Three days before Def Leppard headlined Sheffield United's Bramall Lane to 44,000 people, the same five-piece walked onto a stage barely wider than Rick Allen's kit at The Leadmill, plugged in at full volume, and opened with a Sweet cover. There was no acoustic reinterpretation. There was no string section. There was a 900-capacity Victorian flour mill on Leadmill Road, 850 fans pressed against the barrier, a city worth of context, and a back catalogue stretched across an hour of full-electric club rock.
That hour, captured on tape and film, is what Mercury Studios released on 11 October 2024 as One Night Only: Live at The Leadmill, Sheffield, May 19, 2023. It is the fourth official Def Leppard live album in thirteen years, and on paper it should feel surplus to requirements. It does not. The room, the setlist and the stakes pull it clear of the pack.
Riffology Score: 88/100
A short, rare, properly hot Def Leppard live record from the smallest UK stage they have played in 35 years, with a setlist that earns its existence by digging out Switch 625, Mirror, Mirror and the 1979 debut single Wasted. The five-camera Blu-ray sweetens the deal and the audio mix is honest about how loud a 900-cap room sounds when Joe Elliott is in it.
The Verdict
If you only own one Def Leppard live album it should still be In the Round In Your Face, recorded in 1988 at the Tacoma Dome and reissued half a dozen times since. If you own two, the second should be this. Mirrorball from 2011 is a fine arena document but its 22-track sweep covers ground anyone with the studio albums already has on tape. One Night Only instead does what only the band could do on this single night: a short, deliberately spiky set with no Animal, no Let's Get Rocked, no Love Bites, four cuts from High 'n' Dry, two from Diamond Star Halos, the title track from Slang and an encore that closes the loop on the band's entire recorded career by going back to its first 45.
Album Facts
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Artist | Def Leppard |
| Album | One Night Only: Live at The Leadmill, Sheffield, May 19, 2023 |
| Recorded | 19 May 2023, The Leadmill, Sheffield |
| Released | 11 October 2024 (retail); 20 April 2024 (RSD 2LP silver vinyl) |
| Label | Mercury Studios (Universal Music Group) |
| Producer | Def Leppard |
| Genre | Hard rock, glam metal, live album |
| Tracks | 13 |
| Total runtime | Approximately 63 minutes |
| Formats | CD, DVD+CD, Blu-ray+CD, 2LP orange vinyl, digital audio, digital video |
| Venue capacity | 900 (approximately 850 attended) |
| Notable charts | Did not chart heavily; aimed at the catalogue collector and the documentary buyer |
| Riffology Score | 88/100 |
Why The Leadmill, Why Now
Def Leppard could have warmed up the European leg of their 2023 World Tour anywhere. They could have run the production at a midweek soundcheck at Bramall Lane. They could have done what most stadium bands do, which is hide a tighten-the-cogs rehearsal inside a small theatre on the way to the real money. Instead they took the offer of a one-night benefit at the place every Sheffield teenager in the late 1970s wanted to play and could not get arrested at.
The pull was equal parts geography and politics. The Leadmill had been served with an eviction notice in March 2022 by its landlord, the London-based Electric Group, and a year on the dispute was still live. Sheffield's five Labour MPs had written to the Secretary of State. Billy Bragg, Kaiser Chiefs, Reverend and the Makers and the Manic Street Preachers had all publicly weighed in. Def Leppard added themselves to that letter by handing over the night's gate to the Music Venue Trust.
"Sheffield is in the very DNA of this band. We are ecstatic to be starting the European leg of our world tour at home at Bramall Lane. When thinking of a warm-up, it made sense to do a special set at The Leadmill, in the city where it all started. We know there are a lot of small music venues struggling across the UK, so we wanted to give back to what gave to us."
Joe Elliott, pre-show statement to Press Association, 19 May 2023
The Leadmill: A Brief History
The Leadmill opened on Leadmill Road in 1980 in a converted Victorian flour mill, on the site of the old Esquire club where Jimi Hendrix and Small Faces had played in the 1960s. For its first two years it could not legally sell alcohol, so it ran as a community arts centre with a brief to educate the young and unemployed of South Yorkshire. Jarvis Cocker directed a pantomime there in 1982. Prince Charles, of all people, dropped in for a visit in 1988 and called it "a building well restored".
