First things first: as we all know, Def Leppard guitarist Steve Clark did die last year and yes, drummer Rick Allen lost an arm in a car accident in 1984.

Now that the obligatory tragedies have been refered to-as they have been at considerably greater length in the multitudes of Lep articles that have surfaced this year-we can get down to business.

Just what keeps Def Leppard on top?

"It's certainly not momentum," says singer Joe Elliott. After all, the band takes an average of four years to put out an album.

"It's not constant touring," he notes. Their current U.S. tour is their first since 1989.

It's not spandex pants and a sex-symbol image, although more than one female fan would say the Leps have that as well. "Image only carries you for a little while," Elliott notes. "But you can have a band that consists of the ugliest people in the world and they can still win people over."

And, above all, it's not maturity-especially when the 30-year-old band members are still singing about breaking curfew.

So what keeps Def Leppard on top?

"In a nutshell, I think it just has to be a case where the songs are what really appeal to people," Elliott concludes after pondering the question for a minute. "That's why we spend so long in the studio trying to write good songs. That's what we're good at."

Good at? Try astounding, considering the band's sales record: its second album, High 'N' Dry, brought the band out of relative obscurity to sell two million albums. Since then, Lep has scored ever bigger. Seven million copies of Pyromania in 1983, followed by 15 million copies sold worldwide of Hysteria on 1987.

Not expecting to outdo that, the group has been satisfied to see their latest release Adrenlize spawn three hit singles (Let's Get Rocked, Make Love Like A Man, and Have You Ever Needed Someone So Bad) and do more than three million in sales in its 18 weeks on the chart.

"We're not stupid enough to think that we'll sell 10 million albums in the U.S. this time just because the last one did," Elliott explains. "Hysteria is still selling copies. This one has only had six months and yet, its sold more than five million around the world. And we know there are always people that will go in and pick it up a year from now."

Elliott does note however, that he is especially proud that Adrenalize debuted at number one on the album charts, beating out the two same-week releases by megastar Bruce Springsteen.

"We don't really worry about the charts, that much, though," he adds. "We just do our best in the studio and in concert and it's up to the people to say yes or no to us. It's not their job to buy our stuff-it's our job to convince them to buy it.

"It's nice to be back in front of an American audience," Elliott notes. "We didn't know what to expect because they are always different from other audiences. In a word: They're wild. The reaction has been really unbelievable, though."

Def Leppard began touring in May, first covering Europe and Australia. With those three months of road grime on his shoes, new guy Vivian Campbell has established himself as a card-carrying member of the Leps.

"Vivian is a fully-phrased member of the band now. It's not us and him," Elliott says. "It's not a wage thing, where he's a gun for hire. In fact, Vivian had thought he would never, ever, join a rock band again because it was always like that."

Campbell is best known for his work with Whitesnake-where he and Steve Vai were the axes-for-rent in singer David Coverdale's star vehicle. Before that, Campbell played with Dio and Sweet Savage. He left Lou Gramm's band, Shadow Kings, to join Def Leppard.

"When Vivian joined Dio, he thought it was going to be a democracy," Elliott explains. "It turned out to be a democracy where certain people had a lot more say than other people. In fact, he found out the lighting engineer was getting paid more than he was! And when he asked about it, he got fired. Then he joined Whitesnake and found himself in that mercenary position again."

The group spoke with Campbell about joining Def Leppard for more than a year, "but it was never totally serious," Elliott says. "By the time the tour came up, we had to get serious. He wanted to join us because he saw that we were the same guys who had been together 15 years. He liked that."

Elliott continues: "With Vivian, we're a band just like U2 is a band. We will be together and stand together through thick and thin, just like we did when our drummer lost his arm. It wasn't, 'Oh, see ya later' then. Otherwise, it doesn't work as a group or on stage."

Even non-metal fans acknowledge Campbell as a virtuoso, an almost magical player who has, at last, found a permanet home-"a family," as Elliott put it.

"When you're on the road, you're only on stage two hours a day. The rest of the time you're with this person on a bus or whatever, so actually, his personality is more important than his playing," Elliott says. "We would have settled for someone who was less a player if he fit into that family unit. But with Vivian, we were able to get both. We are all glad to have a great guitarist and backup singer with such a quick, Irish sense of humor.

"When we played our first gig, it was like Vivian had always been in the band-Def Leppard Mach II," Elliott notes. "It was very strange in fact, because I didn't expect it to be that comfortable, especially since we were replacing a guy who died, not one we fired and all hated or something. I would be very surprised if the fans didn't accept Vivian. I mean, what do they expect? We can't bring Steve back.

"Steve was loved very much by everyone in the band," Elliott says. "But we had the advantage of having 18 months since he died, so time had healed some of the wounds."

Elliott willingly talks about his late guitarist and friend but does note that he is more eager to talk about the future of the band than the past. "I don't mind talking about the tragedies but it gets boring after a time," he says. "It overplayed. It's just a good angle for a headline.

"We've been together for 15 years and we've had two major bad things happen to us. That's really not a bad ratio. Any band that has been together for 15 years might have members die. The longer we're together, the more chances for tragedies there might be. Any person, in the last 15 years, has probably had family members die, or a family member who was an alcoholic. But with us, because we're newsworthy, people just hover on it forever. Like with Rick, it's been eight years since he lost his arm and it's still being written about. We try to be polite about it, but I don't believe we are cursed."

Elliott jokes that maybe the press just plays on the band's misfortunes because "we're boring."

"There's nothing nasty to write about us," he says. "We don't go around setting fires to hotels or kicking beggars. "We're never late on stage and our albums are good quality. The fact that we are so reliable might make us seem pedestrian but we're far from it. When we go on stage, we can kick anybody's ass-we just do it at 9 p.m. on the dot."

When the Leps take the stage this time, it will once again be in the round. Elliott says, "We don't like playing at one end of an arena anymore. We've devised this great way of playing arenas with the intimacy of a theater by playing in the round. In fact, the guys in the back have the best view!"

The stage Def Lep is using takes eight hours to build and three hours to tear down, meaning a hefty crew and plenty of set-up time is needed for the tour. One of the group's few luxuries for the tour, Elloitt says, is a private plane to transport the band to each city.

"We only tour every four years so we want to make it an event, play it up," Elliott explains. "When we were young, we always dreamed of creating these legendary stages like Led Zeppelin and doing it up big and now we can, and we do. Plus, when you play a big city like Chicago or New York, it's especially important because people there have so many other choices of entertainment. On the same night, they could probably go see 200 other bands. We have to give them a reason to see Def Leppard."