Pete had become a liability. Says Joe: “Steve Clark was a drinker but at least Steve was a nice guy. Pete wasn’t. One day in the studio Pete was so bollocksed he was actually wearing the guitar backwards – strings inside, strumming the back of the guitar! He had to go.” The album was completed with a new guitarist, Phil Collen, formerly of NWOBHM-era glam rockers Girl.

Released on January 20, 1983, Pyromania was greeted with rave reviews. Rolling Stone magazine, always sniffy about hard rock music, awarded the album four out of five stars. Future Metal Hammer writer Malcolm Dome declared it “the birth of a legend.” As Joe says: “We always thought bigger than everybody else, and we busted our balls to make something that nobody had ever done. We wanted to update the English sound of The Who and Zeppelin. We had that hypnotic drum sound that the Human League had, and stuck the Queen and AC/DC stuff over it. We’d made this amazing record and we thought, if people don’t get it, there’s something wrong with them!”

They needn’t have worried. By August 1983, Pyromania was selling 100,000 copies a day in America. “It was magical,” Joe says. “Fucking unbelievable! We were selling concert tickets faster than Zeppelin did. Our tour started at the Marquee club in front of a few hundred people, and ended with us headlining at the Jack Murphy Stadium in San Diego in front of 55,000!” 

Pyromania would sell over six million copies before the end of that year. Only Michael Jackson’s Thriller kept it from topping the US chart. But with their fourth album, Hysteria, Leppard would hit number one in the USA, UK and throughout the world.

When the band began recording Hysteria, it was without Mutt Lange, who was exhausted after working on seven major albums back to back. But Leppard’s second choice producer – Jim Steinman, the man who wrote Meat Loaf’s Bat Out Of Hell – didn’t work out. So Mutt returned – with a firm agenda. As Joe recalls, “Mutt said to us, ‘Michael Jackson kept you off the top because he had six singles off his album. So let’s make an album with seven hit singles on it!’ That was our game plan. We weren’t trying to better an Iron Maiden record. We were trying to better a Michael Jackson album that sold 37 million copies!”

Incredibly, it almost worked. Leppard couldn’t match Thriller. Nobody could – it’s still the biggest-selling album of all time. But with Hysteria, Leppard achieved their dream of being the biggest rock’n’roll band in the world. And although the album’s first single, Women, bombed, the other six all hit the US top 20, with Love Bites reaching number one, and Pour Some Sugar On Me hitting two. According to Joe, the latter track, a rap/rock hybrid, was written specifically for strippers to perform to.

The success of Hysteria was all the more remarkable given what Rick Allen had been through during its making. As Joe recalls: “After Rick lost his arm he’d had to re-learn everything he ever knew. Not just playing drums – everything. Tying his shoelaces with one hand, brushing his teeth, eating a meal. Think about it. He even had to learn to walk again. When you lose an arm that’s a lot of weight to lose. The first few times he got out of bed, he used to fall over. To get his balance, he had to start compensating by shoving his shoulder this way and that. It was a hard time for Rick and for all of us. But it was Sav who said, ‘Shall we sit around writing the death knell for the band while Rick’s in hospital, or shall we try to write Bohemian Rhapsody to cheer him up?’ And Sav was right. It’s all well and good being sympathetic, but at some point you just have to get on with it. And that’s exactly what Rick said to us.”

Hysteria made Def Leppard a household name all across the world. But before the follow-up album was recorded, the band suffered another devastating blow with the death of Steve Clark. “Steve was a lovely guy and a great guitar player, but he was a casualty, there’s no doubt,” Joe admits. “When Rick had his accident it was totally up to him whether he was going to be in the band or not. With Steve, we gave him six months off for rehab, and it didn’t work. He chose to go to the pub and drink himself to death. When he died it was horrible, but it certainly wasn’t a shock. A shock is when your manager says your drummer’s just crashed his car and lost his arm.”

