Def Leppard frontman Joe Elliott recently spoke with Billboard.com about performing without guitarist Vivian Campbell - who is currently undergoing cancer treatment - and working on newmaterial. An excerpt from the story is available below:

Elliott says Def Leppard is, in fact, gearing up for "a big push" in 2015 that may well include some new music. The group has "15, 16 songs percolating in various, different degrees of being finished," a dozen from writing sessions in February and the rest from May, and Elliott adds that "we could put three of them out tomorrow. The rest of them need a bit of work." 

And, he says, it's been heartening for the group to be so prolific. "We only set out to write three or four songs in February and we ended up with 12. I'm still trying to figure out how and why. I think one of the whys is we haven't really written since 2007, 2008, so we're backed up, which is great to have that huge backlog of new ideas sitting around. And I think psychologically the fact that we aren't signed to a label, there was no, 'Oh, they're gonna want a ballad. They're gonna want a hit single. They're gonna want this or that,' the usual thing I suppose every artist in the world goes through. We didn't have to think like that. This time we just wrote for ourselves, and all of a sudden we were just spewing out all this stuff. There was just a little more freedom to the way we've written these songs and the way we've approached recording them."

Go to this location for the complete story.

KISS, Alice Cooper, Def Leppard, Sammy Hagar, Paul Rodgers, Cheap Trick, Heart, The Who’s Roger Daltrey, ELO legend Jeff Lynne and many more have recorded McCartney songs exclusively for The Art Of McCartney, a long awaited and very special project celebrating one of the most universally acclaimed songwriters of all time, Sir Paul McCartney. An audio snippet of Def Leppard performing "Helen Wheels" is streaming below:

Go to this location for complete details on The Art Of McCartney.