The following story is courtesy of Thisisnottingham.co.uk:

Joe Elliott, front man for rock heavyweights DEF LEPPARD, has a clear idea on the secret of the band's appeal. "We're like AC/DC meets QUEEN, if you wanted to describe us," he says. "Power and balls but with strong melodies." Big claims, but then Leppard are a big band – as 65 million album sales will testify.

This year's Download festival sees Def Leppard return to Donington for the first time in over 20 years, which Elliott sees as a broadening of tastes compared to the early years of Donington as a festival.

"When you look at the bill for the first two days, you wouldn't have expected that at any Donington I went to, but the third night definitely is," he said. "But it shows there's room for everybody."

And "everybody" included a newly-reformed FAITH NO MORE, albeit minus guitar maestro Jim Martin, but Elliott has a certain satisfaction when he talks of the first night headliners. "When they first got together, I was raving about them in Kerrang and they were embarrassed, I think, because they weren't Leppard fans!

"The Real Thing was a phenomenally great record. Those guys went through such a meteoric rise that they didn't know where they were, then they released an album no-one bought and they split up.

"Kudos to bands like us and IRON MAIDEN who've managed to avoid all that. Now the band are older and wiser, they'll probably say 'I wish I'd done it differently' and I can't help having a wry smile 'cos we did things differently.

"We came through the hard times of the grunge era, but those times still weren't as hard as the media made out. We may not have had radio play, but we were still going top 20 in the US and we filled a 50,000 seat arena in South Africa in 1997.

"We knew we were doing nothing wrong. Public perception just changes, but it always tends to change back if you have the patience to ride it out – now our ticket sales are the strongest they've been for 20 years."

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