Gelap Pekat

DEF LEPPARD frontman Joe Elliott recently spoke to ThisIsNottingham.co.uk about the band's appearance at this year's Download festival, which is set to take place June 12-14 in the United Kingdom.

"When you look at the bill for the first two days, you wouldn't have expected that at any Donington I went to, but the third night definitely is," he said. "But it shows there's room for everybody."

And "everybody" includes a newly-reformed FAITH NO MORE, albeit minus guitar maestro Jim Martin.

Elliott has a certain satisfaction when he talks of the first night headliners. "When they [FAITH NO MORE] first got together, I was raving about them in Kerrang! and they were embarrassed, I think, because they weren't LEPPARD fans!

"'The Real Thing' was a phenomenally great record. Those guys went through such a meteoric rise that they didn't know where they were, then they released an album no-one bought and they split up.

"Kudos to bands like us and IRON MAIDEN who've managed to avoid all that. Now the band are older and wiser, they'll probably say, 'I wish I'd done it differently' and I can't help having a wry smile 'cos we did things differently.

"We came through the hard times of the grunge era, but those times still weren't as hard as the media made out. We may not have had radio play, but we were still going top 20 in the U.S. and we filled a 50,000-seat arena in South Africa in 1997.

"We knew we were doing nothing wrong. Public perception just changes, but it always tends to change back if you have the patience to ride it out — now our ticket sales are the strongest they've been for 20 years."

He continued, "A lot of the 90s kids are disappointed. Name one rock band apart from PEARL JAM from the '90s that are still around. So fans are going back another generation to the likes of us, BON JOVI and REM to see what the fuss was about and they're realizing it's not 'Dad rock,' it's just good rock."