Let’s just do them and worry about how they sound at the end.” It gave us something to put our teeth into. We were thinking, “Why don’t we just trust each other that these songs are up to scratch? We wouldn’t suggest they were if they weren’t. Then we brought Savage in on the conversation and he had two ready to go. Phil had two he’d written on his own and two he’d co-written, so we had seven right there. But instead of doing that, we were in a situation where nobody felt peer pressure of four sets of eyes staring at them while they played the cassette. We used to just sit down together and play each other demos and hear what everyone thought. Tell me the process you guys used for recording this new record remotely. They were during our years when we weren’t supposed to be taking that much time off. The last show of the Hysteria tour in October 1988 and the first show of the Adrenalize tour in May 1992 was longer. Let’s not forget that between the last show of the Pyromania tour and the first show of the Hysteria tour was a lot longer than that. We’ve been off the road for two years and four months. What’s it been like to be home for so long? Def Leppard started touring in 1978, and you haven’t taken many long breaks since then. You’ve been off the road now since late 2019. We phoned up Elliott while he was driving around town (“I can walk and chew gum at the same time”) to talk about Diamond Star Halos, the upcoming tour, the band’s long hiatus from the road, selling their publishing, and why he doesn’t think Def Leppard will ever go on a true farewell tour. The process eventually led to their new record Diamond Star Halos, which arrives May 27, just a few weeks before the long-delayed tour with Mötley Crüe, Poison, and Joan Jett finally kicks off in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s nothing new to us to piecemeal bits together.” We’d worked in two or three studios at once. We’d never done an entire album that way, but we’d certainly done bits of one. “By the end of that phone call, we decided that we could make a record remotely. “We spent 40 minutes on the phone going, ‘OK, now what?’ ” Elliott recalls. The singer called up guitarist Phil Collen at his home in California to try and figure out an alternate plan. “And so there we were, brides at the altar.” “They weren’t allowed to fly in from America,” Elliott says. They planned on coming together in late March, just as the pandemic was shutting down global travel along with the entire live music industry. They knew they wouldn’t have nearly enough time to finish an album, but they wanted to start the process and hopefully resume it once the tour wrapped for the year. In the spring of 2020, Def Leppard made plans to gather at Joe Elliott’s house in Ireland to record a handful of tunes before starting rehearsals for their stadium tour with Mötley Crüe, Poison, and Joan Jett.
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