People have written that I coined this word "retromania", but that's not the case.

I've seen vintage clothes boutiques and retro bric-a-bric shops with  the name
Retromania.

There is also a Def Leppard bootleg that came out in 2010 called Retromania, what looks like a collection of rarities and alternate takes, the title obviously a play on Pyromania. (The band also officially released a rarities/B-sides collection in 1993 called Retro Active).

So the word has been floating around for a while. However I did recently discover, when going through some old pieces of mine, that I wrote a piece in the early Nineties whose working title was "Retromania" (it ended up being printed, by the Guardian, under another headline). But even then I think I was just picking up on a word that was in the air. As coinages go, it's a pretty obvious, occurs-to-many-people-independently type word.

But in other Def Leppard news, I learn (via Marathonpacks) that the group are doing a Gang of Four/Return the Gift and are recording forgeries of old hits like "Pour Some Sugar On Me" and "Rock of Ages", in order to get back at the Universal Music Group, who own their catalogue. Full story at Billboard.

Joe Elliott explained that the dispute is over proper compensation for digital rights (which has resulted in a deadlock where none of Leppard's studio albums are currently available as downloads)

"When you're at loggerheads with an ex-record label who...is not prepared to pay you a fair amount of money and we have the right to say, 'Well, you're not doing it,' that's the way it's going to be. Our contract is such that they can't do anything with our music without our permission, not a thing. So we just sent them a letter saying, 'No matter what you want, you are going to get "no" as an answer, so don't ask.' That's the way we've left it. We'll just replace our back catalog with brand new, exact same versions of what we did."

Shades of Borges!

 And it's challenging too:

"You just don't go in and say, 'Hey guys, let's record it,' and it's done in three minutes. We had to study those songs, I mean down to the umpteenth degree of detail, and make complete forgeries of them. Time-wise it probably took as long to do as the originals, but because of the technology it actually got done quicker as we got going. But trying to find all those sounds...like where am I gonna find a 22-year-old voice? I had to sing myself into a certain throat shape to be able to sing that way again. It was really hard work, but it was challenging, and we did have a good laugh over it here and there."

But that is not the limit of Leppard's retro action"

"Elliott... is also working on a second album of Mott The Hoople-related covers with the Down 'n' Outz, his side-band project with members of the Quireboys that he expects to release in 2013."

A second album of Mott covers?!

I knew Leppard were obsessed with glam 'n ' glitter

They did this rather decent and intelligent version of David Essex's "Rock On" a while ago