Def Leppard frontman Joe Elliott says he didn’t mean to chide AC/DC for moving on so quickly from frontman Brian Johnson as Johnson dealt with severe hearing damage; he was merely pointing out differences in the way two bands go about their business.
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Elliott says the comments he made this winter about AC/DC ditching Johnson for Guns N’ Roses frontman Axl Rose were “more of an observation,” not a criticism.
“I got asked about the Brian Johnson situation, and I just said, ‘Look, you know, we would have managed it differently. Angus has got to do whatever Angus has got to do.’ I think Axl Rose did a very good job with AC/DC,” Elliott told the Rolling Stone: Music Now podcast with Brian Hiatt. “Brian [Johnson’s] my friend, so of course I’m gonna go to bat for him. But the fact that he had a bit of hearing problem and they just decided like, ‘Well, okay, we’re just going to carry on without you then.’ And we stuck around for Rick Allen (laughs); it’s not the way we would have done things.”
This winter Elliott told the Life in the Stocks podcast that Def Leppard handles circumstances among its members differently than AC/DC.
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“I can’t speak for [Angus Young] and his team as to what their reasons were for doing what they did, but considering that we had a drummer lose an arm and we waited for him, the way that they dealt with it was not the way I would have done it,” Elliot said at the time. “Put it that way.”
Elliott added that “it’s not really AC/DC anymore, is it?”