Joe Elliott names the singer who never missed a note: “Nails it every time”
The school of hard rock singers that Joe Elliott grew up in weren’t about having the greatest voice in the world.
If we’re being completely honest, a lot of the hair metal bands that ended up following in the footsteps of Def Leppard managed to make a mockery of what rock singing was supposed to be, to the point where the late 1980s featured bands trying their hand at what sounds like a combination of Janis Joplin rasp, David Lee Roth showmanship, and the sound of nails on a chalkboard. But Elliott was determined to make sure Leppard had the kind of chops that he saw in his heroes.
Granted, there were going to be limits on where they could go. Every member of the band would have gladly claimed that Queen was one of their biggest influences, but were they ever going to reach their vocal prowess? Probably not, but when listening to their live vocals from the Hysteria period onward, they were far superior to nearly any other rock and roll band on the touring circuit.
Even newcomer Vivian Campbell remembered thinking that the band were using vocal backing tracks whenever they played, only to be blown away when he realised what he had to be singing. And while Elliott has to take a few liberties now and again when in a live setting, he knew that he was far more interested in what the biggest names in glam were doing than trying to compete with what the blues belters could do.
Despite their name obviously being a mimicked version of what Led Zeppelin had done, Robert Plant was well outside of his range half the time. He wasn’t going to be belting to the rafters in the same way that he did, but even when the blues legends weren’t trying to out-high-note each other, no one managed to bring the same amount of musical taste to a song like Paul Rodgers could in Bad Company.
He had already come up as a member of Free, but when Elliott tried his hand at being a singer, he felt that it made more sense for him to follow what Mott the Hoople were doing than try to match him, saying, “Paul Rodgers nails it every time. I knew when I was 17 that I was never going to be Paul Rodgers, but I might be able to pull off something akin to what Alice Cooper and Ian Hunter did. They’re not great singers but they portray a song brilliantly.”
That’s not to say that one style is better than the other, either. In fact, Elliott actually fits somewhere in the middle between those character-driven singers and the discipline of the blues virtuosos. There’s a lot of attitude in the way that he delivers a lot of those early Def Leppard tunes, but the fact that he actually managed to sing a version of ‘Love Reign O’er Me’ and not make a complete fool of himself isn’t someone who is a lesser vocalist.
But when it comes to Rodgers, there’s no way of accurately describing what he could do. He was one of the few artists that remained consistent every single time he performed live, and given how much he kept his voice in shape, it actually made a lot more sense for him to get the call from the remaining members of Queen to make a record together years after Mercury’s passing.
So while Elliott would be the first person to say that Rodgers is one of the best vocalists he had ever heard, his choice to go in a different direction wasn’t out of feeling inferior. If anything, it was out of respect half the time. Because the minute that someone delivers the kind of vocal performance that he did on the song ‘Bad Company’, there’s no point in trying to compete with that kind of finesse.
