SHOCK WAVE
The day has barely begun in California and Def Leppard’s Phil Collen is already on the road. It’s a little after six in the morning and Highway 405 is already busy as it snakes north towards Hollywood. A high-sided truck glides past him on the left, its drag rattling the car’s windows, the whoosh and hum of the traffic clear through his phone, even from thousands of miles away on a gloomy London afternoon.
“I basically joined Tesla,” Collen says with a chuckle. “Best not tell Joe that. When it came to producing the new album I basically adopted the Mutt Lange philosophy. We ended up making it like we did on the Hysteria record and it really works well. Everyone puts their best in, everyone’s involved equally, no egos, and that works. Mutt, he’d be singing and playing on the record. When it came to making Shock we followed that approach to the letter.”
Tesla were long overdue a new landmark record. Or any kind of record, come to think of it. The band, who managed to fuse early Aerosmith (especially in singer Jeff Keith’s rasping delivery) with melodic nuance and in 1986. They then confounded and delighted their audience four years later with the beautifully weighted live album (which was surely the blueprint for Dave Grohl and the Foo Fighters to make their own live acoustic record, 16 years later).
