[ilovesteveclark]

Smez wrote:

I have a Steve Clarke interview that a DJ friend of mine did with Steve when he was over here (Australia) in 1989 with Phil to do promo after the Hysteria tour. I recently got it on cd as the original one I had was on cassette tape!! Anyone interested? I will transcribe it if anyone is. I promise it won't take as long as the promised Joe interview that was done earlier this year!! Oh and I have a Joe interview (done by the same DJ) when he was doing promo here pre 7Day Weekend Tour. Happy to transcribe that too.

yea i would love to read it too.

[kittycatt]

It would be great to read that

[ilovesteveclark]

kittycatt wrote:

It would be great to read that

yes it would.
i love reading anything related to steve.

[Smez]

Well that took longer that I thought, but here it is transcribed. I apologise but I don't so this professionally so I have punctuated it the way it sounds to me! Enjoy.

Steve Clark Interview 8th November 1989 with Billy Pinnell

BILLY: Steve, how did the band get together, were you school friends or work mates?

SMC: We just sort of fell together it was really lucky. I met Pete Willis originally at college in Sheffield and I saw him reading this guitar book and I was desperate to find a group and I just said 'Do you play guitar?' and he said 'Yeah.' and he said 'Come down and play' and that's how we fell into each other like that. We sort of just drifted together it was really weird how it happened.

BILLY: How about with Joe?

SMC: Well I was the last member at that point to sort of join and so they were already established, they were called something different, I think Atomic Mass at the time or something. There was Sav, Joe and Pete Willis, and I was the last to come in.

BILLY: For a young group you seemed very savvy right from the start, because you formed your own label which was quite unusual for a young, new band. Who thought of doing that?

SMC: Well actually, I got to give the credit for that to Joe because; we wanted to be serious right from the start, we wanted to be a live band and get a record contract and everybody seemed to be sending tapes to record companies and they all get thrown in the bin or whatever. So we said if we make a record, a piece of plastic, we can go round to the local radio stations in England and sort of force them to play it rather than a tape. So he borrowed some money off his parents, Joe, and we got about a thousand pressed up and we went round to all the pubs and everything and said 'Buy this!' and luckily it worked. And it got charted in the BBC charts and then all the record companies said 'Wow, who's this band who've got into the charts and haven't even got a record company?'. So it definitely worked and a lot of other groups followed the same trend after.

BILLY: And that led to you getting signed for On Through The Night, did it?

SMC: Yeah we had about 12 companies who wanted to sign us, we did a really strange thing of, instead of going to London to try and get success, we avoided it and we said let the record companies come and see us. So they had to come up to Yorkshire and see us, we sort of made them angry about it rather than begging. (laughs)

BILLY: So how were the first two albums accepted in your home country because you're known for selling millions of albums of albums in America but how did the English react to High'N'Dry and to On Through The Night?

SMC: On Though The Night the first album had a great reaction, but unfortunately we got a bit of backlash for High'N'Dry because, out of the groups that were up and coming at the time: groups like Iron Maiden, Saxon and ourselves, Girl which was Phil's old group, we were the first to make the move to try and get success in America. And it was just a natural transition for us. We had just been playing clubs and things for about three or four years in England and there was no where left to play, it was like burn out. So we were the first to go to America and they accepted us, so we got the backlash for every body. But its all sorted itself out now.

BILLY: When you play the old records, the two you made before Pyromania, the sound is quite different, but the thing that sticks out is you were very melodic song writers. Like right from the very beginning, the songs were ones you would listen to quite comfortably because they were particularly melodic, and one song I've always like on High'N'Dry was Bringin' on the Heartbreak which segs into an instrumental piece that you wrote. Now they're both very melodic and the second part was written by you alone - the instrumental, is it something you've always tried to maintain within the group, something the audience could latch onto fairly readily?

SMC: Yeah, when we sort of formed the group we were very aware of... we wanted to have this sort of edge of an English rock group but we wanted to combine it with sort of backing vocals, which was more American, but we thought if we could strike a balance we could appeal to both markets! And it was definitely a direction we wanted to go in, and we always wanted to cover a lot of areas: we wanted the melodies as you say, but we wanted the edge so we progressively tried to get more into that over the albums. Obviously we couldn't do that from the start cos we had to establish an identity, but I think we've just built on that through every album since.

BILLY: Again that's been a trend with you, each album has been a progression on the one before, but Pyromania was really an enormous step forward from either of the first two records, was that because of Mutt Lange's involvement in producing the record in such a way that it had this great dynamic sound?

