The one show that Joe Elliott was haunted by: “It was a disaster”
Any artist can usually get over the occasional bad show. No one can claim to be one of the greatest rock bands in the world every time they go onstage, and sometimes, there are just those moments when you’re having an off day, and things just don’t go as planned. But for Joe Elliott, he felt that opening for Ritchie Blackmore in the early 1980s gave him one of the worst gigs of his life.
In theory, though, this should have been a dream come true for almost everyone involved. Every member of Def Leppard had been raised listening to Deep Purple, so to get the chance to hear the more hard-edged version of what Blackmore was cooking up was sure to be one of the greatest nights of their lives.
Then again, Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow wasn’t exactly firing on all cylinders yet, either. The road that was paved by Ronnie James Dio was now long gone, and after one ill-fated lineup with Graham Bonnett trying on their power pop side, Joe Lynn Turner was brought in to make them sound at least somewhere close to a legitimate rock and roll act again.
If you look at what both bands were making around that time, though, Def Leppard won out with the better album. It was certainly helped by the fact that superproducer Mutt Lange was behind the desk, but High ‘n’ Dry was about to be unleashed upon the world and introduce everyone to the next generation of hard rock, but Elliott didn’t make any reservations about how fans heard the worst possible version of it one night in Germany.
Once the band arrived, Elliott remembered being forced onto the stage and delivering one of the most ramshackle shows he ever played, saying, “We literally walked on the stage with no soundcheck. We hadn’t played a gig for over a year, so you can imagine it was a disaster. I know the reviews were awful; I couldn’t read them because they were in German, but everybody was telling me, ‘What are reviews saying?’ I said, ‘You don’t want to know.’”
But since when have the critics necessarily been kind to Def Leppard? Aside from selling millions of records just a few years later, this was the same band that got a cold reception from half of the crowd at a festival because they thought they weren’t staying true to what real metal was.
Asking those same fans today, there’s a good chance all of them ended up loving ‘Bringing on the Heartbreak’ and can probably sing the first verse and chorus of ‘Photograph’ without stopping. Because at that point, Def Leppard didn’t really care about sounding like a true hard rock band anymore.
Sure, they were on a bill by one of the few who helped pave the way for hard rock, but it wasn’t about just making a song for people to bang their heads, too. It was now a matter of making something that could touch someone’s soul, and if that meant having to pay your dues with a few lacklustre shows, then so be it.
