DEF LEPPARD's JOE ELLIOTT Doesn't Believe Including Three Brand New Songs In 90-Minute Set Is Overindulgent

In a new interview with Brazil's 89 A Rádio Rock, DEF LEPPARD singer Joe Elliott was asked what kind of setlist fans can expect from the band's upcoming show in São Paulo in early March. He responded (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "Well, look, in this day and age, whatever I say to you, all you've gotta do is go online and type in 'Setlist.com' and it tells you everything that we've been doing.

"We're not gonna change the set around too much, because it's a different crowd every night. And this is the one thing that critics of that situation never really take into consideration.

"If we were [playing to] the same fifty thousand people every night, we would change the set more. But it's always different people," Joe explained. "And you drop one song and play another one, and somebody will come on and say, 'Oh, they didn't play 'Photograph',' or, 'They didn't play 'Foolin''. They played something else instead.' So we can please somebody, an armchair critic. We're not gonna go there.

"We're obviously gonna be playing songs that people wanna hear. This is what THE ROLLING STONES ostensibly do, or [Paul] McCartney, or GENESIS, or U2 — anybody who's been around for years. DEPECHE MODE, QUEEN…

"[Fans] don't come to be educated in stadiums; they come to be entertained. If you're gonna educate people, you play a small place and play your entire new record to the ones that really care. What we do is obviously do a bit of a mixture of everything.

"We have a fantastic opportunity, over the next two years, to be actively promoting our latest album, so we're obviously gonna do that," Elliott added. "When we started the tour in America, we actually were doing four new songs out of the 16 we played — so 25 percent of the set was new material. In a stadium, it's unheard of. After 10 shows, we re-looked at that and decided we might wanna put one more older song in, so we cut it back to three. But still, we were playing three new songs in a 90-minute set, which is, I think, a wonderful thing for us to do. It's not overindulgent so that the crowd are going, 'I don't know this,' because you surround new songs with ones that they are familiar with. So an audience will forgive you four minutes of a new song if they don't know it, but half the people down the front do know it.

"So, it's a kind of a fine line you have to walk to get the balance right. So that's exactly what we will do in Brazil — we will be playing songs that you know, [and] we will be playing songs that we want you to get to know. But not too many new ones, and a nice balance of our back catalog from second album onwards."

DEF LEPPARD's latest album, "Diamond Star Halos", sold 34,000 equivalent album units in the U.S. in its first week of release in May 2022 to land at position No. 10 on the Billboard 200 chart. It marked the band's eighth top 10 LP.

Of "Diamond Star Halos"' 34,000 units earned for the week, album sales comprised 32,000, SEA units comprised 2,000 (equaling 2.7 million on-demand official streams of the album’s songs) and TEA units comprised less than 500 units.

DEF LEPPARD's previous Top 10 albums included "Pyromania" (which peaked at No. 2 in 1983),"Hysteria" (No. 1 for six weeks in 1988),"Adrenalize" (No. 1 for five weeks in 1992),"Retro Active" (No. 9; 1983),"Rock Of Ages: The Definitive Collection" (No. 10; 2005),"Songs From The Sparkle Lounge" (No. 5; 2008) and "Def Leppard" (No. 10; 2015).

Last summer, DEF LEPPARD completed "The Stadium Tour" with MÖTLEY CRÜE and guests POISON and JOAN JETT & THE BLACKHEARTS. The 36-date trek was originally scheduled to take place in the summer of 2020 but ended up being pushed back to 2021, and then to 2022, due to the coronavirus crisis.