Leppard recorded their fifth album, Adrenalize, as a four-piece, with Phil Collen playing all guitars. Mutt Lange co-wrote nine of the album’s ten tracks, but as he was busy producing a Bryan Adams album, Waking Up The Neighbours, Leppard chose to produce Adrenalize with their trusted engineer Mike Shipley. Released in 1992, the year in which Nirvana’s Nevermind topped the US chart, Adrenalize sold seven million copies and went to number one in 22 countries. As Joe says, “The grunge thing didn’t really affect us then.” But like so many of the big 80s rock acts, Leppard were marginalised in the era of alternative rock and nu-metal. “We never considered splitting, though,” Joe insists. “After what this band went through with Rick and Steve, we were never going to just give up.” 

With guitarist Vivian Campbell, ex-Dio and Whitesnake, replacing Steve Clark in 1992, Leppard have retained a solid line-up since then, releasing a string of albums helped them passing pretty much every passing trend since. As Joe says, “The story of Def Leppard is not just a musical thing. We did it for Rick. We tried to do it for Steve. We’ve always been humans first and musicians second. And after all that’s happened, we’re still here and people still want to see us. As long as they keep coming, we’ll keep playing.”

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 219, June 2011

Freelance writer for Classic Rock since 2005, Paul Elliott has worked for leading music titles since 1985, including Sounds, Kerrang!, MOJO and Q. He is the author of several books including the first biography of Guns N’ Roses and the autobiography of bodyguard-to-the-stars Danny Francis. He has written liner notes for classic album reissues by artists such as Def Leppard, Thin Lizzy and Kiss, and currently works as content editor for Total Guitar. He lives in Bath – of which David Coverdale recently said: “How very Roman of you!”

Few bands are as divisive as Nickelback. The Canadian band may be one of the biggest rock bands of the 21st century, but there’s an army of detractors who take great delight in ripping into the band at any opportunity. But, as Classic Rock found out when we sat down with frontman Chad Kroeger and guitarist Ryan Peake just before the release of 2005’s multi-million selling All The Right Reasons, the digs just bounce off a band are pretty much criticproof.

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Chad Kroeger knows how to make an entrance. We’re sitting in a Soho pizza restaurant (a nearby pub has already been rejected as an interview location, due to fears that the smoke might damage Mr Kroeger’s voice), perusing the menu when the Nickelback entourage begins filing in.

First to arrive is a security guard, hulking and suspicious, scanning the restaurant for anyone who might try to lob some garlic bread in the direction of his client. Next through the door is the band’s manager, an anonymous presence who places himself at the far end of the table. Then comes the press officer, fresh from the challenge of transporting a multi-platinum-selling rock band discretely across the London at lunchtime, but satisfied that this particular pizzeria is low-key enough for our interview to proceed.

Finally, just as the arrival of an eyebrow technician seems on the cards, Kroeger and Ryan Peake appear in the doorway. Contrasting with the sunken cheeks and sallow skin of the lunchtime clientele, the Nickelback frontman and his long-serving guitarist look positively glowing. There’s little sign on either face of fallout from their decade on the road, and nothing in their body language to suggest that invisible hand of the record label pushing them along the promotional trail for latest album, All The Right Reasons, has frog-marched them here. On the contrary, enthusiasm fills the air, and there’s a refreshing sense that both men consider themselves lucky to be dining out on record company Roadrunner’s expense account – this isn’t business.

Still, it takes the pair a little while to warm up. Kroeger will not remove his sunglasses for the duration of our interview, and for the first few minutes he sits in silence, his attention seemingly divided between what to eat and whether to trust the journalist in front of him. Then something gives. He decides he’ll have the mozzarella salad followed by the lasagne, and flashes a grin that suggests he doesn’t think we’re here to stitch him up.

Kroeger’s entrance may have been lifted from the first chapter of How To Act Like A Prima Donna Rock Star, but for the rest of the interview he’s charm personified – to the point of eating with one hand so he can hold my dictaphone.