From the late 1980s onward the venue became the Sheffield benchmark. Pulp, the Arctic Monkeys (who sold the room out faster than any other band on record in 2005), Oasis, the Stone Roses, Coldplay and Muse all played early shows there. The capacity rose to 900 for the main room and 250 for the secondary stage. The bar earned a music heritage plaque from PRS for Music in 2015, unveiled by Pulp on a Steve Lamacq BBC 6 Music broadcast from inside the building. Three NME readers' polls named it favourite live music venue in the United Kingdom.
One band conspicuously absent from the list of acts who had played there: Def Leppard. By the time the Leadmill found its feet as a rock venue in the mid-1980s, the band who formed in nearby Mosborough in 1976 were already on the wrong side of stadium-only.
The Eviction and the Music Venue Trust
The closure threat that hung over the May 2023 show was specific and legal, not vague and sentimental. Electric Group had bought the freehold of the building in 2017, claiming at the time that the alternative was redevelopment into flats. By March 2022 the relationship between landlord and tenant had collapsed entirely. Electric Group served notice that they intended to operate a refurbished music venue on the site themselves. The Leadmill management argued that the brand name and the goodwill could not be transferred with the building, and that without them the site was just an empty box.
Proceeds from the Def Leppard gig went to the Music Venue Trust, the charity that runs the Save Our Venues campaign across the United Kingdom. The campaign succeeded in keeping The Leadmill open through 2023 and 2024, but the eviction was eventually enforced. The venue ceased operating on 27 June 2025, with Miles Kane playing the last gig and "My Way" by Frank Sinatra spinning as the closing record. By the time you read this the doors are shut. The album is the audio document of a venue that, at the time of recording, had two years left on the clock and did not know it.
"The fact that a local act that has gone on to play stadiums across the world is willing to come back home and support us in a time of need, as well as thousands of other integral grassroots venues across the UK, speaks volumes of their character."
Ben Hartley, live promoter for The Leadmill, quoted by Press Association, 19 May 2023
Def Leppard in 2023
It is easy to forget how active the late-period Def Leppard catalogue was in 2023. The band had released Diamond Star Halos, their twelfth studio album, in May 2022 to their best UK chart placing in two decades. They had then spent the back end of 2022 co-headlining stadiums across North and South America with Motley Crue on The World Tour. The same lineup landed back on UK soil in May 2023 with two of those new songs already proven on stage in front of 50,000-capacity rooms. The day of the Leadmill gig, 19 May 2023, was also the release date of Drastic Symphonies, their full collaboration with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. A busier band than the calendar usually shows.
The European leg of The World Tour with Motley Crue opened at Bramall Lane on Monday 22 May, three days after The Leadmill. Wembley Stadium followed on 1 July. Marlay Park in Dublin (Joe Elliott's adopted home city) hosted the same co-headline bill on 4 July. The Leadmill was, in the most literal sense, a warm-up for stadiums.
The Lineup On Stage
The band on the record is the band Def Leppard have been since April 1992: Joe Elliott on vocals, Phil Collen and Vivian Campbell on guitars, Rick Savage on bass and Rick Allen on drums. Campbell took the second guitar chair after the death of Steve Clark in January 1991. The configuration has now lasted longer than the entire classic era. Allen, the one-armed drummer who returned to the band fifteen months after losing his left arm in a New Year's Eve 1984 car crash on the A57 outside Sheffield, was playing roughly a mile from where he learned the kit. None of that needs to be said on stage. It says itself.
| Role | Player | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Lead vocals | Joe Elliott | Born Sheffield, 1959; founder |
| Guitar, backing vocals | Phil Collen | Joined 1982 ahead of [Pyromania](/posts/the-making-of-pyromania-by-def-leppard/) |
| Guitar, backing vocals | Vivian Campbell | Joined April 1992; ex-Dio, ex-[Whitesnake](/posts/the-making-of-whitesnake-by-whitesnake/) |
| Bass, backing vocals | Rick Savage | Founder, Sheffield 1976 |
| Drums | Rick Allen | Joined 1978 aged 15; first hometown show in 35 years |
| Production | ||
| Producers | Def Leppard | Band self-produced the live audio mix |
| Label | Mercury Studios (UMG) | Same Universal stable as the studio catalogue |
The Setlist In Full
Thirteen tracks. No interval, no ten-minute drum solo, no acoustic mid-set sit-down. The setlist is what makes this record. Look at the album-of-origin column and you can see the band deliberately reaching past the singles for a room that bought tickets the same morning they went on sale.
