How Def Leppard Found out They Were Being Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction has been a long time coming but Def Leppard had a hunch that 2018 was finally their year when they quickly took the lead in the fan vote. However, the band – who have been eligible for induction since 2004 – remained cautiously optimistic until the official announcement.

Frontman, Joe Elliott explained in a recent interview, how they found out. “We got the news in Glasgow, so when we all got on the bus, there was a lot of, ‘Hey, Hall Of Famer! How ya doin’?'” he said. “High-fiving and hugging and stuff like that at 10 o’clock in the morning as best you can when you just woke up. So, it wasn’t like a movie, where it was champagne and there was balloons and stuff — it wasn’t one of them kind of things. It was mid-tour. We took it in our stride, ’cause we are a working band — and it was just another bit of information coming towards us that day that was one of many things that we were dealing with. But it was, like, ‘Yeah! We’re in — great!”

The current lineup of Def Leppard – Phil Collen, Rick Allen, Joe Elliott, Rick Savage and Vivian Campbell – along with the late Steve Clark and original guitarist Pete Willis will be inducted. As of yet there has been no announcement as to who will officially induct the band into the Hall at the ceremony on March 29, 2019.

In the meantime, the group is in talks to play another Las Vegas residency in 2019. Their first residency, a nine-show run titled Viva, Hysteria! took place in 2013 at the Joint at the Hard Rock Hotel. Def Leppard performed their 1987 RIAA diamond certified album Hysteria in its entirety at each of the concerts and then branched out to other material from the band’s 40-year career for the encores.

In an interview with the the Japanese show “Masa Ito’s Rock TV” Elliott spoke of the possible Vegas residency (see video below): “There’s no dates set, I don’t think. I don’t think it’s gonna be anything that’s as specific as ‘Viva Hysteria!’ was, ’cause we’re kind of doing that now. I don’t think we’re gonna be doing ‘Viva Pyromania!’ this time,” he added (referring to possible full-album performances of DEF LEPPARD’s third LP, 1983’s “Pyromania”). “We might do it one day — maybe we’ll play more from it — but I think for the kind of venue that they want us in, it’s more likely to be kind of a greatest-hits set. To be quite honest, we don’t really know.”

Guitarist Phil Collen told the Las Vegas Sun in a 2017 interview that Def Leppard’s first residency “was great. We got to live in Vegas for a month,” he said. “Honestly, I thought we’d get more time to do the stuff people come to Vegas for, see shows and all that stuff. But we were so busy. Because we were playing Hysteria straight through for one set, we had 30 songs we had to get down and it was a very different experience. Doing the album was a bit more theatrical than the tour experience. But it’s quite lovely at this point in your career to be able to do different things.”

Def Leppard’s brand new greatest-hits collection titled “The Story So Far – The Best Of”, was released on November 30.

Def Leppard Interview on “Masa Ito’s Rock TV”