I’d assumed that I would spend my thirty-eighth birthday at home, watching England v. Switzerland, but I somehow ended up at a Def Leppard gig in Seoul. I still hoped to see the game, though. As I understood it, the time difference meant that if the match was broadcast live I could watch it first thing Saturday morning, eight hours before it actually took place.
The Leppards’ vocalist, Joe Elliott, put me right on that score. Tomorrow’s gig at Seoul’s Olympic Gymnasium—the eighth date in what will turn into an eighteen-month rockathon—would be over by ten; with any luck, Joe said, we could be back at the hotel by eleven, in time for kickoff.
We’d been talking in the lobby of the Sheraton. In the band’s early years, in the late 1970s, one might have written a piece called “On the Road with Def Leppard.” Now, forty million album sales down the line, it’s “In the Lobby with…”
Well, with quite a few people, actually: the Korean promoter and his assistant Kee-Lee, who was so gorgeous I could hardly bear to look at her, various record company people, and a Japanese law student called Nori: Def Leppard’s number-one fan in the world (he sees almost every gig), whose hair—this will prove significant later—was as long and black as Kee-Lee’s. The only people not there were the band. They’d gone to bed a long time ago, but, keeping a discreet distance, a group of fans were still hanging around in case the Leppards returned for a last-drink encore. It was not likely. Guitarist Phil Collen had already sunk enough to hospitalize most people. My God, did he pack it down him! Orange juice, ginseng juice, kiwi juice, melon juice, water juice. Anyone without his iron constitution would have OD’d on the vitamin rush.
Billy Joel famously remarked that a typical day in the life of a heavy-metal musician consisted of a round of golf and an AA meeting. Make that 240 Geoff Dyer kickboxing in Phil’s case, but this lust for the healthy life (in his late thirties now, he quit drinking nine years ago) represents one of two archetypal destinies for the long-haul rocker. The other is flat on your back with a lungful of puke, the route taken by guitarist Steve Clark, who died of a drugs and pills cocktail in 1980. He was replaced by Viv Campbell, who, on the basis of tonight’s performance, was still a full-on headbanger (two beers: before dinner).
I was tired from the flight but, back in my room, I couldn’t sleep. With the AC on it was too cold, with it off it was too hot. I did a couple of lines of cable porno but there wasn’t anything going down. Switched to a music channel and there were the boys doing a number from their new album Slang: a scaled-down record, bassist Rick Savage (Sav) would explain the next morning, less lavish, less bombastic than the canonical Adrenalize and Hysteria but still—to my ears—pretty lavastic. There are some hip sarangi samples courtesy of Ram Narayan, but world embellishments like this emphasize the core sound’s essential inadaptability, its inherent resistance to dilution or development. I thought about noting down that thought but by now I was too frazzled by tiredness to do anything but toss and turn the television off and on. What was stopping me from sleeping was the pillow: a bouncy, rubbery thing. I threw it on the floor, tore a sheet off the spare bed and tried to bundle that up under my head, but it wasn’t thick enough, so I scrunched up the eiderdown but that was too thick so I got all the towels from the bathroom but they were too hard, and so I threw them off as well. I may not have been trashing my hotel room, but I was certainly putting the towels and linen through their paces. It was five in the morning. I phoned reception but they had trouble understanding, so I put on my pajama jacket and marched down to the lobby.
“I can’t sleep,” I said to the night receptionist. “I’m a journalist, here on a very important assignment, and I can’t sleep because the pillows are too hard. I need a nice soft pillow, a soft fluffy one. This is meant to be a luxury hotel,” I yelled, “and you haven’t even got a nice fluffy pillow. Every single guest in this jumped-up refugee camp is tossing and turning, bending their pillows into shape, trying in vain to get a few minutes’ sleep, but they can’t, they can’t, because you haven’t got a decent fluffy PILLOW!” With that I turned on my heel and strode back to my room.
The next day I was totally exhausted. The band were in great shape, splitting up into various permutations for interviews with Korean journalists. In 1984 Def Leppard and the Anthropology of Supermodernity 241 Rick Allen, the drummer, crashed his car and severed his left arm at the shoulder. A TV crew were asking him about being disabled, about how he’d single-handedly got back into playing the drums. “Well, I prefer to say physically challenged,” he said, and it was nice to hear one of these oft-derided PC expressions come into its own. The crew kept asking Rick about his arm and I was very happy to eavesdrop because, obviously, I wanted to ask Rick about his arm but was reluctant to do so because that’s all anybody asks Rick about, his arm. “All the information I have for playing the drums is in my head,” he was saying. “It’s a question of channeling that knowledge in a different way. What I could do with my left hand I now do with my foot and so on. I see myself as whole, as having all my faculties. It’s frustrating but then I get over my frustration and find a new way to do it.” The interview came to an end a few moments later, which was a shame because I was hoping they might also have asked him about something else I didn’t feel up to asking myself, namely, the article I’d read in a magazine that claimed that, a few days previously, the police had been called to a hotel room where he’d been trying to strangle his wife.
