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Def Leppard guitarist Vivian Campbell in remission after cancer battle

Bringin’ on the opposite of heartbreak: Def Leppard guitarist Vivian Campbell revealed that he is in remission after more than a decade living with cancer.

Appearing on Eddie Trunk’s SiriusXM show Trunk Nation this week, the musician, 62, shared that he is now “100% clean” following his Hodgkin’s lymphoma diagnosis in 2013. Campbell explained that he had missed the band’s first show of 2025 in Mexico earlier this year because he was recovering from a successful bone marrow transplant, quipping that he now owed his donor a beer.

“You know, I’ve been very lucky actually,” Campbell ruminated, recounting going “through the mill with all sorts of chemo and immunotherapy and combination therapies.”

Vivian Campbell during a soundcheck in London in May 2008.

Joby Sessions/Total Guitar Magazine/Future via Getty


He shared, “10 years ago I did an oncologist stem cell transplant, which means using my own stem cells. That didn’t work. The cancer kept coming back. And then a couple of years ago, it really got bad . . . the doctors told me my only chance for a cure was to do a donor transplant.”

Last summer during the band’s tour, “I started doing more chemo in preparation for it,” Campbell shared. “And then right after the tour, they started giving me very hardcore chemo leading up to the transplant.”

Campbell had been set to start the process after Thanksgiving, but he lost his initial donor “10 days beforehand, so that was a kick in the nuts,” he added. “But I was very fortunate that they found me another one in December. And on New Year’s Eve, I went into hospital.”

He remained there for nearly a month, and the procedure “turned out to be a really, really successful transplant,” Campbell shared.

He is now “100% clean, completely in remission for the first time in 12 or 13 years, and I am obviously overjoyed. You couldn’t ask for more than that. I had an incredible donor . . obviously I’m gonna buy him a beer or two or three.”

Def Leppard.

Robert Knight Archive/Redferns


The English rock band, which was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2019 by Queen’s Brian May, embarked on an expansive North American tour this spring, which is set to conclude at the end of August in Virginia. The group released their latest album Diamond Star Halos, their 12th but the first in about seven years, in 2022.

Listen to Campbell on Trunk Nation above.

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