“Do you wanna get rocked?” Joe Elliott asks, engaging 23,000 partisan fans with a mischievous glint in his eyes. It’s entirely rhetorical. Introducing Let’s Get Rocked, Def Leppard are so bone-shakingly loud that the football stadium’s hospitality staff are scrambling around to source more earplugs for their flummoxed VIP guests.
This Steel City rendezvous kicks off the European leg of the Sheffield band’s co-headline tour with Mötley Crüe. Leppard’s infamous Los Angeles glam metal tourmates retired eight years ago, having concocted an apparently legally binding agreement preventing them from touring beyond New Year’s Eve in 2015. 2019’s Netflix biopic The Dirt dragged them back in the public eye, and in true rock’n’roll panto fashion, they swiftly announced their return regardless.
