MusicRadar

Phil Collen shreds on stage with his Jackson PC Supreme. © Helen L Collen

"The first show we played with Pyromania was at the Marquee Club in London," says Def Leppard guitarist Phil Collen. "We started that tour at a 500-seat place, and we finished up at the Jack Murphy Stadium in San Diego - 55,000 seats. Pretty incredible."

What's also incredible is the fact that it's been 30 years since Collen joined Def Leppard and played a vital role in turning the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal upstarts into a global behemoth, one which has sold over 100 million records.

This June, the music of Def Leppard will rock multiplexes when the big-screen treatment of the hit Broadway musical Rock Of Ages opens. The all-star cast includes Russell Brand, Alec Baldwin, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Paul Giamatti and Mary J Blige - and for a little added wattage, there's Tom Cruise, belting out Pour Some Sugar On Me, no less. "It's going to be something else," Collen says of the Adam (Hairspray) Shankman-directed spooler.

To mark his 30th anniversary as a member of Def Leppard, MusicRadar caught up with Phil Collen to share some memories. In addition, we talked about his home recording setup, what the summer holds for the Leps and, most important of all, we asked that burning questing: What's it like seeing the world's biggest movie star singing your song?

Take us back to the time you joined the band. Was there an audition process?

"No. Nothing like that at all. I already knew the guys. What happened was, Pete Willis was having some problems with the band – things were just not going well – and one day, during the High 'n' Dry tour, I got a phone call from Joe Elliot, who was in the States at the time. 'Can you learn 16 songs in two days?' he asked me. 'Uhh, yeah,' I said. 'Why is that?' And then he told me that things weren't great with Pete, that it wasn't working out.

"Funny thing is, Joe called me two days later and told me that things were OK again. But when they started the next album, the one that would become Pyromania, they called me up and said Pete wasn't in the band anymore, and could I come to the studio to play a couple of guitar solos?

So it wasn't stated that you were joining the band.

"No. I went to the studio and was asked to play a solo to Stagefright. I did a first pass and everybody loved it – that's the take that's on the album, actually. From there, I played on Photograph, Foolin', Rock Of Ages, and then I started singing – basically, I finished the album off with the guys. From that point, we went on and on. There was no real joining process."

But still, you had to quit Girl, the band you were in at the time?

"Actually, I had already left. When I was going to go on tour with Def Leppard, I had to leave the other band. It worked out, though – we had kind of come to the end of our thing in Girl. Creatively there was a lot of potential in it, but we never really followed it up. There were lots of problems with management, our record label, all sorts of things. It would have imploded whether the Def Leppard thing happened or not."

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