In an age when even A-list acts like Bad Bunny, Jennifer Lopez, and the Black Keys are struggling to fill big venues, Def Leppard still consistently draw multi-generational crowds. This week, they head out on the Summer Stadium Tour with co-headliners Journey and rotating special guests Cheap Trick, the Steve Miller Band, and Heart, and it’s one of the season’s hottest tickets.

“We don’t stop,” Elliott matter-of-factly says of Lep’s tenacity, sitting with bandmates Vivian Campbell, Rick Savage, Phil Collen, and Rick Allen in Los Angeles’s SiriusXM Garage ahead of a private, fans-only showcase previewing the tour. “We’re always putting new products” — like last year’s orchestral record, Drastic Symphonies, and 2022’s glammy Diamond Star Halos — “and lot of [other] bands, they kind of rest on their laurels. We are always creating new stuff, and this tour is going to look different and sound very different to anything we’ve done before. We keep raising the bar. And it looks like some people are paying attention, because every time we go out there, they go, ‘It was better than you ever were before!’ So, you keep that momentum going.”

This summer’s Def Lep tour is a celebration of the 40th anniversary of Pyromania (“with a slight pandemic delay,” Elliott chucklingly clarifies), the record that made the band MTV superstars thanks to the heavy rotation of the David Mallet-directed video for “Photograph,” one of the greatest pop-rock anthems of all time. Leppard arguably paved the way for the mid/late-’80s MTV explosion of pop-metal groups like Poison, Guns N’ Roses, and Skid Row, as one of the first young, rising hard rock bands to embrace MTV.

“Or, it embraced us, one of the two. We were really lucky. When MTV started, it was my [22nd] birthday — August the 1st, 1981 — and the first video that they’d played, ironically, was [the Buggles’] ‘Video Killed the Radio Star.’ They didn’t have many videos,” says Elliott, recalling that at the time, most of the British bands on the still-fledging cable network were new wave artists. The same year that MTV launched, Lep released their third album. High ‘n’ Dry, and received decent airplay for their low-budget, performance-format video “Bringin’ On the Heartbreak.” They were already working on Pyromania in the U.K. when they started “getting reports back from America that this album called High ‘n’ Dry, which had stalled at a quarter-million sales, had gone gold while we were in the studio making the follow-up. There’s a momentum there, that we can build on.”

Def Lep’s MTV ascent coincided with two other band members’ birthdays, when on Dec. 2 and 8, 1982 — the days that Savage and Collen respectively turned 22 and 25 — the band convened with Mallet to shoot “Photograph” and “Rock of Ages.” The former video, which marked Collen’s onscreen debut with the group, was shot at London’s Battersea Power Station — the building featured on the cover of Pink Floyd’s Animals album — and Elliott credits Mallet, known for directing influential early videos for Lep’s heroes, David Bowie and Queen, for their MTV breakthrough.

“We just stood there miming the song in the freezing cold in his warehouse … [Mallet was] like, ‘OK, darlings, we’re going to get all these girls and put them in these cages! And you guys are going to play on this grid and these lights are going to come through and it’s going to be amazing!’ And we would just throw shapes: ‘Just look like you mean it,’” Elliott laughs. “But [“Photograph”] was really well-lit, and it was when it was finished, he over bled the colors, so it was vivid. Everything was massively vivid. If you’ve seen the Bowie [documentary] Moonage Daydream, they bled all the colors together so it looked like the ‘70s. That’s what this video was, but it was an ‘80s version, I suppose.”

Many older, established rockers were still dismissing MTV as a passing fad at the time. “They would make these videos reluctantly, and we would be looking at them going, ‘They didn’t want to make that video, did they?’ They looked really uncomfortable. … You can tell when you actually see it back; it looks bit sad,” Elliot chuckles, citing ZZ Top as one of the few bands “from the generation before” that had fun with the burgeoning music-video medium. “But we were young enough to embrace all this new technology of the video era. It was all exciting for us. … We were new to this and we were younger, only on our third record — which hadn’t even come out.”

Pyromania did come out the following month, and as Elliott and millions of Gen X Lep fans fondly remember, “When that [“Photograph” video] hit MTV in January [1983], it just went mental. It just blew up, big-time. We were rehearsing for the British tour and we were getting messages, like slow-mo messages from telexes and phone calls, saying that it was getting a lot of traction on radio. By the time we got to the States… it was already a hit. It was getting played everywhere.”