| # | Title | From | Length | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Action | Yeah! (2006) | 3:51 | The Sweet cover, opener from their 1975 single |
| 2 | Fire It Up | Diamond Star Halos (2022) | 3:53 | One of two new-era cuts in the set |
| 3 | Let It Go | High 'n' Dry (1981) | 4:43 | First of four songs from the second album |
| 4 | Too Late for Love | Pyromania (1983) | 4:30 | Crowd backing-vocal moment |
| 5 | Excitable | Hysteria (1987) | 4:21 | Rarely played live since the late 1980s |
| 6 | Mirror, Mirror (Look Into My Eyes) | High 'n' Dry (1981) | 4:18 | Setlist outlier; not in the stadium show |
| 7 | Slang | Slang (1996) | 4:35 | The 1990s era's lone representative |
| 8 | Kick | Diamond Star Halos (2022) | 3:30 | The other new song |
| 9 | Bringin' On The Heartbreak | High 'n' Dry (1981) | 4:43 | 1981 ballad rebuilt with twin Collen and Campbell leads |
| 10 | Switch 625 | High 'n' Dry (1981) | 3:00 | Steve Clark instrumental, segued from Heartbreak |
| 11 | Hysteria | Hysteria (1987) | 5:50 | First of the back-to-back stadium hits |
| 12 | Pour Some Sugar On Me | Hysteria (1987) | 4:25 | Set closer proper |
| 13 | Wasted | On Through the Night (1980) | 3:55 | Encore. Their 1979 debut single |
The omissions are as deliberate as the inclusions. There is no Animal, no Love Bites, no Let's Get Rocked, no Rocket, no Photograph, no Rock of Ages. A casual stadium fan handed a ticket would have left missing half the radio set. The room, by all accounts, did not.
The Sound and the Mix
The live audio is sympathetic to the venue. The kick drum has its room sound rather than the squashed-and-stadium-thudded version you get on Mirrorball. Rick Savage's bass sits noticeably higher in the mix than on a typical Def Leppard arena tape, which suits a club night. The two guitars are panned hard but not so hard that the unison parts thin out, and the backing vocals (the band's longstanding production fingerprint going back to Hysteria) are present without smothering Joe Elliott's lead. The Blu-ray pulls the room sound up a notch further; the CD master is slightly more controlled.
The Blu-ray, in particular, repays the extra outlay. The camera direction (five cameras, all positioned for a 900-capacity room rather than a stadium) catches Campbell and Collen at swap-the-lead arm's length, and Rick Allen straight on. There is no edit-suite trickery dressing up an empty back of the room, because there is no back of the room. The wide shot fits everyone in.
The Opening Salvo: Action, Fire It Up, Let It Go
Action as an opener is a clever piece of crowd management. The Sweet's 1975 single is a song Sheffield rock pubs played to death in the late 1970s, so it doubles as both a Def Leppard live staple of recent years and a knowing wink at exactly the kind of room they were standing in. Fire It Up follows without a beat. Let It Go, dropped in at slot three, signals where the night is heading: this is going to be a High 'n' Dry evening as much as a Hysteria one. The crowd response on the recording leaves no doubt that the trade was understood and accepted.
Going Deep: Too Late For Love, Excitable, Mirror Mirror
Too Late for Love is where the room takes the song off the band. Joe Elliott steps off the mic for the chorus and the 850 sing it back at him; the recording catches it well, the Leadmill ceiling acting as the natural compressor it was never meant to be. Excitable, an album cut from Hysteria that has barely been on a Def Leppard setlist since 1989, follows. The version here is harder and a touch faster than the studio take. The biggest surprise is Mirror, Mirror (Look Into My Eyes), the second-side High 'n' Dry ballad that the band rarely if ever play in their stadium show. In a club it works; in a stadium it would die. That is the whole point of the night, captured in one song selection.
