The album Joe Elliott wishes he had written: “I would shoot my own mother”
There aren’t too many bands that have written about the wonders of being in a rock and roll band quite like Def Leppard.
Look no further than the prominent use of the word ‘rock’ in many of the group’s song titles to see how much they want people to know about their rock credentials. Although Def Leppard may have had the term ‘rock and roll’ stamped on their forehead from the minute they started, Joe Elliott thought that one frontman was the epitome of what he wanted to be.
That’s not to say that Elliott wasn’t a fan of different aspects of popular music. When combing through the band’s covers album Yeah!, Elliott tried his hand at many facets of British music history, from the sounds of pop artists like David Essex to the grit and growl of Iggy and The Stooges or T. Rex.
When first sculpting himself as a frontman, though, the glam scene always loomed large in Elliott’s musical vocabulary. Thanks to acts like David Bowie and Mott the Hoople, Elliott had found his calling as a rock and roll frontman, wanting to tease up his hair and play the same rough-and-tumble rock and roll he heard on the radio.
By the time he had started working with Def Leppard, the music had shifted slightly. What Elliott responded to most was not just confidence, but conviction. The great frontmen made rock and roll feel lived in, like something pulled straight from the road rather than manufactured for the stage. That sense of danger and looseness gave the music its bite, reminding listeners that rock was supposed to feel a little unruly, even when the songs were tightly constructed.
That balance between swagger and songwriting became a quiet benchmark for Elliott. He admired singers who could sell a lyric without oversinging it, letting phrasing and attitude do the heavy lifting. It was less about vocal gymnastics and more about sounding believable, as if every line came from someone who had actually been there and done it.
While every bit as tuneful as the early days, Elliott had added a layer of grit to his voice, no doubt inspired by the influx of metal bands that were clogging up the scene at the time, from Black Sabbath to the brutal rock bombast of Led Zeppelin.
As Elliott was honing his songcraft, though, he had his eyes firmly set on the sounds of AC/DC. Hailing from Australia a few years before Leppard’s ascent, Bon Scott was delivering a masterclass in what a frontman should be, having that cavalier spirit and massive holler that would have made any parents running scared.
For all of the vocal power Bon had, though, his knowledge of how to write rock and roll songs was unparalleled. While the band may have gotten the tag for sounding similar from one album to the next, Scott’s lyrics read like a diary of a musical troubadour, from the dreaming sounds of ‘Rock and Roll Singer’ to the lust for danger in ‘Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap’.
Singling out the album Powerage as one of his favourite rock albums of all time, Elliott said that he could only dream of writing songs with that much attitude, recalling, “I would shoot my own mother… well, no, I wouldn’t, but I would do something drastic to be able to write those kinds of those kinds of songs. Stunning, absolutely stunning – the whole record”.
As Elliott started to write his lyrics, though, the influence of Scott did end up hanging around on a few of Leppard’s classic tracks. Outside of the party atmosphere of an album like High N Dry, the song ‘Let It Go’ could easily pass for a decent AC/DC B-side, complete with one of the most down-and-dirty riffs that Leppard would commit to tape. While the band would clean up their vocals to a sonic sheen on their future albums, Elliott understood the power that came from vocal grit.
