Remaster Of The Universe!

“I saw Lizzy at Sheffield City Hall in ’76, ’77, ’78 and ’79, and every time they were fucking awesome. That bouncing light off the scratchboard thing Phil did with his guitar – brilliant! Then there was all that call and response stuff – ‘We need your helping hands!’, ‘Let me see you!’ – and the one-liners like the legendary ‘Are there are any Irish girls out there?’ before ‘Emerald’. From other singers that would’ve sounded a bit dirty old man-ish, but he had the cheeky personality to pull it off.

“Him, Phil Mogg from UFO and Bon Scott were the people who taught me about stagecraft. Thin Lizzy weren’t your standard rock band, there was something different about them. They were bluesy, soulful and lots of other things all at the same time.
“God bless Lizzy, they’d also let kids in four at a time – autograph, quick picture and then ‘fuck off!’ I’ve still got some grotty old photos of me in a leather cowboy hat, I was 16 or summat, with all their signatures on. They did that every show and remembered you from the last time as well. Phil didn’t just pay lip service to his fans, he loved ‘em.”
Joe Elliott is sat in a quiet corner of Johnny Fox’s pub – could he have picked anywhere more apt? – telling us why he considers Philip Lynott to be among the greatest rock ‘n’ rollers of all time. A fan of theirs since childhood, the Def Leppard singer has just written himself into Lizzy lore by collaborating with Scott Gorham on the new Jailbreak and Johnny The Fox remasters.
“Scott flew over to work on them on Mondays and Tuesdays and then from Wednesday to Sunday it was back to the Def Leppard live album, which will also have three new songs on it,” he says of the sessions that took place in his own Joe’s Garage studio perched on the side of the Dublin mountains. “People say, ‘You must have been daunted’, but actually I was full of confidence that Scott, myself and my brilliant engineer Ronan McHugh could pull it off. A lot of Leppard stuff over the last few years has been demos that we’ve added to. The reason being I’m sick of hearing from every band I’ve ever met, ourselves included, that ‘the demo’s better’. If it’s fucking better, use it!
“Basically what Scott and me did was treat the Jailbreak and Johnny The Fox masters as demos. ‘Is there anything wrong with the drums? No? Cool, we’ll keep ‘em. Does the bass sound a bit funny there? Yeah, it does, let’s re-do it’.
“I could listen to those Lizzy records all day long, but I knew that given the chance to strip the tapes down to Ground Zero and build ‘em back up again, I could make them better.”
It’s testament to how good a job Joe, Scott and Ronan did that you can’t tell where the joins are. Can he give us an example of something significant they fixed in the mix?
“Divulge trade secrets?” Joe laughs. “You put the original version of ‘The Boys Are Back In Town’ on and there’s that guitar break towards the end that’s physically out of tune. Just one string maybe, but out of tune. It’s always bothered me, but it’s bothered Scott a lot more, because it’s his record. It’s the same feeling I get when I listen to ‘Something In The Air’ by Thunderclap Newman, which has a piano break that’s so massively out of tune I’m sure Pete Townshend, who produced it, is still hanging his head in shame! I mean, what drugs were you on, boys, not to have noticed that? Doesn’t stop it being a great song, but fucking hell!
“Getting back to Scott – the rhythm sounds he can achieve on stage now are so much better than they were back in the day, so we set his Engl amps up and had him play guitar non-stop for nine hours. The wife, who could hear all this upstairs ‘cause there’s a bit of leakage in the studio ceiling was like, ‘Wow, I know those songs now!’ To which I replied, ‘Imagine how Scott feels, he’s been playing ‘em for 35 years!’ So, anyway, I’ve promised to improve the soundproofing.”
Did they keep it strictly analog or use new technology?
“Most rock fans consider Pro Tools to be an instrument of the devil, but actually it’s an insanely music-friendly computer programme that physically shows you on a screen if you’re out of time,” Joe reflects. “We time-corrected a lot of Brian Downey’s drumming, which has very little to do with his playing and a lot to do with the fact that Jailbreak was recorded on a budget that barely extended to a shoestring. Seriously, they were on thirty quid a week and notice from the label that if it didn’t sell, they were going to lose their deal. No offence to drummers, but when you’ve only a month to make a record you tend to prioritise the guitars and vocals ‘cause they’re what you notice the most.
“The only time I was under those sort of constraints was on the first Def Leppard album, which coincidentally is the one of ours that sounds the most like Lizzy. We’d just added a second guitarist who wanted to play differently to the other guy, so we had a bit of a Scott/Robbo thing going on!”
Sheffield City Hall meet ‘n’ greets aside, did Joe get to hang out much with Phil?
“There was another City Hall occasion when we’d signed to Vertigo and were therefore Lizzy’s labelmates that they invited us back to the hotel they were staying in,” Joe recalls. “Scott was the one who opened up the most – ‘Hey buddy!’ – but Phil came over and had a few words. The other times I met him were at my house in Isleworth when we threw a garden party and he tagged along as a plus-one, and in December ‘82/January ’83 at Frank’s Funny Farm, the Camden pub immortalised in song by Motörhead, who were always propping up the bar. I went upstairs to the loo and there was Lynott talking to Midge Ure. I had my pee, came out and hovered until there was a gap in their conversation that allowed me to say, ‘Hi, I don’t know if you remember me but I’m in a band called Def Leppard who are on your label…’ I knew that Dave Bates, the A&R man we shared with Lizzy, had played him an advance copy of Pyromania but wasn’t prepared for Phil saying: ‘I heard your album. It’s the reason I’m splitting the band up. I can’t compete with that’. Talk about a left-handed compliment. It felt like somebody had punched me through the heart.
“If I’d known then what I know now, I’d have slammed him against the wall and gone, ‘Make a fucking better record then! Don’t use us an excuse to throw the towel in!’ Our reaction when Nirvana came out with Nevermind was, ‘Fuck, we’ve got a fight on our hands!’ but I think at that stage he’d more or less admitted defeat. A bit of a sad way to remember your hero, but that’s how it was. He was a great guy who lost his way.”
Does Joe feel that having dissected Jailbreak and Johnny The Fox so minutely he now has a better idea of how Philo operated in the studio?
“Yeah, there was loads of banter on the tapes – some of the ‘You’re doing it fucking wrong!’ variety which you’d expect in a pressure cooker situation, but also a lot of affectionate mickey-taking and goofing around. There was an obvious camaraderie, which was lovely to hear. What was also fascinating and kind of spooky – but in a nice way – was discovering a bit in the middle of ‘Jailbreak’ where he’d tried doing this, ‘Okay, we know you’re in there!’ prison guard shout-out. To hear somebody who’s 25-years dead doing something so historical was an absolute mind-blower and too good not to have at the start of the remix we did for the bonus disc.”
Has he sated his Lizzy remasters appetite or might Joe be persuaded to spend some more quality studio time with Scott?
“We’d gladly have done Nightlife and Fighting as well, but the budget being beyond pathetic we had to cherry-pick,” he concludes. “But, yeah, I’d love to do some more albums.”
Watch this space!