There’s something almost methodical about the way Kroeger has led his band to huge success. They started life as a covers act in the tiny Canadian farming town of Hanna, but the singer realised in the mid-90s that for Nickelback to get their break they would need to relocate.

“It’s impossible to get a band off the ground in Hanna,” he smiles. “That’s why we moved to Vancouver. The best analogy would be, if you were a journalist and you lived in Siberia, do you think you’d have a successful career? I honestly think if Nickelback hadn’t worked out, I’d be in jail, on a charge of grand theft auto or trafficking.”

“And I’d probably be bailing him out of jail,” Ryan Peake chips in, right on the next beat.

“The thing is…” Kroeger considers, “Hanna’s got around 3,000 people and it’s two hours from the nearest city. We were so far from anywhere that we didn’t have a lot of influences. If someone brought an album back to our town, everyone knew about it. You had to go to the city to get records, and so we kinda got exposed to whatever was on the radio, which in my house was country and western. We could play gigs, but they didn’t mean anything. We had to leave,” he says, leaving you in little doubt that they had to.

Nickelback arrived in Vancouver in 1996 with a small amount of original material, and a $4,000 loan from Kroeger’s stepfather. They released the independent album Curb later that year, and promoted it with a tour schedule that verged on the masochistic. For the next four years, the band – completed by Chad’s brother Mike on bass and drummer Ryan Vikedal (later replaced by Daniel Adair) – schlepped around the venues of North America, using downtime to manage their own record distribution and bookings, and building airplay by forcing friends who had escaped Hanna to bombard their local radio stations with requests.

A second self-financed album, The State, was released in 2000, and went on to sell 500,000 copies off the back of another continent-wide offensive. With the industry jaw exposed, Nickelback just needed a good follow-up punch, and they delivered it with 2001’s Silver Side Up. By the time the single How You Remind Me hit No.1 in the US and Canada simultaneously, Nickelback were officially huge – that status later confirmed by the five million sales of 2003’s The Long Road.

And yet – how to put this – there was something about Nickelback’s rise to the top of the heap that left a nasty taste in many people’s mouth. Kroeger spent many of his early interviews reminding everyone of his dues-paying roots and the value of songwriting over gimmicks. Sneering reference was made to thd masks and boiler suits of the Canadians’ labelmates Slipknot, while Nickelback’s own music was held up as something from a purer source; the essence of rock’n’roll stripped of the extraneous bullshit. To a large degree, Kroeger’s opinions were justified. But that didn’t stop the knives coming out.

“We get the same rap everywhere we go,” Kroeger sighs. “It’s not just in Britain. We are never going to be confused for critics’ darlings. I think we’re a band that it’s easy to take shots at, because critics only like you when haven’t sold any records. As soon as you’re successful, the press starts policing you.”

When asked whether Nickelback get on with other rock stars, he ponders the question briefly. “Er, if we meet them, yes. If we haven’t met them, for some reason, no. Like, if a band has never met us, we’ll be the first ones they’ll – what do you say over here? – take the piss out of. After a band meets us, they say nothing but good stuff – hopefully.”

Nickelback are famously a very unpretentious band. Have they ever been tempted to get a ‘gimmick’?

“I don’t think we could stick to it,” Kroeger replies. “And I think if you have to have a gimmick to get people to dig your music, then your music is probably not that good in the first place. Just make good music, and people are gonna turn up and drink beer. Beer-drinking is very important for us. We are the people’s beer-drinking band.”

Asked what he thinks when Nickelback play festivals alongside bands like Slipknot, Kroeger fires a perfectly timed reply like a ball from a bat: “We try not to play festivals with Slipknot,” he says, with a comedic edge. “Our fans don’t like each other very much. I actually like some of their music, but I’ll be curious to see if they still want to put on masks and jump around and scream in 10 years. Cos the thing about bands like that – and I’m not trying to trash anybody – is that their fans are going to grow up and look back and go: ‘Hmm…’. Hopefully our fans are gonna grow up and still enjoy our music. Once again, that’s what happens when you have a gimmick – it wears off.”

