Joe Elliott of Def Leppard Page 3

For a lot of people, music has become like wallpaper. When you and I were growing up, when an album came out, that was our whole day. We listened to the record, looked at the liners, and did nothing else. Everything evolves, but everything doesn't evolve in a good way. You talked about getting on the radio. If you polled all the managers and artists who actually know and have got the initiative to do it, most bands now are dying to get on the soundtrack of a videogame. They're not interested in getting on the radio. All their target audience are buying Nintendo or Xbox or PlayStation, and all these young punky pop bands want to do is get their song on a game, because they're not really going to get much exposure on radio. Radio is either too safe, or too classic. There's not really much room in between.

And every generation of artists can moan about how they don't get on the radio enough. I see a lot of people getting wound up about it. We listen from our side of things, and I don't think Madonna's got a right to say she doesn't get played on the radio. I'm sure she's not on as much as she used to be. Well, there are new females coming through - we've got Beyoncé, Christina Aguilera, and Pink, all these kids coming along and filling the void as artists. And as we get older and have other things to do with our lives - family or whatever - you don't put records out every 2 years like before. We're lucky; we never did that. We used to put an album out every 5 years. [both laugh]

Now you're playing catch-up. We are. We've got quite a lot of the next album already written. But you won't be hearing any unrecorded material when we're on the road this summer and fall. It's hard enough playing new, recently released material to a virgin crowd. I just read an article where Pink Floyd played The Dark Side of the Moon completely before they recorded it [true - they did so in 1972 and early 1973]. And talk about getting bootlegged! So we don't want any of our new songs, which we may change the titles or arrangements of, all over the Internet because somebody took a recording device to one of the gigs.

So what we're gonna do is play things like "Hell Raiser," "20th Century Boy," "Waterloo Sunset," "No Matter What," "Rock On," and a few others. We'll interchange them night by night and see which ones stick and which ones go.

I'll give you one vote for doing "He's Gonna Step on You Again." We haven't actually rehearsed that one yet, but there's no reason why we can't. It is a great song to do.

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