Phil Collen could not believe what he was seeing and hearing the first time he played with Steve Clark. The pair had jammed before Collen officially joined Def Leppard in ‘82, but this was something different. He hadn’t seen anyone do what Clark was doing on electric guitar.
“When we sat down, he was doing things that other players don’t do,” says Collen, joining MusicRadar over Zoom. “Whenever you meet any guitar player, there’s always a book that they take from. ‘Oh, it was an Al Di Meola lick. That was a George Benson lick. It’s an Yngwie lick… Oh it’s the Eddie thing.’
“He obviously loved Jimmy Page but he would do stuff and I would go, ‘Well, I’ve never heard this before. I’ve never even heard where it comes from!’ So all of a sudden, you’re like, ‘Whoa, what is this?’”
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They hit it off immediately. But they were very different players. Collen was self-taught. Clark was booksmart, and had a grounding in classical guitar before Led Zeppelin and Page turned him onto rock. The combination worked. Collen and Clark had chemistry. They knew how to complement each other, even if, to this day, Collen has no idea where Clark got some of his licks from.
“Again, he’d go, ‘Yeah, and it kind of goes like this,’ and it’s like he’s showing me how it goes, and I’ve never even seen or heard a style like that,” says Collen. “That was the uniqueness of him, and it’s like I said, you never meet anyone like that – especially guitar players. Everyone all comes from the same kind of pool. Whatever style it is, whether it’s jazz, metal, blues, whatever, they all follow a thing. Steve’s thing was trailblazing. It was like carving his own canyon, all the time.”
Rock players tend to deal in shock and awe. Most know how to give the audience a thrill. But Collen believes it was one of Clark’s gifts that he knew how to write parts that could move them, too – and despite all this he still doesn’t get the credit he deserves.
“You could always count on him to do something unique, special, [pauses] and heartwarming,” he says. “You would actually go, ‘Whoah! This is deep. It has a real depth to it.’ And yeah, he absolutely doesn’t get enough credit, because no one even knows that. Steve was amazing.”
On the adjacent Zoom video we have Tommy Henricksen, someone who does not need any encouragement to pay tribute to Steve Clark. The Alice Cooper guitarist/MD and frontman of Crossbone Skully is a Clark superfan.
Henricksen had Clark in mind when he called up Collen to ask him to guest on Crossbone Skully’s Thunder Love.
“I said to Phil, ‘I want to do a song that’s like a tribute to Steve Clark, and in the vein of like a Pyromania, Hysteria, Photograph-type thing. And I wanted the big chorus and all the other stuff,” says Henricksen. “When Phil got it, he was like, ‘What do you want?’ I said, ‘I want you to dust off the Rockman, put your background vocals on there, and give me a blazing solo.’ When I got it, I was sitting there, going, ‘That’s the sound. That’s the sound that I’m always looking for.’”
That sound has got more than a little Def Leppard circa ’83 to it. Mutt Lange emerged from semi-retirement to apply his magic touch as producer, and to provide backing vocals just as he did with Def Leppard back in the day.
With Phil’s voice, with Mutt’s voice, and my voice in there, I get goosebumps. I almost cried because it means so much to me
“With Phil’s voice, with Mutt’s voice, and my voice in there, I get goosebumps. I almost cried because it means so much to me,” says Henricksen. “It means so much. When you’re working with Phil and Mutt and having that stuff, I can’t explain it. The drum sounds, everything – I just sat in the studio going, ‘I’ve been trying to do this for 40 years!’ When you get it, it’s amazing! It’s a great feeling.”
Collen felt it too. If this was a tribute to Clark then there was an obvious choice of guitar for the video shoot. He tracked his solo with his custom Jackson T-style but Thunder Love was the kind of track that required a guitar with some Def Leppard lore to it.
He didn’t have the Ibanez Destroyer to hand, the guitar he used in the video to Photograph, but in his Jackson X-Stroyer he had the next best thing.
Collen promises Def Leppard fans are in for a treat next year when the documentary Long Live Def Leppard is released. Back in the day, Clark’s former girlfriend, Lorelei Shellist, used to follow them about with a camcorder, driving them all nuts. But what she shot was gold, and much of it has ended up in this new film.
“There’s some amazing footage,” says Collen. “His old girlfriend had all this footage. I remember when she was around, Lorelei, she was like filming, and we’d go, ‘Oh, put that put that camera away!’ And now she’s shared this incredible stuff of Steve that I’d never even seen.
“So now it becomes very emotionally-charged stuff, whereas, again, we were pissed off in the ‘80s when she was filming, walking around with the cameras! And it really has a place. And some of this stuff is in the movie. So you get another kind of insight to what Steve was about. It’s just really cool.”
See the official Def Leppard website for more on Long Live Def Leppard. You can check out Thunder Love above, and read more with Phil Collen and Tommy Henricksen telling MusicRadar why Mutt Lange is rock’s über-producer.
