However, no one in that room seemed more excited about the tour than Poison frontman Bret Michaels. Michaels pumped his fist when Def Leppard’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction was mentioned and fanboyed over the idea of new Lep material. At the end, he started personally moving chairs so everyone could get a photo together. “Bret was saying to me a little while ago,” Sixx said, “[if] he wasn’t on the bill, he’d be going to the show.”

“I’m just telling you that it is going to be not just ‘The Stadium Tour,’ it is the party of the summer,” Michaels said.

“It’s six hours of Top 10 hits,” Dall added.

“If [the other bands] cut half their set, there’s still nothing but hits,” Michaels said.

Visibly absent from the conference was tour opener Joan Jett, whose name was repeatedly mentioned by the assembled artists, making it very clear that she’s an important, if not equal, part of this journey.

“You just put those four names on a piece of paper and look at ’em, whichever way ’round they look at it, it’s a big statement really,” Def Leppard leader Joe Elliott said. “And you know, the Eighties get mocked a lot. There is a lot of people that still think of the Eighties as a mockable decade, and we’re about to prove that it’s not. It’s last man standing to a point, maybe, but we have survived… You can sit and analyze it all you like, but at the end of the day, if the songs are still getting played on the radio, there’s a reason for that. It’s because they were good songs.”

And don’t think, like Crüe’s contract, that these tour dates are the final word. “There’s 22 stadium shows, so it’s pretty much most major territories. And in fairness it seems to be growing and there’s more interest before it’s even gone on sale,” Elliott said. “So it may extend one way or another, even in the next year.”