Online Exclusive: Tour Talk

Joe Elliott of Def Leppard

Touring with: Journey
Tour starts: June 23rd in Camden, NJ

How are European gigs different from playing here in the States? Are the fans different? Are they more intense over there?

Oh, massively different. American audiences get Def Leppard, and sometimes European audiences don't. The one thing that's vastly obvious is that between songs they go deadly silent. And, it's like, "Oh, dead air. Quick, talk!" And, in America, you can towel down and have a quick swig of a drink, and they're still cheering the song you just played 20 minutes ago. It's just a different culture. Rock & roll is more part of the American culture than it will ever be part of the European culture. You know, obviously certain people can fill stadiums. It never feels as nature as America. It's always a lot more -- I don't want to say tiresome -- but it's definitely a lot more uphill than an American audience.

So how do you choose a set list with so many songs?

Yeah, that's a tricky one. The longer we exist, by nature of the fact that we refuse to be a nostalgia act, we are always going to every tour have ten more songs to pick from, or in this particular tour, fourteen. And because we're both playing for the same amount of time, we're actually playing for less time than we would if we were out on our time. More songs, less time -- tricky. What we end up doing normally, is we have a pool of songs, we may be playing eighteen of them any one night, but we're picking from a pool of maybe twenty-five. So we don't die of boredom, we sort the set around a bit.

We can't play the same set night after night, 'cause if you do that somebody says, "Well I've been to see them six different times, and they never change the set." You know, you can't pander, you just can't. You have to do your own thing and live with the consequences. We do our thing by making sure that if we get a set that really works, we're loathe to change to it, but we do because we would actually die if we didn't alter it around every now and again. So consequently, we do a set that's not quite as good as our top set, just so when we go back to doing the other ones, it's fresh again.

How is launching a concert tour different now then, say, twenty years ago?

Essentially, everything is the same except it's all e-mail and mobile phones instead of telex machines. Not finding information out for weeks at a time. Now we find out too much information, when we don't need it. But, it's no different. We're playing the same buildings that we played in 1980 opening up for Ted Nugent. It's just like a footballer that never gets old, who's still playing on the pitch.

Next Tour Talk: Daron Malakian of System of a Down