The Slang Curveball and Switch 625
Then comes the strangest sequencing decision: Slang, from the 1996 album of the same name, parachuted into a set otherwise pitched between 1981 and 1987. The Slang era is the only stretch of Def Leppard's career the average classic-rock fan has never fully forgiven, and yet here it sits, between Mirror, Mirror and Kick, sounding louder and more aggressive than it ever did on the studio album. Phil Collen has talked publicly for years about his fondness for that record. This is him making the case in real time.
The second half's headline is the segue out of Bringin' On The Heartbreak into Switch 625, the way the two run together on the High 'n' Dry vinyl. Switch 625 was Steve Clark's instrumental, an unhurried climb of paired-guitar harmonies that asks Campbell and Collen to play as Steve and Phil rather than as Vivian and Phil. They do. It is the most quietly emotional sequence on the album, and the most obviously a Sheffield gesture. Not many stadium audiences ever get to hear Switch 625.
Hysteria In a Club
Hysteria, the song, sounds bigger in a 900-cap room than it does in a 40,000-cap field. That is partly the closed ceiling, partly the proximity of the crowd's vocal on the chorus, partly Phil Collen audibly enjoying being able to point a Jackson at a wall rather than a sea. The guitar harmonics that open the track ring out longer than they get to on stage at Wembley. Whatever the engineering trick, the recording catches it; this is one of the most three-dimensional renditions of Hysteria the band have ever released.
Pour Some Sugar On Me, Reclaimed
The set proper closes with the song that needs no introduction in any room on earth. The interesting thing about the Leadmill version is how Def Leppard treat it: not as an obligation but as a chance to play it again with elbows. The intro is slightly extended, the breakdown a little longer. The crowd takes the second verse off Elliott in the same way they took the chorus of Too Late for Love. As a piece of live-album sequencing it earns its place; the band stop short of using it as the final word.
Encore: Wasted
Wasted, the band's 1979 debut single (originally on the self-released The Def Leppard E.P. and later on On Through the Night in 1980), is the encore. There is no other song on the album more loaded with venue context. The five-piece on stage in May 2023 was the band that Wasted's teenage authors had wanted to grow up into. Two of them (Elliott and Savage) actually wrote it. Hearing it played in a Sheffield club, on the same axis as where it had been demoed, with the encore chant of "we want more" from the crowd captured intact on the recording, lands in a way that no festival closer ever could. The Mercury Studios release uses it as the official video, and they were right to.
Rick Allen, Home
Rick Allen joined Def Leppard at fifteen years old in 1978, gigging round Sheffield working men's clubs as the youngest member of a band who could not yet legally buy the beer he was playing for. On 31 December 1984, on the A57 a short drive west of the city, he lost his left arm in a Corvette accident at Snake Pass. He returned to the kit in August 1986 with a custom electronic-and-acoustic hybrid built around foot triggers, and has played every Def Leppard tour since. The Leadmill is, in straight-line distance, perhaps a mile from where he grew up. The Blu-ray cameras spend more time on him than you might expect for a drummer in a stadium-rock band, and the band give him room. None of this is announced from the stage. It does not need to be.
Joe Elliott on a Small Stage
The Louder Sound review made the most quotable observation about Joe Elliott's performance: that he plays the gig like he is headlining Madison Square Garden. He is. There is no concession to the room in the vocal delivery, no scaled-down between-song patter, no winking acknowledgement that the audience is close enough to read the setlist on the floor. He addresses the crowd from the front of the kick drum the way he addresses 60,000 from the lip of a runway. The recording is honest about the strain that puts on a fifty-six year old voice; it also makes the case that the strain is what gets across.
"Joe Elliott plays it like he's headlining Madison Square Garden, and all the slick Leppard bells and whistles are in place for a showboating gig that includes everything from Too Late For Love, to Let It Go and even a punchy Mirror Mirror. A few weeks later, they'd be headlining Wembley Stadium as part of their tour proper, but this club show reminds us how and why they got there."
Philip Wilding, Classic Rock / Louder Sound, 10 October 2024
Format Breakdown
The Mercury Studios release is the most heavily formatted Def Leppard live document since their 1980s VHS days. The retail set arrived on 11 October 2024 across six formats, after a Record Store Day silver-vinyl pressing on 20 April 2024 that sold through almost immediately.
