Saturday, July 07, 2012

Def Leppard clone themselves

Def Leppard have got the hump with Universal taking the lions' share - or, rather, the Leppard's share - of their royalties, and have recorded 'forgeries' of their old stuff:

The band's frontman Joe Elliott said to Billboard that the disagreement has led to the band deciding to phase out their recordings for Universal and replace them with a whole new collection of their songs, which they're calling 'forgeries'. "We'll just replace our back catalogue with brand new, exact same versions of what we did," he said.
There's a glorious philosophical conundrum here - are these now new originals? Are the cover versions? Could the 2012 studio version of Pour Some Sugar On Me be considered merely a later take from the original suspended 1987 session?

This is a different class of re-recording from, say, Kate Bush's director's cuts reworking of earlier albums, as the Lep (as they must never, ever be called) are trying to recreate the songs exactly as they were; it's closer to those soundalike albums ("sings the hits of") which unsuspecting parents would buy children to make Christmas mornings so disappointing in the 1970s.

It's not quite the unique event you might think; certainly, back in 1981 Flux Of Pink Indians launched their own Spiderleg Records with a cloned version of the '1970s Were Made In Hong Kong' ep they'd made for Stortbeat Records as The Epileptics a couple of years earlier. That was over a royalty dispute, too.

[Thanks to @jamesthegill for the tip]


1 comment:

frankosonic said...

Camper Van Beethoven did this exact same thing (for the same reasons)

They did a Greatest Hits, but did new clone recordings of the later stuff that was on Virgin.

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