VIVIAN CAMPBELL Doubts DEF LEPPARD Will Record Full-Length Album In 2020

"Rock Talk With Mitch Lafon" recently conducted an interview with DEF LEPPARD and LAST IN LINE guitarist Vivian Campbell. You can listen to the entire chat below. A few excerpts follow (transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET).

On what the focus will be for DEF LEPPARD's forthcoming Las Vegas residency:

Vivian: "There is no specific focus, unlike the [2013] 'Viva! Hysteria' [residency]. That was the first time we'd done an album in sequence, and we had to build a show around that. We broke that show up into parts. This show's going to be a bit more of a career retrospective. There's going to be some very new material that we've never played before as well as some very old material. There's a song we're working on today that I think I played with the band once in a club in Dublin, which was my very, very first time on stage with DEF LEPPARD, and it was a couple of days before the [1992] Freddie Mercury AIDS awareness [tribute concert], which was the big reveal. I think that was the only time we played this particular song, so, you know, it is more of a career-retrospective show. We are going to try to have a part of the show that will be more intimate. Not quite acoustic, but we're going to strip it down and focus on the vocal aspect of the band. It's something that we're pretty well-known for — being a hard rock band with really strong vocals, but to put it in a more intimate setting so we can make that be a focal point of the show as well. Like you said, it's still being decided, literally, and it will be right up until the last minute. We're going to Vegas a few days early to rehearse and work on the stage show and how we're going to present it. It's exciting. It's a different thing for us. It's very different to do a Vegas show than to do a normal touring show."

On whether he would like to play early DEF LEPPARD songs like "Rock Brigade" during the Vegas residency:

Vivian: "Those songs are very interesting to me. They are the first LEPPARD songs I ever heard. I was still back in Belfast [Ireland] at the time when I heard 'Wasted' and 'Rock Brigade'. We did actually play 'Rock Brigade' as part of the opening set on the 'Viva! Hysteria' residency. I'm not so sure how it went down; it's not terribly well known, but it certainly was fun to play. 'Wasted' is a song that we put into the encore slot on occasion, usually in Europe, usually in festival situations. I don't think it's really well known in the U.S. at all or North America. For me as a guitar player, it's always more interesting to play a rock-focused song as opposed to a pop song. There are certainly more of those in the early LEPPARD albums, when you take it back to the 'High And Dry' and 'Pyromania' albums, I get to stretch out a bit more when we do that. Yeah, I'm nudging them there and we're going to be playing some of them in Vegas, for sure."

On the status of DEF LEPPARD's next studio album and whether they will use their Vegas residency to try out new ideas:

Vivian: "There's always songs on the go. Everyone in the band is a songwriter. We all have these little ideas in our back pocket. It's all a question of making the collective effort and actually start recording something. There's been rumors of maybe addressing that sometime in 2020. I don't know if it will be an album; I doubt it. I think what will probably will happen is we'll go into the studio and just try and focus on two or three or four ideas and see what comes out of it. The last time we did that, it ended up being an album, which was the eponymous DEF LEPPARD album in 2015. It's about time. We gotta keep exercising that muscle, as creative beings and as a creative unit, we have to keep doing that, even if it's an excuse to go on tour, because, hey, we got a new album. It's important for us as musicians that we keep doing that. There's a certain percentage of LEPPARD's fanbase that really are hungry for new music. Then there's a whole other generation who is just discovering DEF LEPPARD for the first time and coming to our shows, and they want to hear the hits. I don't think we'll be focusing on writing in Vegas. I'd say the first week is going to be pretty hectic, trying to finalize some of the songs. Like I said, we want to make it a little bit different every single show we're doing out there. We're constantly going to be rehearsing, even on the days off, and finessing the show, right up until the last week. Funny enough, Andy Freeman, the lead singer in LAST IN LINE, lives in Las Vegas. On some of the days off, I'm going to be writing with LAST IN LINE for the next album for that project, but that's a whole different thing."

DEF LEPPARD recently completed an 11-date Canadian tour with TESLA.

The band will take over Zappos Theater at Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino in Las Vegas for 12 nights between August 14 and September 7.