By Martin Popoff

Phil Collen, from GIRL and DEF LEPPARD, Simon Laffy from Girl and Paul Cook from SEX PISTOLS… that’s the weirdly named MANRAZE. You’ve heard about it, they’re talking, theyr’re rocking, they’ve got a second album under their power trio belts, a little mess of madness called PunkFunkRootsRock.

“Artistic fulfillment, you know, the scratch you can’t itch, and now we can itch it, like, musically, lyrically, everything, really.” That’s the fit and trim Phil Collen speaking, from a tour bus burnin’ for you through “the wilds of Pennsylvania.” “It’s just been kind of sitting dormant for years, and this is a vehicle where we can do that, which is great. And we’re a band as well. We rehearse, study it, without even knowing we’re actually doing that, and the end result is just this amazingly fulfilling, really cool thing – especially this new record.”

It really is cool that Phil does this, if you think about it. He’s an old rocker from his pre-Leppard days, but also a hoover of anything musically good. And yeah, it’s the scratch you can’t itch in the rules-bound Def Leppard. Manraze, as a result, rocks grittier and braver than anything Def Leppard’s ever done since pre-Pyromania.

“And that’s the difference,” continues Phil. “In Def Leppard, it’s a certain sound that’s been there for years. But on Manraze, you can really meander off on any tangent, really. You can be jazzy, funky, hence the title, PunkFunkRootsRock; we would be dub reggae one second, and then I would be looking for an ANDY SUMMERS solo or a classic Trojan reggae sound, and the next minute I would be trying to get, you know, influenced by a JIMI HENDRIX sound or something. All of this is going on and it’s unbelievably rewarding.”

Back to the formative years... “The glam thing had such a big impact, especially DAVID BOWIE. But I like rock, hard rock; DEEP PURPLE was the first show I ever saw. ZEPPELIN, all of that stuff. But definitely some of the reggae stuff that was around certainly since the ‘60s, especially in London. There’s a huge West Indian community, and you literally heard the music all over the place. So I think all of that soaks in, but I don’t always get a chance to put it out. We always say in Def Leppard… we tried to experiment, on the ‘96 album, Slang, and our audience didn’t quite get it. And we thought well, we have to tread very carefully. And that’s the big difference. In Def Leppard, we’re not restricted, but we kind of have to obey certain guidelines, and that’s the difference between Def Leppard and Manraze. We don’t have to do that.”

“There’s stuff that you would never dare touch on a Def Leppard album,” answers Collen, asked about lyrical direction. “There’s stuff on the first album, a song called ‘Halo’, which is about Neo-cons, and a song called ‘Get Action’ on the new record, which actually really falls into the whole Rupert Murdoch kind of thing that is going on, but is actually more aimed at Tony Blair, who I thought was brilliant, fantastic, intelligent, charming guy, but actually lead a lot of people down the Swanee (laughs). He influenced a lot of people and he kind of left them… and that’s typical of politicians. It’s not what we think; they can’t actually do anything. Everyone goes, ‘Oh, if this person gets in, they’ll do this.’ No they can’t. There are people who rule us, and we’re unaware of who they are. So you know, we can touch on subjects like that with Manraze. ‘Edge Of The World’ is about accepting mortality, really, and an afterlife. So there’s all kinds of different kind of subject matter. Love songs… there’s ‘I C U In Everything’, which is about my wife. There are all different things, again, coming and going on a tangent. It is very inspiring just to be able to get ideas from anywhere and just run with it.”

“I think the second Manraze album is probably a bit grittier than the first one,” muses Phil. “It’s certainly more widespread and open and confident. I think in hindsight, looking back at the first album, which I think is great, I think there was a certain amount of trepidation. You had to tread a little lightly, because you didn’t know where your foot was going to land, whereas on the second album, there was a certain fuck off-ness to it that the first one didn’t have. Like it was very confident, and I think looking at Paul’s whole shtick with the Pistols, it invokes the spirit of rebellion.”

Folks tend to forget that Phil was part of two semi-pioneering albums before he ever joined Leppard, specifically in time to tour Pyromania. Girl issued the glammy Sheer Greed in ’80 and the gritty Wasted Youth in ’81. “I think we learned a lot from that band,” responds Phil, confronted with this portion of his past. “We were very naïve when we started. Me and Simon didn’t actually write together. Our first writing experience was, I think, ‘Skin Crawl’ or ‘Connected To You’ from the first Manraze album. Kind of ludicrous that we were in a band together for three years and we never got that side of it going. So I think, with Simon as well, there’s a lot of stuff that you could actually never get out before, lyrically, and musically. We’ve been doing stuff that was almost jazz-based and stuff, and you can do that in the context of rock. And I think the problem is, people get very close-minded about genres and they get all genre-specific and everything. And I think one of the things that we did bring from Girl, is that it’s okay to be different, and if you don’t like it, fuck you. So that was the one thing that Simon and I did have in common from that kind of era.”

Have band, will tour, sez Phil. “Whenever we get any breaks, I’ll gladly go out, after we finish this Def Leppard tour. Then I think the next hour I’d go into rehearsal with Manraze. So that’s no problem. The challenge is actually getting someone to want us to come to a certain place. That’s the trick, which I also find with Def Leppard. It’s like, ‘Why aren’t you coming to Mexico? Why don’t you come to Taiwan? Why aren’t you doing this?’ And it’s like, ‘Why are you asking me?’ You can’t just show up. That’s one of the things, and it’s a similar thing with Manraze. We have to wait to be invited, but we would love to come on a totally different level, like doing clubs, sweaty clubs – that would be perfect (laughs).”