And so, Def Leppard became high-rotation MTV darlings alongside the likes of new wavers like Duran Duran. But — much like Duran Duran — Lep didn’t always garner respect, specifically because they had a large (and loyal to this day) female fanbase. There’s an inherent misogyny to that, but Elliott, who recalls being bullied at school as a kid for liking effeminate glam-rock bands, shruggingly muses: “It was the same with the ‘70s. We would never on our playgrounds at school admit to liking David Essex or David Cassidy or the [Bay City] Rollers, even if you liked one of their songs. I bought ‘Crazy Horses’ by the Osmonds in a brown paper bag!

“It was more of a man’s world, wasn’t it? It’s like the reason the Runaways never became massive, or Fanny never became massive. All-girl bands were a ‘novelty.’ But in fairness, the Rolling Stones had a pretty big female following. And so did the Beatles.”

However, Def Lep ultimately crossed gender, generational, and genre lines with Pyromania. And they’re excited to entertain audiences of all demographics with deep cuts, like “Rock! Rock! (Till You Drop),” “Too Late for Love,” “Die Hard the Hunter,” “Billy’s Got a Gun,” and “Comin’ Under Fire,” on tour this summer.

“These songs have been in our orbit permanently. It’s not an album that came out and disappeared, or meant something to a few people like, say, On Through the Night or maybe even High ‘n’ Dry. It’s an album that we are regularly reminded is the album that got kids into rock music, because it crossed over,” notes Elliott. “It wasn’t full metal. It wasn’t total pop. It was somewhere right in the middle, and so it brought in a lot of people. The rockers that didn’t care that it was a bit pop, and the pop people didn’t mind that it was a bit heavier. I think that’s an important part of the album.”

And of course, Def Leppard were vindicated when — like the above-mentioned Duran Duran — they finally got into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, crushing the fan vote, in 2019. Elliott is still on a mission to get his glam-rock idol who performed with Lep at that year’s induction ceremony, Mott the Hoople’s Ian Hunter, in the Hall. But in the meantime, his band’s Summer Stadium Tour’s setlist will feature a new single that pays tribute to Lep’s glam roots, “Just Like ’73.” Like the majority of Lep’s catalog, especially Pyromania, the new song is nostalgic but timeless.

“It’s how [Pyromania] sounds — it still sounds pretty good to me, all these years later,” Savage says of their landmark LP’s staying power. “When you hear it on the radio, or whatever medium you listen to it on, there’s not a lot where you’d go, ‘Oh, I would have changed that’ or ‘I wish we hadn’t have done that.’ It still sounds really good.”

Def Leppard (Photo: Consequence of Sound)

Up until very recently, hard rock acts didn’t have a great track record with the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. It took years for KISS, Rush and Bon Jovi to get in, for instance, and British metal gods Judas Priest have yet to be inducted. But finally, Priest’s peers, Def Leppard — not just one of the most influential bands of the 1980s’ metal boom but one of the most successful artists of all time, having sold more than 100 million records worldwide — will enter the Hall next year, alongside more esoteric acts like Radiohead and the Cure. Surely the more than half a million loyal fans who voted for Leppard are feeling vindicated right about now.

“The fans who collectively voted was about 560,000, which is insane,” Leppard frontman Joe Elliott marvels. “I mean, we crushed the fan vote. So, I guess what happens there is that [doubters] go, ‘You know what? Yeah, they do deserve to be in!’”

Speaking to Yahoo Entertainment shortly after the inductees announcement, Elliott acknowledges that Def Leppard have never been critics’ darlings. “I can understand why people say, ‘Well, they sold a ton of records but it’s just commercial fluff,’ if you like,” he shrugs. “But our body of work is not that. It’s got commercial stuff on it, yes. It’s got catchy choruses. But it’s got songs that have remained hits for 30 years. You know, it doesn’t all have to be dark gloom and Bob Dylan-strength lyrics to make an impact. Sometimes just watching 25-46,000 fans at our concert, singing the chorus of ‘Pour Some Sugar on Me’ so loudly that they actually drown out the band — that, to me, is making a cultural impact.

