DEF LEPPARD's PHIL COLLEN Talks 'Mirrorball', Upcoming Tour

Shannon Joy of the LA Music Blog recently conducted an interview with DEF LEPPARD guitarist Phil Collen. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

LA Music Blog: DEF LEPPARD are back from a brief hiatus with "Mirrorball", the band's first official live release. Why wait until now to put out a live offering?

Collen: We actually didn't get the time up until now. It's always been album-tour-album-tour, and believe it or not, this was the first real break we've had in thirty years. You get off tour, and it's pretty much straight into recording another album. So it never really seemed valid or the right time, but now it's absolutely perfect. We had a year off, and we record every show, so we were able to gather all the stuff up and there you go choose the best stuff.

LA Music Blog: The album actually features a few new studio songs as well. How does this new material compare to the band's past work?

Collen: You know, it's really interesting. When you put any band's greatest hits on, even if the stuff was recorded in a span of two decades or even longer, you can still tell that it's the same band. So I think they sound obviously DEF LEPPARD; they sound very much like classic DEF LEPPARD, whatever that is, or whatever that may be. (Laughs) But you know, you listen to it for like ten seconds and you go, "Oh yeah, that's DEF LEPPARD."

LA Music Blog: You've been in the industry since the mid-'70s. Any chance of slowing down?

Collen: No, because physically, I feel better than I did when I was twenty. (Laughs) It's amazing, the whole myth about slowing down people ask "How do you do it?" and it's consistency. I'm really physically active, working out and doing everything, and that just keeps you really young. I know guys ten years younger than me that can't walk properly because they've adopted a lifestyle where they drive everywhere, they're sitting on their computer, and they don't even walk anywhere. It's the complete opposite for me. I can actually wake up at six in the morning and do a head kick, which is six-foot-five, without stretching, and that's just the consistency. (Laughs) It's not that I'm a freak or anything. It really is a matter of just being consistent about it, and I just love the way it feels. And the other part is that it kind of looks cool as well. (Laughs) So the main thing is that. Like I said, I know guys guys I went to school with, or even younger than that and they can't get up. They've got back problems, and their legs hurt, and this and that, and I have nothing like that at all. So as long as I keep doing this, then I should keep doing that. (Laughs)

LA Music Blog: How are you able to maintain consistency on the road?

Collen: Oh, that's easy. You get so much down time. It's the same as singing or playing guitar, you know? That's something I do all the time. I always have a guitar floating around, or I'm working out all the time, and that could be anything, you know, running up a flight of stairs and doing push-ups. You get bored in the day, and instead of just sitting there eating or something, I'll go and exercise. On tour, it's even more consistency. I'll work out three times a day when our trainer's out. He gets us in the morning, we'll do stuff in the afternoon, and just before we go on stage, I'll do some more. The more you do it, the better you seem to feel, but you can overdo it, so you've got to know what your own personal line is.

LA Music Blog: DEF LEPPARD is hitting the road with Heart this summer in the States. Is there anything else that you have planned for the rest of the year?

Collen: Yeah, we actually kick off the whole thing in Donington. We're doing the Download festival, which is a big rock festival in England. I think we're headlining that on the 10th of June, right before we come to the U.S. That's always fun. We did it a few years ago, and it's thrilling, actually. It's huge, 85,000 people I believe last time. It's a blast. So we'll kick off with that, and typically what happens with a DEF LEPPARD tour is that you add dates on, you know? You start the tour, and all of a sudden a promoter from Japan or Australia will phone up and go, "Do you want to play here?" and it's like, "Yeah, sure," so that's really how that works. Also, in the breaks we typically take two weeks off every six weeks everyone goes home and sees their families or things like that. In those two weeks, I'll be getting the MAN RAZE thing going, and hopefully we can play some club shows or things like that. I'm really looking forward to that as well.

Read the entire interview from LA Music Blog.