- CD: single disc, all 13 tracks, the cheapest way in
- DVD + CD: full video performance plus the audio disc
- Blu-ray + CD: the recommended format if your shelf has a player; the 1080p mix is the best version of the video, and the CD is identical to the standalone
- 2LP orange vinyl: limited retail pressing on coloured wax, four sides, with the same 13-track running order
- 2LP silver vinyl: Record Store Day 2024 exclusive, 20 April 2024, the original release
- Digital audio: streaming and download via the usual platforms
- Digital video: the full concert film as a video release
| Format | Release date | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| 2LP silver vinyl (RSD exclusive) | 20 April 2024 | 13-track set across four sides, RSD 2024 sticker |
| CD | 11 October 2024 | Audio only, gatefold sleeve |
| DVD + CD | 11 October 2024 | Concert film with stereo and surround mix, plus CD |
| Blu-ray + CD | 11 October 2024 | 1080p film, lossless audio, plus CD |
| 2LP orange vinyl | 11 October 2024 | Standard retail coloured vinyl pressing |
| Digital audio / video | 11 October 2024 | Streaming and download |
Compared to Mirrorball (2011)
Mirrorball was the last full Def Leppard live album proper before One Night Only, recorded across the 2011 American Mirrorball tour and released in June of that year with two studio bonus cuts. It runs 22 tracks across two discs and is engineered to sound like a Def Leppard arena gig should: tight, glossy, every Animal harmony in place, every Rocket sample on cue. As a comprehensive document of the band as a live act, it is the better record.
That comparison is also where One Night Only earns its keep. It is not trying to be Mirrorball. It is shorter, rawer, recorded in a tenth of the venue size, and built around exactly the songs Mirrorball did not bother with. If you cross-reference the two tracklists, only four songs overlap: Action, Too Late for Love, Pour Some Sugar On Me and Hysteria. Everything else on this album is, by Def Leppard live-record standards, a curio. That is the case for owning both, not one.
Critical Reception
Reviews of the 11 October 2024 retail release have skewed warm rather than rapturous, with the consensus that the songs and the room more than offset the slight redundancy of yet another Def Leppard live album. The Louder Sound and Classic Rock review by Philip Wilding noted that the rush to expand the RSD exclusive into a full multi-format release might bother fans who queued for the silver vinyl, but called it "a minor quibble" against "this blistering set of old and new material." MyGlobalmind's Adrian Hextall awarded the album 9 out of 10 and singled out Too Late For Love, with the audience acting as Def Leppard's backing choir, as the night's emotional centre.
"This 13-track release captures the night as well as it can. The 800 or so that were there on the night will remember a truly epic event, packed to the walls with fans singing along to every word of every song. If you didn't attend, then this is as close as you'll get."
Adrian Hextall, MyGlobalmind, 20 September 2024
Smaller specialist sites (Rockposer, Maximum Volume Music, Cryptic Rock, Rockwell Unscene) were broadly positive, with the most common reservation being the absence of a deeper-dive Blu-ray (no rehearsal footage, no documentary segment, no Joe Elliott walking around Sheffield as the credits roll). What is on the disc is the gig and only the gig, which on balance the reviewers found refreshing.
The 2023 World Tour Context
The Leadmill gig sits inside one of the busier years of Def Leppard's touring life. The World Tour with Motley Crue ran across 2022 and 2023, with the 2023 European leg launching at Bramall Lane on 22 May, three days after this recording. The bill also took in Glasgow, Sheffield, Dublin, London, Manchester, the Hellfest festival in France, and dates across Germany, Switzerland and Scandinavia. Alice Cooper opened many of the European shows. Tickets for the Leadmill came up via a separate quiet announcement; 850 sold out within the first hour they were available.
The European leg crowned itself at Wembley Stadium on 1 July 2023 in front of 60,000 people. That, four festival headlines later, was the song of the tour: a band who could fill Wembley with a Pour Some Sugar On Me singalong and, six weeks earlier, fit themselves into a 900-cap club for the same money.
