Def Leppard Jokes Mötley Crüe Rocker Tommy Lee Smuggles 'Plants Now Instead of Cocaine' on Tour (Exclusive)
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Def Leppard opens up to PEOPLE in this week's issue about (a more wholesome) life on tour with Mötley Crüe
Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic (Lee)
(L) Def Leppard and (R) Tommy LeeLife on the road looks a little different these days for Def Leppard and their pals Mötley Crüe.
The “Pour Some Sugar on Me” rockers open up to PEOPLE in this week’s issue about their joint tour with Tommy Lee and company, which kicks off this weekend — and how things are a bit more wholesome this time around.
Guitarist Phil Collen likens their co-headlining tour to “being a bunch of kids at school,” while lead singer Joe Elliott says the group has learned to be on high alert around Lee, 60.
“If you fell asleep, you were in deep doo-doo, because Tommy ‘I’m 5 Years Old’ Lee and John 5, probably five months older, would go around putting plant pots on people and taking pictures of them while they slept,” says Elliott, 64. “So God help you—just don’t shut your eyes.”
Quips Collen, 65: “At least Tommy’s smuggling plants now instead of cocaine. Bonsai trees, that’s his latest obsession.”
Lee, of course, has been open about his past drug use; in a 2020 interview on Steve-O’s Wild Ride podcast, the rocker revealed the creative ways he’d smuggle “f---in’ cocaine, whatever it was” on tour, whether on the bus or on a plane.
Collen says he still remembers playing shows with Mötley 40 years ago, and appreciates the ways in which the musicians have matured — at least a little bit.
“It’s been really nice being semi-grown up and actually appreciating all that we do,” he says, while guitarist Vivian Campbell, 60, adds: “You never really grow up in this industry. You can’t.”
Elliott agrees, explaining that growing up too much would actually be unhelpful in the world of music.
“I think the wonderment of what you do is part of what keeps your mind young,” he says. “The childhood dreams, when they go, it starts to fall off.”
Those childhood dreams are still going strong for Def Leppard, who are fresh off the May release of their orchestral remix album Drastic Symphonies (the rockers also released their 12th studio album Diamond Star Halos in 2022).
To have made it this far in their careers is a testament not only to their music, but to their strength, as the group has weathered a number of setbacks over the years, including a 1984 car accident that claimed the left arm of drummer Rick Allen, 59, the overdose death of ousted guitarist Steve Clark in 1991, and Campbell’s 2013 cancer diagnosis.
“History tells you, with a car crash, death, cancer, whatever the hell we’ve survived, we’ve always had this underpinned strength of, it’s the music that kept us all together,” says Elliott. “We’ll survive anything that gets thrown at us.”
Def Leppard will resume their tour with Mötley Crüe on Aug. 5 in Syracuse, New York, and will wrap on Aug. 18 in El Paso after seven shows before heading to Japan and Australia in November.
For more on Def Leppard, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands everywhere Friday.
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