On this day · 48 years ago · 1978
48 Years Ago Today: Def Leppard Plays Its First Ever Show for Five Pounds
Def Leppard's first-ever public show, a school dance in Sheffield on July 18, 1978, nearly stalled before it started when guitarist Steve Clark's Marshall amp was left on standby. A teacher paid the band five pounds out of his own pocket.
By Jaxon, Metal rhythm desk · Edited by Cadence ·
Def Leppard played its first public concert on July 18, 1978, at Westfield School in Sheffield, England, in front of roughly 50 to 150 students. The band, then Steve Clark, Pete Willis, Joe Elliott, Rick Savage, and drummer Tony Kenning, smuggled beer in via the bass drum case and was paid five pounds from a teacher's own pocket. Guitarist Steve Clark's opening power chord produced only silence, his Marshall amp had been left on standby, before the band restarted and closed with a cover of Thin Lizzy's Jailbreak.
A gig booked to keep the band together
Def Leppard's first-ever public concert almost didn't happen at all, and not for lack of a venue. By mid-1978 the band, formed from the wreckage of Pete Willis and Rick Savage's earlier group Atomic Mass, had been rehearsing for months at a Sheffield spot called the Spoon Factory without ever playing in front of an audience. Guitarist Steve Clark had seen enough. After watching UFO play Ipswich's Gaumont that July, he told singer Joe Elliott that if the band didn't book an actual show soon, he was quitting. Elliott turned to a local promoter nicknamed Bootleg Bill, who came through with a booking at Westfield School, a school in the Mosborough district of Sheffield, for the following Tuesday.
The band, then Elliott, Clark, Willis, bassist Rick Savage, and drummer Tony Kenning, had three days to rehearse. They hauled their gear, including a borrowed PA, across Sheffield in the backs of friends' parents' cars, and set up in a school auditorium with a classroom serving as their dressing room. To settle their nerves, they smuggled beer into the venue hidden inside Kenning's bass drum case.
Five pounds and a dead amp
The show, at 9pm on July 18, 1978, drew somewhere between 50 and 150 students depending on which band member is telling the story. What's consistent across every account is what happened next: guitarist Steve Clark walked to the front of the stage for the band's opening number, "World Beyond the Sky," threw a big Pete Townshend-style windmill into the opening chord, and got nothing. Silence. His Marshall amp had been left on standby after the band's backstage tuning session. The audience laughed. The band reset and started again.
Clark's tech troubles aside, the set held together: roughly 50 minutes, almost entirely original songs, a genuine rarity for a band playing its first-ever gig. The crowd didn't fully engage until the encore, a cover of Thin Lizzy's "Jailbreak," the one song in the set the schoolkids actually recognized. "We need to write more songs like this," the band reportedly told each other backstage afterward, a lesson that shaped the more hook-driven direction of their earliest records. Payment for the whole night came to five pounds, handed over by one of the supervising teachers out of his own pocket. Def Leppard went on to play more than 2,100 concerts across over 50 countries since that night, according to Def Leppard's tour history archive; Joe Elliott and Rick Savage are still touring in the band today, while Steve Clark, who stayed through the band's biggest-selling years, died in 1991.
Chasing that classic rock crunch
Whatever amp trouble Clark had that first night, Def Leppard's rhythm sound over the decades since has leaned on the same basic ingredients as most of their classic rock peers: a medium-gauge nickel set that holds up under palm-muted riffing.
Power Slinky 2220 (.011-.048)
Why this one: Not a claim about Def Leppard's own 1978 gauge, undocumented from that first show, but the classic-rock workhorse gauge a lot of hard rock rhythm players reach for once .010s start feeling thin.
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