In 2018, I missed the Def Leppard/Journey tour twice: once in Washington, D.C., and again while visiting friends in Detroit. In early 2020, I bought tickets to see them at Nationals Park in Washington, only for COVID to put the tour on hold. It looked as though it might finally happen in summer 2021, but the Delta variant had other ideas. On 2 July 2022, after four years of near-misses, I finally got to see Def Leppard live at TIAA Bank Field in Jacksonville, Florida, alongside co-headliners Mötley Crüe and support acts Poison and Joan Jett & the Blackhearts.

Could the weather stop the show?

It nearly did. As the gates opened at 4.30pm, the heavens opened too. From 4.30pm until 6.15pm, the crowd sheltered in the concourse while a thunderstorm rumbled overhead. When the rain eased to a drizzle, Joan Jett & the Blackhearts took the stage. Original openers Classless Act had been lost to the delay, but Jett made sure the wait wasn’t wasted.

“Cherry Bomb” got the crowd’s engine revving; by “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll”, it was running smoothly. Seven songs were enough to lift spirits that had been thoroughly soaked, and Jett left the stage having done exactly what an opener should: made the audience forget, briefly, about the weather.

Briefly was the word. Another delay kept everyone waiting from 6.45pm to 7.20pm. When AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” came over the PA, the crowd was ready to believe Poison had arrived early.

Did Poison deliver after the delay?

At 7.20pm, Poison came out without singer Bret Michaels, who had been hospitalised just two days earlier after a bad reaction to medication. The band had already been forced to miss its Nashville show, so there was understandable uncertainty about what the Jacksonville set would look like. When Michaels finally ran onstage, the response was enormous.

He sounded tired when he spoke, but gave the performance everything he could on his own terms. C.C. DeVille helped carry the load with a series of guitar solos, including a crowd-pleasing run through Eddie Van Halen’s “Eruption”. When DeVille started tapping the fretboard, a bright red screen crossed with white stripes appeared behind him, and the stadium erupted. Poison finished with “Nothin’ but a Good Time”, sending the crowd off on a high and, mercifully, bringing the rain to an end.

Was Mötley Crüe worth the wait?

I have a confession: I adore hair metal, but I don’t particularly like Mötley Crüe. Perhaps I’m fussy about my punk and glam being served separately. Personal taste aside, though, their show was an absolute spectacle.

Where Joan Jett, Poison and Def Leppard kept their stage setups relatively straightforward, Crüe went all in: smoke machines, video introductions, dancers, props and enough mayhem to make the stadium feel like it had been let loose. Nikki Sixx played like a man possessed, while Tommy Lee hammered the drums as if tomorrow didn’t exist, despite having recently broken four ribs while carrying his wife’s luggage. I was sitting around two-thirds of the way up the stadium, and even my seat rattled.

The weather had finally relented, and the crowd was more than ready to let loose. Had another storm rolled in and cut the set short, I’m fairly sure the audience would have rioted. For a band I arrived ready to dislike, Crüe made a remarkably convincing case for the live spectacle.

Could Def Leppard live up to the wait?

After a New Year’s Eve-style countdown, Def Leppard took the stage. Rather than leading with one of their enormous hits, they opened with “Take What You Want” and “Fire It Up”, both from their then-new album Diamond Star Halos. It’s a move few bands on the nostalgia circuit could pull off, but they made it work. The audience had just spent a set on Mötley Crüe’s wild side and seemed happy to catch its breath before settling into the songs it knew by heart.

When “Animal” arrived, the stadium sang straight back at Joe Elliott, and the singalong barely let up after that. Phil Collen and Viv Campbell traded lead and rhythm parts with the ease of a band that knows its catalogue inside out. Rick Allen, one of rock’s most distinctive drummers, delivered a solo that would give plenty of two-armed players a run for their money, while Rick Savage held down the low end and Elliott pushed for the high notes that make these songs so instantly recognisable.

There was less seat-rattling than during Crüe’s set, but when 45,000 people sing “Love Bites” together, the sheer volume has its own kind of force. “Photograph”, from Pyromania, closed the set. Behind the band, the giant screens filled with photographs submitted by fans, turning the finale into a reminder of the people who have carried these songs with them for decades. As the band left the stage, “Kings of the World”, their own 2011 song, drifted across the PA.