The greatest band of the century, according to Joe Elliott
Every generation of rock and roll has had to work against the legacy that has come before it. While no one will go into the studio looking to make a song that could go toe-to-toe with The Beatles or Led Zeppelin, it’s always important to sing what’s in your heart rather than cater to what you think the masses want you to be. Although rock had started to get stale by the turn of the century, Joe Elliott thought that one band was proudly flying the flag for everything the genre stood for.
By the time Def Leppard had entered the new millennium, Elliott had already gone through his fair share of genre experiments. While the group had started as a straight-ahead hard rock affair on their first handful of albums, their collaborations with Mutt Lange led to them making some of the most celebrated pop rock of the modern age, from ballads like ‘Love Bites’ to the warped anthems like ‘Animal’.
Although that wall of sound worked well in the 1980s, the arrival of outfits like Pearl Jam and Nirvana led to them restructuring their approach for the album Slang. Miles away from their usual sound, most of the album featured the group spending a fortune in the studio trying to move as far away from their original sound as possible in favour of a lacklustre alternative impression.
Looking to get back in touch with what the fans wanted, 1998’s Euphoria was viewed as a comeback for the classic Leppard sound, which gave the band incentive to take another risk with their 2002 album, X. While the group would end up venturing more towards pop music in search of hit records, the new kids on the block were bringing the loud guitars back in full force.
In the wake of Nirvana’s demise, many of the biggest names in post-grunge began falling by the wayside, either being called copycats of the Seattle sound or wanting to take elements of their heroes and not do anything original. While Dave Grohl may have started as a crucial part of Nirvana, he transformed Foo Fighters into one of the biggest success stories of the 2000s.
Rather than focus on the angsty sounds of grunge, many of their best songs revolved around Grohl making stadium-ready rock anthems that felt right at home being played at festivals. Although Leppard had already graduated to living legend status playing various summer shed venues, Elliott knew that Grohl had something unlike anything else in the music industry.
When talking about the impact of alternative music in the mainstream, Elliott would call Foo Fighters one of the best bands working today, saying, “The Foo Fighters are the greatest thing that’s happened this century, [and I had] no issues with Kurt Cobain trying to kill the ’80s. 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.”
It is telling that Elliott’s praise is not rooted in nostalgia for a specific sound, but in the posture of the thing. Foo Fighters never behaved like a museum piece, and they never sounded like a band apologising for wanting to be huge. In an era where guitar music was often treated like a guilty pleasure or a retro affectation, Grohl doubled down on the simple virtues, a big riff, a bigger hook, and the sense that a rock show should feel like a communal release rather than a private confession.
That is the thread that connects them to Def Leppard more than any production trick or chorus shape ever could. Both bands understand that craft is not the enemy of credibility, and that accessibility is not a moral failure. Elliott can admire Cobain’s purge of the copyists while still saluting Grohl for rebuilding the tent, because the point was never to win an argument about purity. It was to keep the lights on for rock and roll when everyone else was busy writing its obituary.
Judging by their progression, Grohl seemed to take a few pages out of Leppard’s playbook as well, having the same style of singalong choruses in their later material like ‘Making a Fire’ from Medicine at Midnight. While both outfits may have approached rock and roll from completely separate angles, each was willing to represent everything the genre stood for at its best.
