Iron Maiden’s Adrian Smith has revealed that he was in line to take on axe-wielding duty in Def Leppard following the death of guitarist Steve Clark in 1991.
In a recent interview with EonMusic, Smith was asked whether he was “in contention” to replace Clark. Though he confirmed that he was in fact, almost earned his Def Leppard stripes, he was reluctant to give too many details away.
“I was, yeah. Yeah, I was.” he shared. “I want to write more books,” he said. “That might be in my next one! There’s a whole story about that.”
At the time, Smith had left Iron Maiden. The band were in the thick of working on their 1990 album No Prayer for the Dying. A record that Smith felt was a regression. Arguing that the stripped-down sound was a “step backward” from its ambitious predecessors Somewhere in Time and Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. Smiths taste for “bombastic production,” would’ve made him a natural fit with Iron Maiden.
“My playing, I like to think, I try and feel stuff, and I like the space to play in it, and that was probably one of the first songs I was able to do that,” he mused “A lot of the Maiden stuff up until then had been very fast and aggressive and heavy, but that actually allowed me a little bit of space to stretch out a bit. It was nice, you know. So you’ve got more scope in the writing then.”
Ultimately, the guitar duty was thrust upon Former Dio and Whitesnake member, Vivian Campbell. The band had cut their teeth playing with ex-Whitesnake member John Sykes, Adrian Smith and a kid named Huey Lucas from Birmingham.
“There was no formal audition with John and Adrian, they just came and played with us for a while. It was more about us getting a sense of what they were like as people,” Leppard singer Joe Elliott confirmed in an interview with Loudwire.
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“John could sing his ass off,” Elliott says. “And he wrote Still Of The Night for Whitesnake. Adrian I adore, and in the end it worked out well for him because he’s back in Maiden where he belongs. We also tried out a young unknown kid from Birmingham, Huey Lucas. Great player, but his voice wasn’t that strong. Vivian was always the number-one candidate. For us it wasn’t about how well you could play, it was more about how well you can sing. And more importantly, we’ve got to get on with this person.”
