Joe Elliott is still thrilled about the success of The Stadium Tour. The tour featuring Motley Crue, Def Leppard, Poison and Joan Jett & the Blackhearts was one of the most successful tours of 2022. While the tour grossed $173.5 million, there was one part of the tour that was a bit of a downer.
Def Leppard frontman Joe Elliott touched on this in a new interview with Classic Rock. When asked if the whole lineup hung out off-stage, he said, “Not much. The safest way for us to keep that show on the road was just to avoid human beings as best we could.”
Elliott continued, “I caught covid at home before the tour. It’s still out there. So all of us in Leppard traveled separately, which is the smartest decision we made. I didn’t stay in hotels. I lived on the bus, just me and Dale, my driver, in total isolation.”
He added, “That’s the price of doing business in 2022. If we cancel a stadium show in Arlington, Texas at four in the afternoon, people will have traveled hundreds of miles and spent hundreds of dollars to get there. So we avoided contact, we tested every day, and it worked. We didn’t lose one gig.”
However, there were some moments where the acts mingled, including one funny moment when Elliott and Motley Crue’s Nikki Sixx went out for dinner.
“The one guy I hung out with a lot was Nikki,” said Elliott. “One night in Denver we went for sushi and talked about everything but music. It was funny, we didn’t realize Tommy [Lee] was in the same restaurant until we could hear him! He’s quite loud, you see.”
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