Def Leppard’s new album, Drastic Symphonies, featuring the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, comes out May 19, and they’ve just given fans another taste of what to expect. The Rock & Roll Hall of Famers dropped the official visualizer for the new take on the 1987 classic “Hysteria.”
Def Leppard is one of the few bands from the ’80s that is still making records and having hits today, with many rock bands of that period not surviving the ’90s grunge era of bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam.
In an interview with Yahoo Entertainment, Joe Elliott insists he had “no issues with (Nirvana’s) Kurt Cobain trying to kill the ‘80s,” adding, “I don’t think he tried to kill Def Leppard; I think he tried to kill 99 copyists.”
“I think he’d have been fine with it if we’d have been the only ones out there,” he adds. “But it was saturated.”
Def Leppard survived by taking risks, like their latest album, and those risks brought the band to the place Elliott always wanted them to be – on top.
“We always had ambitions … saying, ‘We are gonna be the biggest band in the world,’” he explains. “I didn’t see the point, with all due respect, of being a band that once got to No. 42 on the Billboard charts. That wasn’t an ambition that resonated with me.”
He adds, “If that’s all we ever got, fair enough, but you don’t stand at the bottom of Mount Everest saying, ‘Oh, I just want to get a hundred yards up.’ You want to get to the summit.”
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