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Writing a song is actually quite easy. Writing a good one is very, very difficult.
Joe Elliott Def Leppard -
With Los Angeles, it's kind of a love-hate thing. Sometimes I think it's marvelous, and sometimes I think it's a dump. It's so fake and I can't deal with how fake it is.
Joe Elliott Def Leppard
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To be honest, I'm a bit of a snob now; give me a Four Seasons anywhere in the world and I'm happy. Also, they've just opened a Ritz-Carlton in County Wicklow, Ireland, which is stunning and has great views.
Joe Elliott Def Leppard -
I saw the Stones three years ago at the Wiltern Theater in L.A. and that was mind blowing.
Joe Elliott Def Leppard -
Any idiot who knows five chords can bang a song together. But it's probably going to be rubbish.
Joe Elliott Def Leppard -
I never really enjoyed sex with groupies though. It's like having a wank - you get 30 seconds of guilt when you've finished.
Joe Elliott Def Leppard -
We are just fans of music, we are not fans of a specific kind of music. We just happen to be a rock band. Until we explain ourselves, sometimes people don't understand why we limit ourselves to just being a rock band. It's because that is what we like doing.
Joe Elliott Def Leppard -
There are networks of groupies - and nowadays it's instant because of the internet. Before, it took days to tell your penpal 'I just had Jimi Hendrix'. Nowadays, 20 minutes after you've zipped your trousers up, it's in New Zealand! Somebody e-mailed me a groupie website that I was on, and there was somebody describing my tackle. It was flattering but completely fucking wrong - I'd be the first to say that I don't have a ten-and-a-half-inch dick!
Joe Elliott Def Leppard
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Every town in America had at least one, two, or maybe three radio stations that played rock 24 hours a day. In England, we had a rock specialist on for two hours a week.
Joe Elliott Def Leppard -
If you can't handle the responsibility of a hit single, don't write one.
Joe Elliott Def Leppard -
Music and soccer. They would be my two major passions.
Joe Elliott Def Leppard -
Rock and roll has always been very basic. The actual relationship between a man and a woman is different for everyone on the planet. One of the truest forms of contact is singing about boy-meets-girl. I can strut like a peacock on stage, but that's about as far as it goes. It's up to other people to see what they see. We're not overtly sexual in the sense that we go around wearing codpieces.
Joe Elliott Def Leppard -
When we set out to replace Steve Clark, Vivian Campbell exceeded our wildest expectations.
Joe Elliott Def Leppard -
A fan would get an autograph and that was that. If we didn't tour again for five years, we wouldn't remember them.
Joe Elliott Def Leppard
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The Vatican takes your breath away.
Joe Elliott Def Leppard -
There were incredibly few rock songs making it out to the airwaves until the '80s came along.
Joe Elliott Def Leppard -
I've always liked traveling around Europe and seeing the architecture. The buildings in capital cities have been there for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. Some look better than the new ones.
Joe Elliott Def Leppard -
I suppose I do have half decent legs. They're long and lean. Most of the time, people go on about my eyes. When I was little, people used to call me Ching Chong Chinamen in the days before political correctness. When I got older, they became a positive feature.
Joe Elliott Def Leppard -
That's why 60,000 people go ape when the Stones play 'Satisfaction.' The songs are part of their legacy, and you fall back in love with them over the years.
Joe Elliott Def Leppard -
Sometimes after a gig one of the band would say 'Did you see that girl down the front?' and somebody would say 'Do you want me to get her back?' But, generally we met them at the hotel or backstage. For a girl to get backstage in the first place, she'd probably blown half the crew - and I'm not into sharing in that respect. We had one roadie who actually had a heart attack on tour with us in 1983 - he was a big, big guy and he was doing at least four or five groupies a day!
Joe Elliott Def Leppard
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In England, rock music very rarely infiltrates the charts, but country music even less so.
Joe Elliott Def Leppard -
Goodbye Pete Willis, hello Phil Collen. We decided to try to do something that no other rock band had tried before - blueprint "Sgt. Pepper". A period in time when we allowed our Pop sensibility to come to the fore ... and guess what? Our first major success...huge in the U.S. ... but nowhere else ..
Joe Elliott Def Leppard -
The band is a millionaire. We as individuals aren't.
Joe Elliott Def Leppard -
Any time I can get off is my favorite holiday. I don't pay too much attention to traditional times because we're often working on Christmas and have to celebrate in January. But I love Christmas. The old clichés are true. To watch someone's face when they're opening a present is mind-blowing really.
Joe Elliott Def Leppard