Would you put Mötley Crüe in that bracket? Their persona has a certain whiff of the artificial.

“I think with Mötley Crüe, they actually did all that,” Ryan Peake counters. “You’ve read The Dirt, right? They actually lived all that.”

“Tommy’s a buddy of mine,” Kroeger says, “and I’ve heard all those stories first-hand. Some of it does get embellished, but then some of it also gets buried, because it’s too unbelievable and nobody wants it to come to the surface.”

Anyone planning a similar book on Nickelback?

“I don’t think we do enough cocaine,” Peake shrugs.

But that’s not to say the band haven’t dabbled in rock star excess. “I was wild, I’ll say it,” Kroeger admits. “Hell yeah. Getting drunk and blowing tons of money. I did build a swimming pool, but it didn’t resemble the shape of a guitar. We’re, like, the year 2000 musicians. We invest!”

“You can wreck whatever you want,” Peake says sagely, “and the record label will pay for it. It’s your money anyway, so it doesn’t matter. We’ve done all that.”

Down to business, then. What themes are you writing about on your album All The Right Reasons?

Kroeger rocks back in his chair. “Hmm, let’s see… There’s blow jobs… more blow jobs. That’s important to a rock’n’roll musician. The ability for a woman to orally satisfy somebody in a rock band – that’s a wonderful quality, isn’t it? Sex crops up a lot on the album. It’s a universal theme.”

He’s not kidding. All The Right Reasons is so sex-crazed that you half expect it to start humping your leg. Animals is a soaring rocker that discusses the dilemma of being caught shagging in a car by your father-in-law. There’s violence, too, especially on Next Contestant.

The third universal theme on the album is less frivolous: death. Nickelback were drinking partners with Dimebag Darrell until the Pantera guitarist was murdered in 2004, and for All The Right Reasons, they decided to fuse together some Pantera out-takes from the vaults as a tribute. The resulting track is Side Of A Bullet. It’s the one subject on the menu this afternoon that makes Kroeger’s face cloud over.

“The last time I saw Dimebag it was the end of a night out,” he reflects. “I’m sitting in his car, he hands a bottle of JD over, and I take a huge pull off of it, open the door, throw up, wipe my mouth, and send it back over. I hugged him. He told me to be careful on the road; I think I actually told him I loved him. Then he got on the bus. And that was the last time I saw him.”

“We’d actually worked together before, on a cover of [Elton John’s] Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting),” Chad continues, “but there wasn’t enough material [to put together another track]. So we called up Vinnie [Paul, Dimebag’s brother and former Pantera drummer] and asked if he could send us some pieces from [Pantera’s] Vulgar Display Of Power and Far Beyond Driven. We wanted to get those signature Dimebag pieces, so the minute he starts playing you know it’s him. And we’re very proud of it.”

Nickelback are due across the road at Virgin Radio, so we wrap things up. Chad clicks off the dictaphone, Ryan cleans his plate, and they get an assurance that Classic Rock won’t slag Nickelback off in the feature that will come out of today. “It really doesn’t matter if you do,” Kroeger grins.

And he’s right. This band is impervious to cynicism. Whatever you think of Nickelback, your opinion doesn’t change the fact that they write music that gives millions of people a laugh, a dance and a respite from real life. And when it comes down to it, aren’t those all the right reasons?

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 89, October 2005

Henry Yates has been a freelance journalist since 2002 and written about music for titles including The Guardian, The Telegraph, NME, Classic Rock, Guitarist, Total Guitar and Metal Hammer. He is the author of Walter Trout’s official biography, Rescued From Reality, a music pundit on Times Radio and BBC TV, and an interviewer who has spoken to Brian May, Jimmy Page, Ozzy Osbourne, Ronnie Wood, Dave Grohl, Marilyn Manson, Kiefer Sutherland and many more.