SMC: Yeah, we must give a lot of credit to Mutt. I think we always had that sound that we were talking earlier; from day one, we knew how we wanted to sound, but it was finding somebody who could make us sound how we thought in our heads. He polished us and everything, he made us really aware of different studio techniques, and multi layering backing vocals and encouraging us with melodies and things. His input was best, he opened the doors up for Hysteria and eventually now we're doing the music we always imagined to do, it just took a bit of time to create that.

BILLY: How did you feel about Mutt getting heavily involved in the songwriting on Pyromania?

SMC: That was something we always encouraged anyway. Because, there's a lot of producers around in the business who really get money for old rope (laughs), they go out for long lunches and dinners, and with Mutt, he arranges our music and we always encouraged him to write because that's, in our opinion, a producer's job is: somebody that you employed because you respect their opinion and to really polish your own ideas and to see it in a different way. He might push you in a different direction, if its just a guitar solo, he makes you approach it in a different way that from the obvious that it occurs to you. So he is very responsible for a lot of the music we created.

BILLY: Now because of Mutt Lange's great contribution to Pyromania, how did you feel when he couldn't produce the initial sessions for Hysteria?

SMC: Well we were very, very disappointed but um...

BILLY: Why couldn't he?

SMC: Well after Pyromania, or when we were on tour after the release of the album he went up to do the Car's last record, I think it was the last one they did. And Mutt had been in the studio for fifteen years without a break, and with any group that he works with, whether its Def Leppard or the Cars or Foreigner or AC/DC, its a seven day sort of job. You might go into the studio at ten o'clock and not come out til four or 5 the next morning and he was just burnt out and he just wasn't in the right frame of mind to make another record, so in a way we respect him for his honesty because if somebody's not in the right frame of mind to create music, then to be wasting our time also.

BILLY: So you chose Jim Steinman?

SMC: Yeah, that didn't work out too well. I wouldn't say it was all Jim's fault but ahh... it was totally a mismarriage. The way he heard the record was not in any way... it didn't relate to how we made records with Mutt. So we just decided to part company. Then we tried to produce it ourselves, which was not sightly more fruitful but a lot (laughs). Basically because there were five people and we're very democratic in the way we work, and we're very good friends, so we had to try every idea five different ways cos we had no headmaster as such and so it was so time consuming. That didn't work out again so we wiped that album, by which time Mutt had had a couple of years off and he felt ready to make music again. So Mutt came back into the project.

BILLY: Just before Mutt did come back, and you're in the midst of getting no where, or running around in circles, Rick Allen had his accident. Did you feel like chucking it all in then?

SMC: No, not chucking it in, but it was the most depressing part of our lives, for everybody concerned.

BILLY: What did happen to him?

SMC: It was New Year's Eve, he was visiting his parents in Sheffield and I don't know, its very vague with the story - I don't think anybody really knows the truth up to date. His car flipped over overtaking or somebody was overtaking him and he hit the curb and it flipped over and he went through the sunroof and his left arm got caught in the seatbelt or something, and he lost his arm. It couldn't have been a worst time for it to happen but especially after two years of really getting nowhere fast, but we were really concerned at the time not whether he was going to play drums but whether he was going to live, cos he lost a lot of blood and there were a real lot of problems. So it was the worst time for everyone of us. Nobody really thought long term, it was like wow, so we decided to get over it, the best thing we could do to stop thinking about it, is just go straight back into the studio and just carry on working.

BILLY: Was there any pressure from the record company, or from people outside of the band, to replace Rick with a session player just to get the record finished?

SMC: No, absolutely everybody concerned, including the record company and other musicians, they couldn't have been more supportive. And as we said, we were so concerned about his general health and not necessarily his drumming that everyone went out of their way, they were fantastic. Phil and myself were the first to visit him in hospital after he sort of got weaned off the drugs and things, when he was awake so to speak. And we were expecting the worst, we thought wow how are we going to deal with this. And we walked into the room, (chuckles) and Phil says 'What you done now you stupid idiot' y'know, and we all started giggling and he was tapping his feet on the bed post, he said I think I found this new way to play drums. We went 'What?!' y'know, we were expecting this guy to be picked to bits, and he was really positive about it all. And so it never really even occurred to us whether we should replace him or not because he just said 'I've got this new way to play drums', we were in the studio at the time, and he'd be the first one to tell us if he couldn't have done it and would have suggested somebody else, but we said 'Well look you're in the band til you say you're not, its up to you'. And he overcome it as everybody knows.

