The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has announced its 2019 class of inductees. The artists who will enter the Cleveland institution are: Def Leppard, Radiohead, the Cure, Janet Jackson, Roxy Music, Stevie Nicks and the Zombies.
Earlier this week, it was announced that Def Leppard had also won the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame fan vote, with 547,647 votes.
In addition to Def Leppard’s current lineup—singer Joe Elliott, guitarists Phil Collen and Vivian Campbell, bassist Rick Savage and drummer Rick Allen—former guitarists Steve Clark, who passed away in 1991, and Pete Willis, who contributed songwriting and performed on the band’s first two albums, as well as much of 1983’s breakthrough Pyromania, will also be inducted.
Asked by Rolling Stone about Willis, Joe Elliott said: “I haven’t seen Pete in 14 years. I don’t know if he’s aware yet. We’re going to reach out to him over the next day or two now that the dust has settled and we’ll see if he wants to come.
Regarding whether the former guitarist might come up and play with Def Leppard, he continued: “I haven’t thought about that, but I don’t think we’ll be playing anything from that far back. But being there is part of the thing. Pete has kind of moved away from this kind of stuff, so he might just be a little reluctant to come along. The truth is that it’s obviously right that he gets in and he gets his statue, or however it works, but the success of the band was mostly to do with everyone else. I think that anybody would rightly say that the reason we got nominated is more likely to be because of the work we did after Pete left.”
Elliott also added that the band was happy to get the nod. "Now we can stop holding our breath and go, ‘Great! How wonderful to be in the same club as the Rolling Stones and the Beatles and the Who and Queen and etc., etc.,’ ” he said. “It’s nice. It’s a good club to be in.”
Other artists who have commented on their inductions include Zombies singer Colin Blunstone, who told Rolling Stone, “This is a career-defining [and] life-defining moment.”
Said Stevie Nicks—who will be the first woman to enter the Hall two times (she was inducted with Fleetwood Mac in 1998)—in a statement, “I have a lot to say about this, but I will save those words for later. For now I will just say, I have been in a band since 1968. To be recognized for my solo work makes me take a deep breath and smile. It’s a glorious feeling.”
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony will be held at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center on March 29, with an edited version set for broadcast at a later date on HBO and SiriusXM radio.
