It was in the summer of 2005 that Phil Collen said what every member of Def Leppard was thinking: enough is enough.“Fuck it!” the guitarist snapped. “We’re better than this.” The band were in America’s Deep South, performing at a state fair in a dusty field on the banks of the Mississippi River. And, as they knew only too well, the state fair circuit was where rock stars go to die.
As singer Joe Elliott explains it now: “In one sense, state fairs are like every other gig – big stage, big audience. But there’s a stigma that comes with it. It’s the difference between an eighties artist like Madonna doing six nights at Wembley and an eighties package tour featuring Marc Almond and the Thompson Twins at Butlin’s. And at a state fair you’re just one of the attractions, along with a big wheel and firework display, and a juggling pig or whatever. It’s not exactly Madison Square Garden.”
When Collen recalls the scene from that night in 2005, he can laugh now at the tragicomic absurdity of it all. “It was like a carnival,” he says, “if you can imagine doing a gig at a carnival. They put fucking deck chairs out! It was full-on Spinal Tap. Like: ‘Are we going on before the puppet show?’” I was so pissed off. I just thought: ‘I don’t want to do this any more.’”
At the time, the humiliation of their predicament burned deep. For a band that had sold millions of records during the golden days of the 80s, it was a bitter pill to swallow.
Def Leppard had dug deep before. Sheer force of will had seen them through the darkest times: drummer Rick Allen losing his left arm after a car crash on New Year’s Eve 1984; guitarist Steve Clark succumbing to alcoholism and dying at the age of 30 in 1991. The band had also weathered the storm of the alternative rock revolution of the early 90s, which had destroyed the careers of lesser 80s stars. But in 2005 they found they were fighting a losing battle.
The thought of leaving the band never entered Phil Collen’s mind. “What I thought,” he says, “is that we’re in a rut and we need to change. And everybody backed me up on it.”
It was a turning point for Def Leppard. The change that Phil Collen demanded – and that every member of the band agreed upon – would lead, in time, to a late-career renaissance. In 2022 their stock is as high as it’s been in decades. May sees the release of Diamond Star Halos, the most anticipated new Def Leppard album since Adrenalize back in 1992. That’s followed by the biggest US rock event of this summer, The Stadium Tour, on which Leppard will co-headline with another superstar act from their original purple patch in the 80s, Mötley Crüe.
Def Leppard have come a long way since Phil Collen lost his shit at that state
