Fresh from backing Taylor Swift on a cover of “Pour Some Sugar On Me” at last week’s 2009 CMT Music Awards, Def Leppard is gearing up for its 40-city North American summer tour with Poison and Cheap Trick by digging through its back catalog, shuffling its playlist for fans that may have caught the band on one of its previous summer treks.
Speaking to RollingStone.com, Def Leppard frontman Joe Elliott said, “We’ve got 90 minutes to try and keep every Leppard fan out there happy, because they’ll all get, ‘Oh, they should’ve played this, and they should’ve played that. I think if we played all night, there’d be someone saying, ‘Well, they didn’t play that B side from 1983,’ or whatever. What we’ve done is we’ve got a tour set that’s going to change. We’ve got certain songs we’re going to flip out every night, but I doubt very much we’ll play the same set two nights in a row.”
Elliott added that after five years of going out on these big name tours with fellow rock survivors such as Journey, Brian Adams and Styx, he didn’t want people to get bored, although fans could still expect to hear the group’s biggest hits, such as ”Pour Some Sugar on Me,” “Rock of Ages,” and “Love Bites.”
“If I were to see the Stones, and I didn’t hear ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash,’ I’m going to go home disappointed,” Elliott said.