News Segment
DEF LEPPARD’S “ROCK ON” VIDEO ONLINE NOW:
June 9, 2006
Def Leppard fans, get ready to rock on — on your television screen and on the Web.
Beginning Friday, the video for “ROCK ON” the first single from Def Leppard’s brand-new release, YEAH!, can be watched right here at DefLeppard.com. And on Monday, the video goes into regular TV rotation on VH1 in the U.S.
“ROCK ON” is a classic radio smash originally done by David Essex in 1973, when Def Leppard was just a bunch of young lads in England starting to learn about music. It’s the perfect introduction to YEAH!, a 14-song collection of glam-rock covers that serves as a long-awaited tribute to Def Leppard’s hard-rock heroes. And the video, directed by award-winning filmmaker Nigel Dick, puts the proper spin on the song, giving it a fresh, harder-edged veneer.
Captured in the desert climes of Placerita Canyon outside Los Angeles, it envisions the band getting ready to play a post-apocalyptic stage, with grit, grime and nothing but guitars, drums and the spirit of rock to guide them. In other words, “ROCK ON” are great words to live by.
“We’re really pleased how that came out,” guitarist and vocalist Phil Collen says. “It was fantastic. It’s Mad Max meets something nasty and gritty and fancy and dusty. It’s very iconic and we just love the way it turned out.”
The band members love the way the album turned out, too. Songs from the Kinks, Badfinger, Marc Bolan and T. Rex, David Bowie, Sweet, Roxy Music, Mott the Hoople, Free, the Faces, Blondie and Thin Lizzy are all represented, and while some songs are straight-up, faithful-to-the-note reproductions of these classics, some have been reworked in the trademark Def Leppard style.
“ROCK ON” is definitely one of the latter. “The end section is just absolute, typical Def Leppard guitars and vocals, just sort of putting our little feel on it,” bassist and vocalist Rick “Sav” Savage adds. “It made it sound like a Def Leppard song. And we even played it live on the last tour. By the end of the tour, it ended up being one of the highlights of the show because everybody kind of knew the song anyway and it was like we’d transformed it and given it our own identity.”
Collen didn’t hesitate to name “ROCK ON” as his favorite track on the album, too. “The interesting thing about that song is that it’s our tribute to Queen, if you like,” Collen says. “We didn’t do a Queen song for very definite reasons. We didn’t want to do Queen, Led Zeppelin, the Stones or the Beatles. That was just a no-no for us because it was way too obvious. So we did ‘ROCK ON’ and we just gave it a Queen-type treatment. In doing so, it actually sounds like it could have been on HYSTERIA or something.”
Courtesy of www.defleppard.com