The 2024 Summer Stadium Tour
By the time the live album landed in October 2024 the band were already deep into another touring year. The 2024 Summer Stadium Tour ran across North America from June to September with a heavyweight package bill:
- Def Leppard and Journey: co-headliners across all dates
- Steve Miller Band: direct support on the bulk of the run
- Cheap Trick: opener on the bulk of the run
- Heart: direct support on a smaller subset of dates after Steve Miller stepped back from his shows
The tour wrapped in Salt Lake City in early September 2024. By the time the Leadmill film hit shops the band were back to writing for what would become the next studio album cycle. One Night Only arrived almost as a bookmark for an era: the last hometown Def Leppard club gig the surviving five-piece will ever play in a room that no longer exists.
Things You Might Not Know
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| First-ever Leadmill show | Despite forming in Sheffield in 1976 and growing up in its pubs, this was Def Leppard's first ever performance at The Leadmill in the 43-year history of the venue. |
| Tickets sold out in an hour | The 850 available tickets were gone within sixty minutes of going on general sale, faster than the band's Bramall Lane stadium date that same week. |
| The opener was a Sweet cover | Action was originally a 1975 single by The Sweet; Def Leppard recorded it for the 2006 covers album Yeah! and have used it as a live opener for two decades. |
| Same day as Drastic Symphonies | 19 May 2023 was also the worldwide release date of Drastic Symphonies, the band's collaboration album with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. They did not play any of it on the night. |
| Three days before 44,000 | The Leadmill capacity was about 49 times smaller than the Bramall Lane crowd Def Leppard played to on 22 May 2023 with Motley Crue. |
| Proceeds to Music Venue Trust | All gate income from the gig was donated to the Music Venue Trust, the United Kingdom charity that runs the Save Our Venues campaign for grassroots clubs. |
| The Switch 625 segue | The unbroken segue from Bringin' On The Heartbreak into Switch 625 mirrors the running order of the 1981 High 'n' Dry album side, and is the same sequence Steve Clark designed before his death in 1991. |
| Wasted is older than half the room | Wasted was first released on the self-financed Def Leppard E.P. in November 1979, when the average age of the 2023 Leadmill audience was, statistically, not yet born. |
| The RSD silver pressing came first | Mercury Studios released the album as a 2LP silver vinyl exclusive for Record Store Day on 20 April 2024, almost six months before the multi-format retail release. |
| Five cameras, no edits | The Blu-ray was shot with five cameras for a single 60-minute set, an unusually high ratio for a club gig and a sign Mercury knew the value of what they were filming. |
| The Leadmill closed 25 months later | The venue ceased operating on 27 June 2025 after losing the eviction case. The last song played in the building was Frank Sinatra's My Way; the last live act was Miles Kane. |
| Rick Allen mile from home | The Leadmill on Leadmill Road sits within walking distance of the streets where Rick Allen grew up before joining the band aged fifteen in 1978. |
| The band own the venue history they never used | Def Leppard could have played The Leadmill at any point in 43 years but chose to wait until the venue was threatened with closure, turning a long-overdue first appearance into a political statement. |
Riffology Verdict
The case against another Def Leppard live album is obvious. They already have four. Two of those four (In the Round In Your Face and the 2018 Hysteria-in-full And There Will Be a Next Time) are exceptional. The shelf is full.
The case for One Night Only is the room and the setlist. It is the only Def Leppard live document recorded in a small space; it is the only one with Switch 625, Mirror, Mirror and Excitable; it is the only one anchored to a venue that no longer exists. The Blu-ray transfers the visual element of all that intact. At 13 tracks and just over an hour, it earns the right to sit alongside Mirrorball rather than under it.
It loses points for the absence of any bonus material; for being yet another Def Leppard live release in a busy decade for them; and for the slight feeling that the multi-format retail release in October 2024 took some of the romance off the original RSD exclusive. None of that overrides the basic facts of the record. 88 out of 100. The best Def Leppard live document since In the Round In Your Face, and a small archival monument to a club that, when this album was recorded, was still standing.
The Riffology Podcast
If you have made it this far you might also like the way we talk about records on the Riffology podcast. Def Leppard, Sheffield rock, the late-period live-album glut, Rick Allen's comeback, the Steve Clark legacy, the strange afterlife of Slang: all on the table over a pint. Find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music and every other platform that takes an RSS feed. New episodes weekly.
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