Musician, who revealed first Hodgkin’s lymphoma diagnosis in 2013, says cancer’s return won’t slow him down
Def Leppard guitarist Vivian Campbell recently told radio station YSKL that he has cancer again. Campbell previously revealed that he was battling Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2013, which returned in 2015.
“There’s only been one time that I felt it was gonna kill me,” Campbell told the El Salvadoran station. “In the winter of 2023, I got really scared about what was happening and the pace at which it was happening. And I realized at that point that I had to do a donor transplant. It was my only hope to survive. … I did that in January of ’25. … Unfortunately, it didn’t stick. So the cancer has returned, and I’m continuing treatments to manage it.
“I’ll probably have to do another transplant within a few years with another donor to try and see if maybe that would cure me,” he continued. “But in the meantime, I’m certainly not slowing down.”
Campbell said he was keeping busy with both Def Leppard and his other band, the Last in Line. He’s also doing rally driving. “I love cars and I love driving,” he said. “And as a child, I thought, ‘If I don’t play guitar for a living, I’m gonna be a race car driver.’”
The guitarist joined Def Leppard in 1992, replacing Steve Clark, who had died the previous year. Prior to Def Lep, he played in the New Wave of British Heavy Metal band Sweet Savage, the first lineup of Ronnie James Dio’s band Dio, and briefly in Whitesnake. He later formed the Last in Line, which takes its name from a Dio song, and, in 2005, put out a solo album, Two Sides of If. Def Leppard’s most recent release is the single, “Rejoice,” which came out in January.
