Def Leppard frontman Joe Elliott feels the delays caused by the pandemic to the soon-to-be launched “Stadium Tour” ultimately benefitted the band. Leppard will be out on the road all summer with Motley Crue, Poison, Joan Jett & The Blackhearts with opening night set for June 16th at Atlanta's SunTrust Park.
While talking to Heavy Consequence, Joe Elliott explained that having the band's new album, Diamond Star Halos in the can and ready for release upon hitting the road, is a best case scenario: “The advantage as well, now in 2022, over last year, or the year before, is that we can play some new music which we wouldn’t have been able to do in 2020. It would have been fine because that’s what the tour was set out to be, not a greatest hits tour but a trip down memory lane, your legacy, your back catalog, all the songs that people want to hear in the Stadium.”
Elliott touched upon the risks of introducing new material in a mammoth football stadium jam-packed with fans on a summer night: “It’s not the environment. If you want to play 12 new songs, you need to be in an open mic night in a basement somewhere. It’s not really what (Paul) McCartney, the (Rolling) Stones, or anybody with a brain would do in a stadium, but we can introduce some of the new songs into this tour which we couldn’t have done before.”