Def Leppard launched Yeah! in Could 2006, however vocalist Joe Elliott first conceived the concept of recording a fully-fledged Def Leppard covers album over twenty years earlier – across the time that the band’s business breakthrough, Pyromania, caught hearth around the globe.
“The Yeah! album has been in the making in my head since 1983,” Elliott knowledgeable Billboard in 2006, when the album first appeared. “It got shoved aside as we were making our own records. [These are] songs that were inspirational to us as young kids, when we were pulling our parents’ sleeves and saying, ‘I want a guitar for Christmas, please!’”
Elliott doggedly hung onto his dream of a Def Leppard covers album, and the band took a step nearer to realizing it in the course of the tour behind 2002’s pop-oriented X, when their setlist commonly made house for his or her inimitable variations of a number of collective favorites, together with Badfinger’s “No Matter What” and Skinny Lizzy’s “Don’t Believe A Word.”
Interviews undertaken by Elliott and firm in the course of the X tour additionally repeatedly hinted that the long-mooted Def Leppard covers album was lastly about to materialize within the close to future. There was reality within the rumor, too, as the brand new file – quickly to be christened Yeah! – shortly took form all through self-produced periods at Dublin’s Joe’s Storage Studios in the course of the summer season of 2004.
Yeah! was initially slated for launch in the course of the autumn of that very same yr, however after Mercury launched the extremely profitable anthology assortment, Finest Of Def Leppard (rechristened Rock Of Ages: The Definitive Assortment within the US) and intensive touring ate up a lot of 2005, the band’s new album ultimately appeared in Could 2006.
Taking its cue from David Bowie’s Pin Ups, Yeah! dug significantly deeper than the usual covers album, even when most would agree that robust, anthemic fare such because the aforementioned “Don’t Believe A Word,” Faces’ raunchy “Stay With Me” and The Candy’s glam rock stomper “Hell Raiser” are tailored for these stalwart Yorkshire rockers. On the similar time, nevertheless, few would have anticipated them to insert loops and samples right into a sparse’n’neat reinvention of David Essex’s 1972 hit “Rock On,” or rise to the leftfield challenges offered by the acid-fried funk of John Kongos’ “He’s Gonna Step On You Again” and ELO’s swooping, Beatles-esque “10538 Overture” with such enthusiasm and aplomb.
But, as Joe Elliott precisely identified to Rolling Stone, Def Leppard “were always a lot more pop than heavy metal… we could work both ways, we could tour with Journey or Bryan Adams, and we could tour with Scorpions too.” Concurring with Elliott’s summation, the identical prestigious publication went on to bathe the file in reward, their four-star assessment declaring that “it’s good enough to just hear the band and see where all the Hysteria came from.”
Nostalgic it might have been, however Yeah! was powered by an enviable up to date vitality which ensured that Def Leppard’s ardent fanbase additionally responded within the affirmative and despatched the file into the Prime 20 of the Billboard 200. The album’s potent, life-affirming vibe additionally spilled over into the writing and recording of 2008’s Songs From The Sparkle Lounge: Def Leppard’s most assured and forward-thinking assortment of authentic songs since 1996’s Slang.
The Def Leppard Quantity Two 7CD and 7LP field set is out now and might be purchased right here.
