REVIEW: Def Leppard at PPL Center shows its music is timeless
“You’re going to get a little of everything tonight,” Joe Elliott, lead singer of the British rock band Def Leppard, told the crowd at Allentown’s PPL Center on Tuesday.
“Something old, something new, something borrowed.”
And the band lived up to the promise, with a 16-song, 87-minute set that included a lot of the old hits (only two songs released this century and only one other as recent as the 1990s), two new songs from last year’s self-titled album, and one cover.
But all of it was good. The hits, only very slightly updated, still sounded good and resonated with the near-sellout crowd of perhaps 9,000.
The two new songs – the first single “Let’s Go” and the new single “Dangerous” -- also were very good, and fit nicely in the band’s catalog.
In fact, the concert opened with “Let’s Go,” an appropriately titled first song, though a bit muted to kick off a rocking night. “Dangerous” was even better, sounding only marginally different from the group’s 1980s heyday sound.
The songs stood up well stacked among hits such as the 1987 hit “Animal,” “Let It Go,” the group’s first U.S. charting single from 1981, and its big 1983 hit “Foolin’,” which was slow and strong.
The hits were the highlights of the show, and Def Leppard played them exceptionally well. “Love Bites” was strong, and the poppy, energetic “Armageddon It” even better. The title track from the band’s 1987 album “Hysteria” also sounded good.
The dual-guitar attack of axmen Vivian Campbell and Phil Collen helped elevate the evening. The strutting, shirtless Collen was ripping as early as “Let It Go” and Campbell on “Dangerous.” They combined at the front of the walkway into the crowd on the six-minute mid-show instrumental “Switch 625.”
But the crowd even bought into the drummy, chanty “Rocket,” “Hysteria” and the good-and-intentional 1984 minor hit “Bringin’ on the Heartbreak,” which Campbell’s guitar helped elevate. And they cheered the show’s “borrowed” song – a cover of David Essex’s “Rock On.”
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