Rob Cavuoto from Guitar International spoke with DEF LEPPARD guitarist Vivian Campbell (also THIN LIZZY) recently about a number of topics including the band's new live album, Mirror Ball. A few excerpts from the chat follow:

Guitar International: Tell me about how Mirror Ball came to be and about doing a live CD versus a studio album?

Vivian Campbell: "We never really made a conscious decision to do a live record. It’s just that in the past doing a live album was very involved. You had to get a truck and you had to record basically one or two shows. There was a lot of pressure and a lot of performance anxiety. The technology is cheap now, so we basically just started recording every show over the last two tours. As such, there was never any, “Oh, my god. We’re making a live album. We better not screw up.” You really forgot you were recording. It took a lot of the pressure off. I don’t even think that we started to do it with the viewpoint of making a live CD. We just wanted to archive our performances. So this was recorded over multiple shows in 2008 and 2009 and we just cherry-picked the best performances. We decided to take some time off at the end of the last tour. Joe Elliott became a daddy for the first time and Rick Allen’s wife was expecting. So it was a whole thing and we just wanted some personal time. The idea of doing a live album freed us up a lot more and there was less pressure than doing a studio album. Other than that, Def Leppard’s basically been inactive other than Joe Elliott sitting in the studio sorting through this stuff, which basically was the biggest chore."

Guitar International: I understand that the CD will be a Walmart exclusive. That can really have its pros and its cons, like with AC/DC, it worked out very well, whereas with KISS, it didn’t work well and maybe prevented them from going Top 10. What was the decision to do this Walmart exclusive and was there any apprehension involved?

Vivian Campbell: We had done deals in the past where we sold a certain amount of records through Walmart. So we had a little bit of experience with it. Our manager had a lot of experience with having dealt with big box retailers with the other acts he manages. So we basically followed the advice of our management. We were no longer working with a major label, Songs from the Sparkle Lounge was our last record for our label which the band had been with for 30 years and we needed to find some outlets. Like it or dislike it, it kind of is the nature of the beast now. There is no bricks and mortar industry for music anymore. It’s Walmart and Best Buy and Target and places like that. Those are the places where people are most likely to buy physical CDs. The business has just been in a tremendous amount of flux and you’ve got to adapt. What’s working this year is not necessarily gonna be do-able in a year or two from now. It is what it is."

Guitar International: I saw that Mirror Ball would also be released on iTunes. Def Leppard, like AC/DC, were holdouts on iTunes - what is the story behind that?

Vivian Campbell: "We weren’t on iTunes because there were some reporting discrepancies with the aforementioned record label. The band’s original contract from that late ‘70s predates the technology. There was never a provision in the contract for digital royalties. Our label was not accounting to us. They were selling on iTunes, so we had to pull down most of our catalog off iTunes while we audited the label and went through the whole legal hassle of that. Now I’m glad to say we’ve got that all resolved. We eventually want to make our entire catalog available on iTunes."

Read the entire interview here.