BILLY: So after the 4 and a half years between Pyromania and Hysteria, when it was finally finished (Steve laucghs), could you be objective about it at all? And could you look at it and think 'well yeah it has a chance of even emulating part of the success of Pyromania'?

SMC: Well, nobody knew what to think in the end. When Mutt came in, which was a long time before it eventually was completed, was a breath of fresh air. Because we had heard so many times in so many different arrangements of the same songs, nobody could be objective and Mutt came with fresh ears and heard it for the first time and he really pointed us in the right direction. But it didn't really sink in that it was finished. It was like a prison sentence making that record y'know, you almost had a job clocking in and out. But when it came out, it charted it went straight to number one in England and we all thought that if that was our first number one we all thought we would all be jumping around and drinking champagne, but we were so in shock we just went to bed! (laughs) We accomplished what we set out to, it was just a long winded way of doing it.

BILLY: Have you found that a lot of the fans that might have gone to the first concerts in Sheffield have stuck with you for the ten years? Is there any way of knowing that?

SMC: No, I couldn't really be accurate but obviously the fanatics are still there but we've found that its a slightly different audience now. I mean a lot of the kids who came to see us on the Pyromania tour that were fourteen were married with a couple of kids by the time we got this one out. So we just had a belief in the album that no matter what our audience was we wanted to have a cross appeal. There's no reason why an Elton John fan shouldn't like Def Leppard or a Metallica fan shouldn't like Def Leppard. And that's the album we set out to make. It crossed through quite a lot of territories. Because whether its heavy metal/heavy rock or whatever you call it, there might be a potential audience in America of two million and you can never get bigger than that so we know to sell, it's got to over eight million in America now, we had to cross over to Michael Jackson fans or, but it doesn't really matter as long as Metallica fan or Megadeth still liked it, then it worked.

BILLY: Did you realise you're the only band to ever sell over 7 million copies of two albums in America? No one's ever done it before.

SMC: Yeah, we're the first ones to do it, its a fantastic feeling. We just feel very lucky that, well, we were hopeful that we just regained the ground we lost after spending such a long time. But we never thought it would actually sell more than Pyromania, which is amazing to think.

BILLY: For someone who's sold that many records, you certainly have your feet on the ground, is coming from a place like Sheffield in the north where conditions were pretty tough, one of the reasons you've been able to maintain like a really sensible approach about your success, do you think?

SMC: Ah, I think to a certain extent that helps, you brought up that we're sort of working class lads so to speak, but I don't think you can rely on that excuse forever. I think that making the album, and coming from such a high from the Pyromania success to such a low where we all had car accidents. Everybody had to face up to reality, there was no fairy god mother going to bail us out. We didn't know we were that overly in debt making this record, we didn't know if it was going to sell. We wanted to make the best record - the ultimate rock record of life if it was possible, but there was no guarantee if it was going to sell, so it made everybody come to face reality with a bump and we just had to put a lot of hard work in. And we grew up a lot, it just made everybody face up to things. Cos it was sort of weird because it made everybody grow up in a certain way, because people tend to get really depressed and upset about finicky little things, which we were guilty of at the time, like missing a flight, everybody gets upset or something. It was a source of inspiration to see this guy there with one arm who overcome it all and think 'I've got problems, what about that guy?!' So, everybody grew up a lot, and you just can't take anything for granted. And you're only as good as your last record, and the people that put you there... thank you!(laughs) But that's the bottom line. Just because you sell a lot of records don't give you an excuse to be big headed or blaise about anything.

BILLY: I know you can't really plan too much ahead because things happen to interrupt the best laid plans but I'm sure you wouldn't want to wait four and half years before the next record comes out.

SMC: Well we've prepared much better this time 'round because we were still relatively young after the Pyromania tour, we were about 23, it didn't occur to any of us, even though we knew that we had to make another record, or what it entailed, it took us another 6 months just to write songs after the tour. So on the last world tour, we've been writing songs as we were going along, any time we had a couple of hours we got together, we got about six songs already finished now, and we've actually got two on tape so ah, we learnt from our mistakes - we're never going to do that again. (laughs)

We really want to break Australia because its the only market that, on this tour, didn't really take off straight away. But whatever it takes, if that's what it is, we'll try and play next year.

