Def Lep Pod Drops the Def Leppard Knowledge
A wonderful storytelling podcast adds extra depth and context to Def Leppard's music.
Good day to you and thanks for spending a few minutes with Michael’s Record Collection. As always, I appreciate your time.
I hope you’re sharing these stories with your music-loving friends, co-workers, and family members. The readership numbers are holding steady with the MRC newsletter, while the podcast and video channel are showing slow but steady growth. Thanks for reading and to those of you who also check out the full embedded videos (or visit the MRC YouTube channel), which are packed with way more than I can fit into each newsletter. Thanks also to those who download the podcast version on your favorite podcast app (mine is Goodpods) so you can hear clips from the music being discussed.
One item I wanted to bring to your attention is that I’ll be guesting on an upcoming episode of Something for Nothing: A Rush Fancast with Steve and Gerry. I told you about that podcast in a recent issue of this newsletter and we discussed Rush’s Signals album on Episode 36 of the Michael’s Record Collection podcast. I went on their show to count down our five favorite Rush albums, so be on the lookout for that soon-ish.
For today’s issue, I spoke with Neil Poole, who produces and hosts an excellent podcast about the music of British rockers Def Leppard. Def Lep Pod dives deeply into the mighty Leppard’s music with wry humor, a fan’s perspective, and a burning curiosity that unearths some outstanding details.
I’m not exactly sure how Def Lep Pod ended up on my radar, but I was glad to discover it. It’s likely that someone I follow retweeted one of the show’s posts into my feed. I simply don’t recall, but it’s been a must-listen podcast since I found it.
Host Neil Poole puts the show together and in each episode he dissects some aspect of the band, whether it’s a box set release, a particular song, a documentary, or another facet of the band. Poole’s fandom is never in question, and his is a well-crafted show. While he sometimes has guests, he often works solo, providing incredible background and detail about songs like “Pour Some Sugar On Me,” “Photograph,” and “Let’s Get Rocked.”
Anyone wanting to jump into a new podcast is in luck with Def Lep Pod, because there aren’t loads of episodes to catch up on. As of this writing, 17 have been released with another due out today.
“I started last June and the reason it was started was essentially because I've always wanted there to be a Def Leppard podcast,” Poole said. “I was always looking for Def Leppard podcasts, and you can get rock music podcasts where they might do an episode on Def Leppard. And that's great, but there was never anything to sort of scratch that itch. So, I know it's a bit of an old cliché, so I thought, well, if no one else is doing them, I'll do one myself.”
Poole’s Def Leppard fandom dates back to 1988. Like many kids, it was an older sibling that steered him as a 10-year-old to a band he ended up falling in love with. But his brother certainly didn’t introduce Neil to Def Leppard in a traditional manner.
“I saw he was into Iron Maiden. I thought, ‘Oh, that’s good, I might get into Iron Maiden as well,’” Poole said. “And then he suggested to me that I should get my own band.
“And then he said, ‘Well, there's a band out there called Def Leppard. I think they're quite good. Why don't you get into them?’ So, never having heard Def Leppard, I went to a local shop called Woolworths that doesn't exist anymore, where you could buy singles, and they happened to have a single out at the time.”
Poole picked up a 12-inch single of “Love Bites” from the Hysteria album. The record had two B-sides — a live version of “Billy’s Got a Gun” (a song from Pyromania) and another Hysteria song, “Excitable.”
“I've still got it to this day, and I really liked it,” Neil said. “So, within this 12-inch record there are three very, very different sounding songs, and on the back of that, I then bought a pirate copy for two pounds off a man who used to come around the houses and sell pirate copies on cassettes of albums, and I bought hysteria, and then listened to it nonstop for essentially about a year. And it was from that point that I then delved backwards into (Def Leppard’s back catalog).
“So it was just sheer luck, to be honest. I just bought a record of a band I’d never heard, based on my brother saying, ‘Why don’t you find a band?’ Whatever it is, thirty years later or so, I’m still here.”
Poole had plenty of time to go back and fully explore the band’s first three releases, On Through the Night, High ‘N’ Dry, and Pyromania, because there was a long gap between the releases of Hysteria and Adrenalize due to the death of guitarist Steve Clark.
“So, it was Hysteria that obviously I discovered first, and then from that, and particularly from loving “Billy's Got a Gun,” which to this day is one of my favorite Def Leppard songs, I then literally went in reverse order backwards. So, I got Pyromania, loved that. I got High ‘N’ Dry, loved that. And then got On Through the Night, and loved that. I was really surprised to see how different they were. If you take those four albums, I mean, each one doesn't sound very much like the one that came before. So it was quite an interesting period of discovery for me going backwards in the band and hear them getting heavier and heavier.”
Def Leppard didn’t reach the same heights of popularity in their native England as they did in the United States early in their career, so Poole wasn’t jumping onto an already unstoppable bandwagon when he fell in love with the group. Pyromania had gone to No. 2 on the Billboard 200 album chart in the U.S. but only got to No. 18 in the UK, though Hysteria did go to No. 1 in both countries (as well as New Zealand, Australia, and Norway).
“It's two very different trajectories. The overall common theme, however, is that they've always been much, much bigger in the United States than they have in UK,” Poole said.
The band was no doubt helped by the explosion of MTV in the U.S. in the early to mid 1980s, with videos from Pyromania songs like “Photograph” and “Rock of Ages” in heavy rotation.
“What's really interesting, to give you a comparison between the success in the UK and the success in the States of Pyromania, is on the first gig of the Pyromania tour, Def Leppard played in a really little club in in London called the Marquee Club, which is quite famous,” Poole said. “It's a few hundred people. By the time they finished that tour in the States, they're playing in Jack Murphy Stadium (in San Diego on Sept. 13, 1983) and it's 55,000 people.”
Poole being able to casually drop a stadium name and an attendance figure from a show in 1983 in another country shows his depth of knowledge of Def Leppard’s history. That’s what he brings to each episode of the Def Lep Pod. He crafts his show with a bullet points script so that he stays organized and on point while not reading verbatim from the page.
“I can’t go in cold (without a script). I tried that,” he said. “(I use) Quite detailed bullet points, but it's not word-for-word scripted. So what I will do is that the bullet points that I write, I will just write them off the top of my head and what goes down in those bullet points are the basis of why say. I won’t draft and redraft and refine it or whatever. It's still what just came out of my head as if I was speaking and able to articulate myself.”
Poole tries not to think about how much time he spends researching a topic for Def Lep Pod, although he said it might take up to 10 hours looking for information and preparing for recording. He starts with his own baseline of knowledge about the topic and combs through YouTube, online magazines, and other areas of the web — such as Setlist.FM — looking for details and is able to file them away for precisely when he needs them.
Fans of Def Leppard will find plenty to like in Def Lep Pod. It’s a great conduit to a deeper understanding and appreciation of the band’s music.
Def Lep Pod is hosted by Podbean and can be found on all the common podcast apps, Spotify, etc. You can follow Neil on Facebook or on Twitter (@DefLepPod).
For my complete chat with Neil Poole about Def Lep Pod and our wider discussion about my favorite Def Leppard album, Pyromania (Neil’s is Hysteria), please watch the video below or download Episode 39 of the Michael’s Record Collection podcast.
Thanks again for your time today. I hope you found it worthwhile and that you share it with the Def Leppard fans in your life. Check out Neil’s show and see how much your appreciation for Def Leppard grows even more.