Time & Perspective Quote by Vivian Campbell

There is a particular sting in the word "still" when you are a legacy rock band: it turns endurance into an accident, like you survived by mistake. Vivian Campbell is swatting at that casual condescension and replacing it with a different grievance: not that Def Leppard endured, but that they were made invisible.

The line works because it’s less about the band’s actual longevity than about who gets counted as present in culture. “People just don’t get to hear us” isn’t literal; Def Leppard has never been underground. It’s a comment on gatekeeping-by-rotation, the way radio formats, playlist editors, and nostalgic algorithms shrink a band’s living career down to a few museum-ready hits. If the public only encounters you through “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” you start to feel like a finished product, not an ongoing act.

Campbell’s subtext is also defensive pride. “Leppard’s been around this whole time” carries the weary insistence of someone who’s watched peers get lauded for “comebacks” while his band keeps working, touring, recording, and being treated like a period costume. The implied accusation lands on an industry that rewards the narrative of disappearance and return, because it’s easier to market than steady craft.

Context matters: Campbell joined after Def Leppard’s imperial phase, and the band’s post-’80s output lives in the shadow of an era when rock monopolized the mainstream. His complaint isn’t that audiences are wrong; it’s that the pipeline that decides what gets heard has trained them to ask the wrong question.