Def Leppard cements legacy: 'If you have great songs, it doesn’t matter how old they are'

Like the restless rust, Def Leppard never sleeps.

We don’t understand what it means either, but they told us so 36 years ago in “Animal.”

And here we are, a year after the rock behemoths released their 12^th studio album, “Diamond Star Halos,” and co-headlined a massive stadium tour with Motley Crue, Poison and Joan Jett & The Blackhearts for a haul of $176 million.

On May 19, Def Leppard will release “Drastic Symphonies,” a creative collaboration with The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra that recasts hits (“Love Bites,” “Hysteria”) and album cuts (“Paper Sun,” “Goodbye for Good This Time”) with a symphonic bent.

Then, on June 13, “DEFinitely: The Official Story of Def Leppard” lands. Part memoir, part photo essay, the hardcover is a treasure of 1,500 elements of band history, including recollections from singer Joe Elliott, guitarists Phil Collen and Vivian Campbell, bassist Rick Savage, drummer Rick Allen and archival interviews with original guitarists Steve Clark and Pete Willis.

If that isn’t enough Lep in your life, after an early summer gallop through Europe, Def Leppard returns to the U.S. for six stadium dates with Motley Crue and Alice Cooper, commencing Aug. 5 in Syracuse, New York.

Amiable frontman Elliott chatted with USA TODAY from his home in Dublin about which Def Leppard hits sounded “hideous” with an orchestra, why the band is compelled to still be better and how he's still holding on to rock star mystique.

Question: Even with all that Def Leppard has accomplished in 40-plus years, how surreal was it to have the Royal Philharmonic playing your songs?

Answer: It was very surreal. But we’re well aware of walking a well-trodden path. We’re by far not the first band to do (an orchestral album), but we didn’t want to just be buttering a piece of toast and slapping the orchestra on top of a record. We wanted to strip these songs down and bring the base of them back up.

Were you there for any of the Philharmonic’s recordings?

We spent two days on a balcony overlooking these guys. Whenever you see an orchestra, they’re usually wearing tuxes. But these musicians were wearing Def Leppard T-shirts, sweatpants and runners. When they did “Kings of the World,” I’ve never seen (Rick) Sav (age) get his phone out for anything other than answering a call and he filmed the whole thing. It was like watching David Attenborough filming the penguins! But it was his song and he probably thought he’d never see the Royal Philharmonic in Abbey Road doing his song.

Some of the songs – “Hysteria” and “Bringin’ on the Heartbreak,” in particular – seem like obvious choices to get the orchestral treatment. How did you decide which songs worked?

We’d get early arrangements from (string arranger) Eric Gorfain, who was scoring them on a keyboard that sounded like an orchestra and he’d send us MP3s for a yay or nay. The reason “Rock of Ages,” “Let’s Get Rocked” and “Photograph” aren’t on this record is because they sounded hideous. We weren’t going to just do the hits to the detriment of the song because it looks good on the (album) sleeve.

There is a very different version of “Pour Some Sugar on Me” on the album. Who is singing with you?

Emm Gryner, a Canadian solo artist I met in 1999 who backed up (David) Bowie and has about 28 albums out. She did a covers album in 2001 with “Crazy Train” from Ozzy (Osbourne) and “Song 2” from Blur and she had her version of “Sugar” on there. It was Sav who said, why don’t we just do Emm’s version? And you got that stunned silence when you can hear the cogs going around and about six seconds later it was, yeah, that’s a good idea.

You’re going to disappoint a lot of strip club fans with this version.

(Laughs) They’re of a certain age these days where they’re happy to just sort of wonder.

Looking through all of the photos and memorabilia and old tour posters in the "DEFinitely" book is a reminder that the band has weathered so much tragedy. Does it pain you to relive the loss of Steve Clark?

It’s been over 30 years (since he died). Hardly a day goes by when his name doesn’t come up or you see him in a photo to approve legacy artwork. He’s always there. My dad died in 2012 and he’s always there too. I think about Steve a lot, but it doesn’t pain me. I don’t like dwelling on it too long because in my mind, I find it disrespectful to Viv (Campbell). We’re for sure a better band musically and vocally since Viv joined and that’s no slight on Steve. In a perfect world, Steve might not be in the band anymore, but he’d be alive.

With all of the old photos of things like Phil Collen’s calendar and your tour itineraries and backstage laminates, the book also reiterates how cool it was to NOT know everything about the band in real time.

Things have changed now that we are in this mad world. It’s OK if there is a picture of you with a zit or with a black eye because you were in a fight. You tried to hide all of this stuff to show your best side; now you just show every side. The mystique is kind of a thing of the past that bands of our generation refuse to let die.

I saw the Stadium Tour last summer and thought the band sounded stronger than ever.

We’ll egotistically allow ourselves to acknowledge it. A good thing about learning from the past is that a lot of bands we grew up with had a five-to-10-year shelf life and they visibly and sonically didn’t get better. But we got better at every aspect. I sing better than I used to. We’re gelling as a band maybe because we feel we belong again. I don’t feel like we’re on trial. We’ve been accepted the way Fleetwood Mac or the Eagles have been and you see Billy Joel out there killing it in stadiums even though he hasn’t put an album out since ’93. It’s proof that if you have great songs, it doesn’t matter how old they are.

What drives you to still want to be better?

We’re not afraid to put the work in. We want people to leave going, “Wow, that was great” and then we want them to go, “Yeah, and better than the last time I saw them.” Live, we know we get it. No one is going to sell records like Taylor Swift except Taylor Swift. We had our moment. But are we going to be talking about whoever in the year 2065 the way that – luckily and blessed that we are – we’re still talking about Def Leppard 47 years after we started? We’ve worked very hard to put ourselves in that position to be talked about.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Def Leppard releases symphonic album, book: 'It was very surreal'