After lunch we reconvened in the lobby, ready for the sound check at the Gymnasium. This promised to be a big moment for all of us: it involved leaving the hotel and afforded the opportunity to confirm my suspicion that we were not in Seoul at all. We had sat in a plane for twelve hours but for all I knew we had spent that time circling Heathrow before being taken to an Asian theme hotel on the outskirts of Hounslow. And even if we were physically in South Korea, we could have been anywhere. On the plane, appropriately enough, I’d been reading Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, in which Marc Augè; argues that more and more people spend more and more of their lives in non-places: international hotels (if you’re lucky, refugee camps if you’re not), planes, transit lounges, motorways. From this I extrapolated that rockers like the Leppards were not so much outriders as residents of supermodernity: they spent their lives in these non-places. They had houses scattered over several continents, but these were just relics of earlier, archaic modes of habitation: the rock star’s true home is actually a hotel lobby, a dressing room, a stadium, which, irrespective of whether it’s in Seoul or Hounslow, is actually nowhere.
There was a massive security presence in the lobby: men in black suits with earpieces, talking into their lapels, looking into the middle distance (the 242 Geoff Dyer lobby was easily big enough to accommodate this kind of scrutiny). Rick assumed that a high-ranking politician had turned up at the hotel, but no, the security was for us. Not, I suspect, to protect us from assault but to cushion us from the shock of stepping outside the hotel. For a few stunned moments we were out in the fresh (i.e., foul-smelling) air, then we were sealed in the bus, wading through traffic.
Ah, the traffic! If the greatness of a city is measured by the sprawling extent of its tower blocks, by its pollution, by its commitment to a policy of unrelieved congestion, then this place—wherever it was—could hold its own with the best of them. The ten-minute drive to the Olympic Gymnasium took about two days. The sheer immobility of the experience was thrilling, moving (paradoxically), almost religious.
The sightseeing segment of the day completed, we milled around in the dressing room. The usual crowd: lighting people, road crew, the lovely Kee-Lee (if I could just run my hands through that lovely shiny hair, I thought, brush it back over her ear and kiss her throat, I would die a happy man), and Nori. I forgot to mention earlier that Nori, the number-one Def Leppard fan, lacks a hand. Now this could be a coincidence, of course, but it was interesting that the number-one fan of a band famous for having a one-handed drummer should himself be one-handed. What happened? Did he cut it off and, so to speak, hand it to Rick as a token of his undying devotion?
Before I had a chance to find out, the Seoul wing of the Def Leppard fan club was shown into the dressing room. They came bearing gifts and had their photos taken with the band, who received them, as always, with exemplary mildly flirty friendliness. As the show was drawing near, all talk began to focus more seriously on the real business of the evening: getting back to the hotel and watching the football. So many of us had said that the game might be shown on Star Channel that this had now become an established fact.
Thirty minutes before showtime we hangers-on left the dressing room so that the band could move into their private pre-show preparations. Just before kickoff (musically speaking) I too moved into my final preparations, cramming toilet tissue into my ears while nine thousand fans prepared to pay their ecstatic devotions. The band hit the stage in a surge of light and volume. That’s the problem with rock shows like this: nothing that happens subsequently can quite live up to those opening moments when all the power Def Leppard and the Anthropology of Supermodernity 243 suddenly erupts and you are, emphatically, no longer waiting for something to begin.
Pretty soon, though, you are waiting for it to end. The pace varies, of course, and the big songs, those with the auto-ovational choruses—“ Rock of Ages,” “Rocket,” “Let’s Get Rocked”—come at the end, but the climax is recognizable as such, less because of some gathering pressure and momentum than because, by simple sequential determinism, it is followed by the encore. And while the band’s sound is, ostensibly, juggernaut-heavy, epic, there is—or so it seemed to my tissue-insulated ears—a hint of blandness about much of their material. And this, I suspect, is what accounts for their phenomenal success.
Everyone knows Def Leppard are one of the biggest rock acts in the world, but any non-devotees I asked had trouble summing up what was special about their music. In this respect Slang turns out to be an instructive title. According to J. E. Lighter in the Historical Dictionary of American Slang, “the proportion of slang actually created by identifiable individuals is minute”; slang, what’s more, “maintains a currency independent of its creator, the individual writer and speaker.” Def Leppard’s music, to translate this back into musical terms, has relatively little to do with the people who bring it into being: it’s rock-generic— and far from limiting the product’s appeal, this guarantees its longevity, its ongoing marketability.
Backstage, the crew swapped stories of technical catastrophes narrowly averted. Joe thought he had sung badly, but the audience had been great. Years ago the band would have been keen to go out and get loaded, but now the important thing was to get back for the football.
Except the football wasn’t on, so we all hung out in the hotel’s Skylight Lounge with its moonlit view over the nonspecific city. The Lepps had a couple of juices and went to bed, leaving us hangers-on with nothing to hang on to except our bottles. Once the band had gone to bed, though, everyone else could move up a few notches in the glamour hierarchy. The road crew told us about their exploits in the fleshpots of Manila. I bragged about all the non-places I had been. We ordered more drinks. There was talk of going to a disco. I was place-lagged, confused from snorting hard rock with one nostril and French theory with the other—and this, I think, is what accounts for the unfortunate incident that followed. Kee-Lee was sitting with her back to me. I studied her shadow-black hair and then moved my face toward that mane of dark hair, which smelled like no one in the world had ever smoked a cigarette. In a friendly, well-the- gig’s- over- and- it’s- our- last- night- in- town way, I touched her hair, stroked it, ran my fingers through it, tilted her head toward me, revealing a pair of outraged eyes.
“Jesus!” I said. “I’m sorry, Nori…”
1996