Joe Elliott said he spent most of the Stadium Tour with Motley Crue, Poison and Joan Jett in “total isolation” as “the price of doing business in 2022.”
The Def Leppard singer avoided hotels almost entirely, remaining holed up alone on his tour bus except for his driver. In a recent interview with Classic Rock, he revealed he spent a little social time with Nikki Sixx but avoided any large gatherings in a bid to avoid contracting COVID and canceling shows.
“The safest way for us to keep that show on the road was just to avoid human beings as best we could,” Elliott said. “So all of us in Leppard traveled separately, which is the smartest decision we made. I didn’t stay in hotels. I lived on the bus, just me and Dale, my driver, in total isolation.”
He noted, “That’s the price of doing business in 2022. If we cancel a stadium show in Arlington, Texas, at four in the afternoon, people will have traveled hundreds of miles and spent hundreds of dollars to get there. So we avoided contact, we tested every day and it worked. We didn’t lose one gig.
The singer argued that, despite acting “like children onstage,” most of the entourage are “actually quite responsible when we need to be.” He added that “the one guy I hung out with a lot was Nikki. One night in Denver we went for sushi and talked about everything but music. It was funny – we didn’t realize Tommy [Lee] was in the same restaurant until we could hear him! He’s quite loud, you see.”
Elliott reflected that he didn’t have much of a personal life during 2022. “We’ve just done the biggest tour that we’ve ever done,” he said. “I’m not gonna say the biggest that we’ll ever do because it’s onwards and upwards from here – 45 years into our career, that’s a marvelous feeling. And there’s more to come from Def Leppard in 2023. We’ve got the beginnings of the next album percolating away on the back burner. There’s another thing we’ve been working on that will be revealed soon.”
Def Leppard and Motley Crue will take the Stadium Tour to a global audience during 2023, starting Feb. 18.
Def Leppard Albums Ranked
From their metal-edged debut to their pop breakthrough to the recent records, we rank every single LP.
