The article started innocently enough, "Def Leppard kicked off the release of its new album, 'Songs From The Sparkle Lounge', yesterday (Tuesday, April 29) with a couple of high-profile television appearances on ABC's 'Dancing With The Stars' and 'The Ellen DeGeneres Show'." The site included YouTube videos of the performances. That's when the trouble started. The readers didn't ask why Def Leppard would play 20-year-old songs to showcase a new album, instead they voiced their suspicion that the band had "performed" to a CD track on "Dancing with the Stars." But it was the real live performance on Ellen that elicited the strongest responses.
Pukeman44 wrote, "My mom put on Dancing With The Stars when Def Leppard performed, and there was no doubt in my mind that was the CD version of Pour Some Sugar On Me being played, and not the band playing it live. LOSERS!" Then bagofsoup said, "Hard to decide which is more pathetic: Miming to a 20-year old recording with the solid gold dancers parading about, or that god-awful live performance of Hysteria." zeets succinctly added, "I'd say at this point ellen has more balls than def leppard".
Not to be apologist for the band, but a couple of things to keep in mind here. The first is that a lot of TV programs force musical guests to lip-sync. Actually another band from the NWOBHM movement made a mockery of the practice, when they were asked to do it on a TV show the members swapped instruments during the "play back" of the song.
As for how bad Joe sounds in the live performance, and he does sound pretty bad, he did just cancel a string of shows because of an illness that caused him to lose his voice. Whether that was the cause or not we'll have to see during their next TV appearance after he's had time to recover properly.
Witness the videos for yourself to draw your own conclusions.
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