“The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame should be about impact on the music industry — your impact on the next generation of kids coming up,” Elliott continues. “Did you encourage a kid to buy a guitar? Did you encourage a kid to buy a drum kit? Did you encourage a kid to pick up singing and writing songs? If that happened, then whoever the band — whether it be us, Nickelback or Boyz II Men — are eligible for a nomination, because they’ve made some kind of an impact. … There’s a lot of [artists] who stop me in an elevator and go, ‘Your music brought me through my teenage years and made me want to be a musician.’ And they’re in a band that don’t sound a thing like us! But, we got them started.”

It’s worth noting that in the past, Def Leppard were the victims of an odd and low-key sort of sexism, in which bands with large female fan bases tend to not be taken seriously. “That’s a good point, actually,” Elliott muses. “Maybe this whole #MeToo Movement has helped make a seismic shift in that kind of thing too. I really never thought of it like that, but yeah, it’s ridiculous that a band would be thought of in a negative way because they have a female audience over a male audience. That might be something to do with maybe the committee is mostly male — that’s me supposing, mind you. But it never occurred to me that bands that have a mixture of both sexes coming to their shows, that that would be even an issue. … I always thought it was down to your body of work. And that’s how it should be.”

Looking ahead to the ceremony, which will take place on March 29, 2019, at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, Elliott isn’t yet sure exactly what Leppard’s performance will entail. “I’ve only just heard that you play a three-song set, and then there’s normally some mad jam at the end. I just kind of burst out laughing — I think I spat tea across the floor — at the idea of me, Thom Yorke and Robert Smith being on the same stage,” he chuckles.

But what about doing some sort of “mad jam” with the class of 2019’s surprise inductees, Roxy Music? Roxy’s groundbreaking glam rock, along with the glittering music of David Bowie, T. Rex, Mott the Hoople, Slade and Jobriath, was a major influence on Elliott when he was growing up in the Northern English city of Sheffield in the 1970s. (“Take them out the loop, and there’s no Def Leppard,” Elliott stresses.) So, might we expect Elliott and Roxy’s Bryan Ferry to share the stage at some point? Maybe a “Bringin’ on the/ In Every Dream Home a Heartache” medley?

“Yeah, you and I would love that,” Elliott laughs. “What you have to realize here is that there’s a logically good reason why that will never happen: I totally get that I’m a huge fan of Roxy Music, but I totally get that Roxy Music are not huge fans of Def Leppard! Why would they be? Bryan Ferry is big into Bob Dylan, he’s big into Marlene Dietrich, that kind of thing. I think there might be some smiles and handshakes and congratulatory stuff going on [backstage at the Hall ceremony], but I just can’t see Bryan Ferry checking out the genius of the production of [Def Leppard’s breakthrough album] Hysteria, because he’s probably never heard it in his life. … I mean, sure, I would get up and do ‘Virginia Plain’ with them, but I can’t see them wanting to get up and do ‘Pour Some Sugar on Me’ with us!”

That being said, Elliott is already looking forward to the following year’s nominations, when he will get the chance to vote as a Rock Hall member — because he already knows who will be at the top of his class of 2020 ballot. “I think it’s — ‘disappointing’ would be my faintest word here — that the guy who gets the third best fan vote, Todd Rundgren, doesn’t even get picked in the top seven,” Elliott says. (Rundgren was shortlisted this year but didn’t make the Hall’s final cut.) “This is a guy who, you listen to the Nazz, you listen to his solo work, there’s hits. You listen to his work with Utopia, it stretched boundaries. You listen to his production work: Meat Loaf, Psychedelic Furs, the New York Dolls. I could go on. It’s like, ‘Really? He’s not in?’ It’s unbelievable. But I can’t control that. I can just be disappointed for him and hope that he gets in next year, because if I get to vote next year and he’s nominated, he will be the first one on my list.”

It’s been a “long, hard, strange trip” for Leppard to get to the Hall — a trip marked by such tragedies as the loss of drummer Rick Allen’s arm and the death of guitarist Steve Clark — but Elliott proudly says it’s been “worth every minute, because it’s all we ever wanted. It was always about making the songs better. That’s the kind of club that we wanted to be in. And the fact is, we’ve got a number of songs that are thought of by our generation in the same way that I think about stuff by the Who or the Beatles or the Stones. I’m not trying to say that we’re as good as Lennon and McCartney or Jagger and Richards, but for our generation, we are their version of that. … And that’s where we wanted to place ourselves.”

This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.