Def Leppard - BBC Radio 2 Live in the Park, Hylands Park, Chelmsford, Britain, 9-7-2025

Here's the last of the six albums that I'm posting from the 2025 BBC Radio 2 Live in the Park Festival. For the second and final night of the festival, the headliner was Def Leppard. As a result, their set was significantly longer than most of the other sets from the festival.

I already posted another Def Leppard concert, their VH-1 Storytellers performance in 1999, which you can find here:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2024/09/def-leppard-vh-1-storytellers-vh-1.html

So I don't have a lot to say about them. Clearly, by 2025, their peak commercial era was far behind them. They haven't had a Gold studio album since 1999. But they've had the same line-up since 1992, and they show in this concert that they can still rock.

This music here is unreleased, and the sound quality is excellent. 

This album is an hour and 16 minutes. 

01 Rock, Rock [Till You Drop] (Def Leppard)
02 Rocket (Def Leppard)
03 talk (Def Leppard)
04 Let's Get Rocked (Def Leppard)
05 Foolin' (Def Leppard)
06 talk (Def Leppard)
07 Armageddon It (Def Leppard)
08 Animal (Def Leppard)
09 Love Bites (Def Leppard)
10 talk (Def Leppard)
11 Just like '73 (Def Leppard)
12 Bringin' on the Heartbreak (Def Leppard)
13 When Love and Hate Collide (Def Leppard)
14 talk (Def Leppard)
15 Rock of Ages (Def Leppard)
16 Photograph (Def Leppard)
17 Hysteria (Def Leppard)
18 Pour Some Sugar on Me (Def Leppard)
19 talk (Def Leppard) 

https://pixeldrain.com/u/zcJwPbMs

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/hr5uZI77jBuo08b/file

Frankly, by 2025, the band sounds a lot better than they look. So I figured this was a good occasion to show how large the crowd at the festival was. That's the band's lead singer Joe Elliott looking out over the crowd.

Def Leppard - VH-1 Storytellers, VH-1 Storytellers Studio, New York City, 7-26-1999

Here's another "VH-1 Storytellers" episode. This time, it's the hard rock band Def Leppard.

I just posted the Duran Duran Storytellers album a few minutes ago, and the fortunes of Def Leppard were quite similar to that band at this point in their career, in my opinion. Like Duran Duran, they were massively popular in the 1980s. Two of them albums from that decade sold over 10 million copies each in the U.S. alone. They've sold over 100 million albums worldwide overall. 

But while they had some success in the 1990s, particularly the early 1990s, they struggled with changing musical tastes, especially the rise of grunge over hard rock. The album they released at the time of this concert, "Euphoria," had the lowest sales of any of their albums so far, only going gold in the U.S. The band is still together as I write this in 2024, but they've had less success, with no more albums even going gold.

That said, their 1999 album "Euphoria" was seen as a return to form, as they went back to their original sound after struggling with new styles in an attempt to stay relevant. Three of the songs here, "Promises," "Demolition Man," and "Goodbye," are from that album. 

Weirdly, this episode is a rare case of not having only part of the first song included. So I didn't have to do any fixing for that. But the lead vocals were rather low in the mix, so I boosted them using the UVR5 audio editing program.

This album is 44 minutes long.

01 talk (Def Leppard)
02 Armageddon It (Def Leppard)
03 talk (Def Leppard)
04 Pour Some Sugar on Me (Def Leppard)
05 talk (Def Leppard)
06 Two Steps Behind (Def Leppard)
07 talk (Def Leppard)
08 Hysteria (Def Leppard)
09 talk (Def Leppard)
10 Promises (Def Leppard)
11 talk (Def Leppard)
12 Demolition Man (Def Leppard)
13 talk (Def Leppard)
14 Rock of Ages (Def Leppard)
15 talk (Def Leppard)
16 Goodbye (Def Leppard)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17167415/DEFLPPRD1999StrytllrsStrytllrsStdoNwYrkC__7-26-1999_atse.zip.html

alternate link:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/sRwakPeC

The cover photo is a screenshot I took from this exact concert. I picked this scene to show how the band performed semi-acoustic for some of the songs.

UPDATE: On September 26, 2024, I updated the image, sharpening it with the program Krea AI.