After Joe Elliott and Rick Allen shared their most memorable moments with Def Leppard, guitarist Vivian Campbell is revealing his, and it centers around a really big show the band took part in not long after he joined the band.
In a video posted to Instagram, Campbell says getting to perform with Def Leppard at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert for AIDS Awareness in 1993 sticks out for him, noting that while he had already played a club show with the band, it was his first really big gig with them.
“It was, I don’t know, 80-something thousand people in the stadium. It was broadcast live worldwide,” he said. “It was just wall to wall celebrities, Elton John came in to the dressing room to say hello to us, and I’m thinking, this never happened in Dio,” referring to the heavy metal band he played with in the ’80s.
Also making it special was that Queen‘s Brian May came out and performed with them.
“That was fantastic. I’d never met Brian before,” he said. “To be onstage, Wembley Stadium, Def Leppard, Brian May, I thought, ‘I could get used to this."”
“There’s been a lot of great moments in the 33 odd years since,” Campbell concluded, “but that one certainly stands out as being probably the biggest for me and certainly the first one for me with Def Leppard.”
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