I first talked to Phil Collen about Man-Raze two years ago. He was experimenting with new sounds and new songs with a new band. The new trio consisted of Collen, Sex Pistols drummer Paul Cook and Collen’s former Sunset Strip glam band Girl band mate Simon Laffy. While it took a couple of years for the band to find time to write and record, Man-Raze has finally released their first album on VH Classic Records. The music is a pure mix of Def Leppard harmonies, Sex Pistols punk and West Coast glam. While this may seem odd on paper, it works in the real world. The music is unique and the musicianship outstanding.

Collen sings on the album and he has an amazing voice. He is quick to point out that while he remains in Def Leppard, Man-Raze is the real deal. This is a band and not a solo project. The band energy that comes off the CD proves that all three men are legit and totally committed to making something fresh and real with Man-Raze.

Read on to learn how Phil came to form the band and what Man-Raze has planned for the future. We also discuss Def Leppard’s new album The Sparkle Lounge and how the band wrote a song with Tim McGraw in the corridor backstage at the Hollywood Bowl.

Phil: We didn’t want to go with a standard record label as they are a dying breed. What they offer has always been sort of a rip-off. They are bit more up to date with stuff but they still have an outlet so it seemed perfect to us.

Phil: As you know, we worked at this for years and when we finally recorded it we found that it had its own sound. When we were in the studio it just popped and it was its own entity.

Phil: As soon as Simon and I started talking we knew that Paul [Cook] was the perfect person to play drums for us. I saw Paul in the street in London. It was a bit weird, actually as we had just mentioned it. We spoke to him and we started rehearsing and all of our influences just came out.

Phil: My dad was in the hospital and I was coming back from seeing him. Simon and I just had a couple of songs at the time. We were talking and we thought Paul would be perfect because we were all into the same stuff growing up. We all loved reggae and punk and different kinds of roots music. It was a very much a London kind of thing when we were kids. When we started playing together it felt very natural.

IPhil: I had spoken to Paul and when I was in London I would occasionally bump into him. I went and saw the Pistols play a few years ago and we all knew each other from just being in a band. Simon’s girlfriend knew Paul’s wife. It was very much one of those things.

Phil: I know Sid wasn’t the best bass player in the world but the guy they have now is great. I saw them a few months ago in a little club in LA and it was really cool. Steve Jones had the best guitar sound I have ever heard.

Phil: We are talking about September. The majority of the dates look like they will be on the Coasts – mostly on the East Coast but we have a few dates on the West Coast as well. Leppard and the Pistols both have a month off then.

Phil: No, not really. We have done stuff before. Joe and I did a tour of Japan and England with the Cybernauts. This really is not a solo thing; it is a band. These are songs that we could never do in Def Leppard.

Phil: Yeah, we are going to play some Pistols. We did a thing in Burbank, California a few months ago that was like a documentary by an English film maker – I think it is going to be on VH1. It was a live gig in this sound stage. We were doing versions of the songs so we are going to do that again. We change some of the songs here and there and it is really cool.

Phil: It is so much fun. People ask me where I am going to get the energy to do this. You can only sit on the beach for so long – don’t get me wrong because I love doing that too – but after a while you just start dying to record and tour.

Phil: We were in the band Girl, which was twenty-five years ago; that is half my life. We always remained in contact. When we were in Girl we never wrote together but in Man-Raze we did and it was really, really cool. Girl was a different dynamic and we just never wrote together. When we started to this time then we opened up the flood gates.

Phil: Joe had called me a few years earlier because they were having problems with Pete [Willis]. Joe asked me if I could just come out and help them out because things were not happening with Pete. I told them I would but it ended up sort of smoothing over so I didn’t go. A few years later, on the High "N Dry tour, actually they had just started Pyromania – I don’t think the backing tracks were even done yet but all of the songs were written. Joe said, "Do you want to come down and play some guitar solos?" It went from there. I wasn’t actually asked to join the band. I played some solos and then I played some more guitar and then I sang some vocals.

Phil: Yeah but it was grinding to a halt. We had lost our manager and our label, Jet Records that had Ozzy and ELO on them. They decided to go somewhere else and it ground to a halt. Without a label and a manager it just fell to pieces. The timing for Leppard couldn’t have been better.

Phil: He said, "Go for it. We have come to the end of our cycle." It was a normal thing. We had worked really hard and everything kind of disintegrated.

Phil: My old girlfriend in London knew Simon. We all hung out in a big group together in London. She told me that I should check out some of Simon’s songs. I didn’t even know he was writing any songs. He was really getting into deejaying and mixing songs. Again, there is a whole different dynamic there that I didn’t know about. Our writing sessions were very open-minded. Paul is a great drummer but he is also a great dub drummer and he loves reggae. Three of my cousins are married to Jamaican guys and you would always hear that music coming down the hall. With Simon, Paul and me then all of this stuff all started coming together.

