Why a 14-track set of covers? Elliott explains: “…I just thought it was a great idea, ever since I had David Bowie’s ‘Pinups’ in my arsenal of albums. It’s with reverence that Elliott wrapped his pipes around dusty standards including Sweet’s “Hell Raiser,” David Essex’s “Rock On,” the Faces’ “Stay With Me,” Badfinger’s “No Matter What” and a single that every member of Leppard bought separately, before they’d met, ELO’s “10538 Overture.” In 1970s Sheffield, kids couldn’t afford albums and there was nothing but Top 40 AM radio, he recalls, so the only introduction to certain artists was Universal) an anthology of some of his and Def Leppard’s favorite childhood songs. And then you realize that, for the rest of your life, everything is an uphill battle.”īut Elliott sounds boyishly exuberant on “Yeah!” (Island/ From the second you wake up, you’re going uphill. “It’s just something you’ve got to keep your finger in, because it’s hard work being a human being, never mind being in a rock band. These days, with the other band members spending most of their off-hours with their wives and children, he says, “I can’t get another nine people to kick a football around, so I have to use my home gym, and every day I exercise, without fail,” Elliott says. His old workout plan? Five-a-side soccer. “I’m pain-and-steroid-free for the first time in several years, and it’s good not to wake up crippled, or just forever wondering why your trousers don’t fit anymore.” “So now I’m officially getting back on track,” Elliott says of the slim new him on the cover of “Yeah!” Def Leppard’s new covers album. He told the vocalist that it wasn’t steroid abuse, but steroid use that would eventually hobble him permanently by tearing away his remaining spinal cartilage. They took the pain away, but they also make you balloon in weight.”Ī specialist sat him down for a life-threatening bulletin. “I was forever being injected with steroids, but I didn’t realize what they did.
JOE ELLIOTT DEF LEPPARD FULL
He was pumped full of them again in’03, when he tore his rotator cuff. Steroids eased the throb of Elliott’s herniated discs. And that was when I got my first steroid injection.” And every time they’d fix me up, I’d get onstage and do a jump here, a twist or shimmy there, and pop! Out goes the back again. He says he once saw 41 chiropractors in 43 days: “Every single day except for two we had to get somebody in to fix me, because I was bent in half, I was crippled. Look! He’s portly!'”īut people didn’t realize that sometimes he was wearing a back brace under his shirt. The spotlight would beam down on him, he says, “And people would go, ‘Wow. He admits, “Never as important - an ugly band can make great music and get away with it, and PInk Floyd would be a great example.”īut Elliott was programmed to think of his audience first. Of course, there’s the cold reality that everybody in the band is conscious of the fact that, especially coming up through the MTV years, image and the way you look are partly as important as how you sound. “And once you’ve got one, as everybody who has a bad back knows, you’ve got it for life,” he says. As a teen, lifting boxes incorrectly in a steeltown factory, the future star developed a bad back.
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