BILLY: That's great, on behalf of all your fans here in Australia, congratulations on such a wonderful album with Hysteria and if you can make it back here to play next year, you'll make a lot of people very happy.

SMC: Well I'd love to, thanks very much for your time. All the best mate.

Billy's post interview observations:
What a nice fellow Steve Clarke was, if they sold something like 20 million albums worldwide he'd probably be a millionaire a couple times over, he was telling me he's got an apartment in New York because that's where most of the business is done for Def Leppard, their record label is headquartered there, so he's got to be where the action is I guess. But he also spends part of his time at his parents home in Sheffield, and for someone who's quite a wealthy young man, he certainly has got his feet on the ground. He was very friendly to all the staff here at the radio station and it was an absolute pleasure to be able to sit down and have a talk to him, and I hope they do come back during this year to perform.
They played here about three years ago at The Venue, and there was a power blackout during their performance and they actually played acoustically until the power came back on, that's the sort of band they are. Y'know there were no tantrums when the power got turned off.
It would be great to talk to Steve again maybe if they come or even Joe Elliott who's the singer and writes most of the lyrics for Def Leppard.

---

Unfortunately they never did come back to tour Hysteria and we lost Steve. I have the follow up interview with Joe before they had decided on Viv (he says in the interview that they were still auditioning) and before they came back for the 7 Day Weekend tour.

[kittycatt]

Thanks for that Smez. Great interview! Looking forward to the one with Joe.

[Smez]

Where should I put the Joe interview? Is there a Joe thread?!

[MsHiFi]

Thank you so much for that transcription, Smez! That interview is awesome! So wonderful to find a "new" interview with Steve.

[dlspirit]

ilovesteveclark wrote:

Smez wrote: I have a Steve Clarke interview that a DJ friend of mine did with Steve when he was over here (Australia) in 1989 with Phil to do promo after the Hysteria tour. I recently got it on cd as the original one I had was on cassette tape!! Anyone interested? I will transcribe it if anyone is. I promise it won't take as long as the promised Joe interview that was done earlier this year!! Oh and I have a Joe interview (done by the same DJ) when he was doing promo here pre 7Day Weekend Tour. Happy to transcribe that too. yea i would love to read it too.

How do you get to the Steve Clark interview?

[SavageSmile]

dlbabygurl wrote:

ilovesteveclark wrote: Smez wrote: I have a Steve Clarke interview that a DJ friend of mine did with Steve when he was over here (Australia) in 1989 with Phil to do promo after the Hysteria tour. I recently got it on cd as the original one I had was on cassette tape!! Anyone interested? I will transcribe it if anyone is. I promise it won't take as long as the promised Joe interview that was done earlier this year!! Oh and I have a Joe interview (done by the same DJ) when he was doing promo here pre 7Day Weekend Tour. Happy to transcribe that too. yea i would love to read it too. How do you get to the Steve Clark interview?

Scroll up.

[dlspirit]

Thanks

[jennymocha]

SMEZ thank you so much for taking the time to do that.

[stevie 625]

Thank you for the transcription, Smez!! It was very nice and very kind from you posting that!! Beautiful interview!

[dlspirit]

*rolls eyes* I couldn't have read it cause i didn't have my glasses on. I'm gonna have to re-read it again.

[Dale Cooper]

dlbabygurl wrote:

*rolls eyes* I couldn't have read it cause i didn't have my glasses on. I'm gonna have to re-read it again.

Are you for real?

[dlspirit]

Yes dale I'm for real. I'm near sided. I know how to read just couldn't see it well. Now I got my glasses so I can read it.

[KLD28]

Thanks very much, Smez, for taking the time to transcribe it for us! It happens so rarely that you can find a new Steve interview.

[ilovesteveclark]

KLD28 wrote:

Thanks very much, Smez, for taking the time to transcribe it for us! It happens so rarely that you can find a new Steve interview.

i know i hate that fact.
its weird cause you see all kinda os joe phil or rick but like none of steve hardly..
makes me mad ha ha.

[Stevephilwoman]

Thanks, Smez, for the Steve interview. It was great reading it. I printed it out and took it home with me and when I sat down to read it the song "Animal" came on the radio. Talk about coincidences!

It was wonderful to read it - thanks again!

Also thanks for the Joe Elliott interview as well. Even there was talk about Steve in it and that was a good thing even though the talk wasn't completely positive but honest in some weird way.

[dlspirit]

I love you Steve Clark. I miss you.

[Rock Goddess]

WOW Smez....are your hands hurting???

Thanks for that!