In a new interview with Billboard, Q Prime Management co-founders Peter Mensch and Cliff Burnstein - who have played an incalculable role in the success of Metallica, Def Leppard, and others - discuss their 33 year partnership. An excerpt follows:

Billboard: How long did you have just one act? You started with Def Leppard, right?

Peter Mensch: “Yeah, we had Def Leppard in 1982 but at some time…”

Cliff Burnstein: “And we had the Waitresses. But the point was, if you have one really big act, and Def Leppard became really, really huge…”

PM: “Very quickly.”

CB: “We could've just said, “Hey, we can make it on Def Leppard alone.” But we would have had to be psychic to know that they would take three years to make an album [1987’s Hysteria], that the drummer [Rick Allen] would lose his arm [in 1984] and that eventually one of the key members would die [Steve Clarke, in 1990]. So if you knew all that, then you definitely wouldn't wanna manage only one act.”

PM: “Remember, we didn't start from the bottom. When Def Leppard went on tour with Billy Squier [in 1983], they blew him off the stage every night: It wasn't like they’d spent seven years [toiling] in the clubs. We got these acts at the right time - and boom. Krebs and Leber were sort of hands-off with Def Leppard, Scorpions, AC/DC and a guy named Michael Schenker - I brought Cliff in and those were the four acts that we had.”

Billboard: But you weren't able to take any of them but Def Leppard with you, right?

PM: “No. We got fired by AC/DC. The Scorpions…”

CB: “Traitorous!”

PM: “The traitorous Scorpions stayed with Krebs, and I'll never forgive them for that. Then they fired him and we had another shot at them in the mid-'80s and they chose Doc McGee. And that's why they're even more traitorous.” [Laughter]

Billboard: Why did AC/DC fire you?

PM: “Who knows. They never told me.”

Billboard: Why did Def Leppard get big so fast?

CB: “When we left Leber Krebs, even though their second album was not as successful as the first, it was starting to blow up in America a year after it came out because Polygram [Records] had just made their deal with MTV - they had been holdouts. And they didn't have any videos to give MTV - all they had were these live videos that we shot of Def Leppard. We didn't have MTV in New York [for its first months, the channel wasn’t available in New York City], so we didn't f---in' know what was going on [with it in the rest of the country]. And all the sudden the record started selling - apparently with nothing going on. It was because [MTV] were playing “Bringin' On The Heartbreak”. That was the thing we knew going into our management business.

PM: “Well, that and having Mutt Lange produce their next record.”

CB: “We knew when we heard “Photograph”, even though the record wasn't gonna come out for another five or six months, we knew we had a smash.”

Read the full interview at this location.