Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott Gives Update on Vivian Campbell’s Health

As Vivian Campbell undergoes stem-cell treatment to fight Hodgkin's lymphoma, his bandmates in Def Leppard have been in contact with him to get regular updates on his health. In a new interview, singer Joe Elliott says that he could be home in a few weeks.

"The latest that I'm aware of with Viv," he told Billboard. "They were harvesting stem cells from him and do whatever they do in a Petri dish with them, and then they were gonna carpet bomb him with chemo for a week and he was gonna be kept in the hospital...Then they're gonna put the stem cells back in and do whatever they do, wave the magic wand and say 'Abracadabra'...We were under the impression he would be in the hospital until Christmas, but the last email he sent me, which was about two weeks ago, said, 'It looks like I may be able to get out of here by mid-November.'"

Back in May, Campbell said that his lymphoma had returned after a six-month period of remission. To cover a few previously booked commitments, the band hired Trixter guitarist Steve Brown to take his place. Elliott is hoping that, once Campbell is back full-time, they will be able to go through the 15 or 16 songs they've written in 2014, with the hopes of getting a new album out at some point next year.

"I think psychologically the fact that we aren't signed to a label," he added. "There was no, 'Oh, they're gonna want a ballad. They're gonna want a hit single. They're gonna want this or that,' the usual thing I suppose every artist in the world goes through. We didn't have to think like that. This time we just wrote for ourselves, and all of a sudden we were just spewing out all this stuff. There was just a little more freedom to the way we've written these songs and the way we've approached recording them."