Phil: Originally I wanted to call it The Fay Rays but they told me it was a bit camp. They thought it was a little effeminate. Someone said, "How about Man Ray?" I told them that we couldn’t use that because he is an artist and that is his name. So we called it Man-Raze as it is a mix between Man Ray and Fay Ray. Paul came up with calling the album Surreal and since Man Ray was a surrealist it fit in perfect.

Phil: They have their own TV station. A lot of people go on there and they also go online. They have some plans and they are pushing it. In July they are supposed to give it a big push. We are going to do some acoustic things around the country on radio stations and come September we will be doing gigs.

Phil: This is really a band. It is not my solo project by any means. We feel there is a need for something a little bit different. We feel that there is a need for a band who can bridge the gap between rock music and alternative music. There are very few bands that can actually straddle that successfully. The Police and U2 have done that. The Foo Fighters are doing it now. We felt there was a need for powerful rock music with punk energy. Lyrically, the songs also follow that. We have only just started and we are still developing our sound. We have half of the second album already recorded. There were a couple of songs that we felt were too commercial to put on the first record.

Jeb: We first talked about this band over two years ago. It has been fun to watch this unfold.

Phil: I am thrilled. Paul was saying that instead of just talking about the old Pistols stuff, smashing televisions and talking about Syd dying he now has something new to talk about. We are really excited. We have live music that we have recorded as well. Two years ago we did an acoustic gig that I had forgotten about until I found a clip of it. Paul was playing a skiffle beat on a cardboard box while he was sitting on a couch and it sounded amazing. We played a Talking Head’s song – actually it’s an Al Green song, "Take Me to the River" and we had a great time playing it.

Phil: People ask me all the time what it is I want to achieve with Def Leppard because we have done it all. Last night we played in Estonia, which is on the Russian side. The town is smoking. There were tons of fifteen and sixteen year-old kids singing our songs. Def Leppard has always wanted to break to the masses. We feel that we have something to share. People ask me if we ever get bored and I tell them no way. We have a brand new record and our audiences are amazing. To me, that is where we always wanted to be. We are playing Albania, Turkey and Greece and that is very exciting. There are always new conquests to be had and new places to play. We have an amazing catalog that we carry with us. The most important thing for us is to break new music and that is the hardest thing to do so we have a lot of ambition.

Phil: Rick Allen’s brother is Tim’s tour manager. For years Tim has been telling him that he would love to write a song with us. Knowing this, I told Tim that I had an idea. I saw him when we played at the Hollywood Bowl. I sang him his part and then Joe came in and said, "What if we did this?" I had just met Tim and he we are in Hollywood, standing in the corridor with all these actors and musicians around us and we are just standing there. I played him the chorus and I told him that was the payoff. He looked at me and said, "I’ve got a title." In about ninety seconds the format of the song was written. Over the next year we recorded the basic track. We went to Nashville and we put his vocal on it. It was a very natural thing. The worst thing to do is to stop a natural flow of enthusiasm. I don’t think we could do a country song but we can do a bluesy sort of Stones thing.

Phil: The interesting thing is that we all came in with three songs each. Instead of sitting down as a band and writing we all came with our own songs. You can tell the Viv songs and the Joe songs and the Phil songs. The songs are not disjointed but that is why you have the different kinds of songs and the different approaches. Normally we have a committee and we sit and discuss the album. We had not done this since we did the Slang album. We just showed up with our songs and we recorded it.

Phil: Thank you. Slang was very much on or off. We were trying to avoid the big guitar thing. It was the time period, really. The grunge thing was happening and people didn’t want to hear lead guitars. On this album we said, "Me and Viv and play the shit out of a guitar so let’s just stick it in there. And that is what we did.

Phil: That one really deserves a big cover. It was really funny how that came about. I gave the guy who did the cover a brief description of what I wanted him to come up with. I told him three or four album covers I loved. There was Led Zeppelin II, Sargent Peppers by the Beatles, Live at Drury Lane by Monty Python and a Fall Out Boy album that has a stage on it. I said, "We want to have a stage but instead of looking at the stage we wanted the cover to be looking out at the audience. We also wanted to make the audience disjointed." Two days before the deadline – we had Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and others on the cover – they said that we couldn’t use Elvis unless we paid a lot of money. See what I meant earlier about big record companies? We told the guy who did that to pull out the famous people and put family members, friends and the band in there. It was a bit of a compromise and it was thrown together at the last second.