Joe Elliott is sitting in a room at the Four Seasons in downtown Minneapolis, eight or nine hours before he’ll climb onstage with his band Def Leppard for a gig at the Minnesota Twins’ baseball stadium.

“See it over there?” he asks on a Zoom call, tilting his laptop so that the camera takes in Target Field through a large window behind him. “Green Day was there on Saturday. And over here,” he adds, swinging the camera across downtown to U.S. Bank Stadium, “is where Metallica just did two nights. Crazy weekend here.”

Twenty years ago, few would’ve predicted that Def Leppard would still be in that kind of mix. The British pop-metal outfit exploded with 1983’s 10-times-platinum “Pyromania” and its 12-times-platinum follow-up, 1987’s “Hysteria,” both of which the band polished to a high-tech gleam with its famously exacting producer, Mutt Lange. Inevitably, the group’s career cooled throughout the ’90s and early 2000s as peacocking hard rock gave way to grunge and pop-punk.

But then things started heating up again for Def Leppard, which eventually got back into arenas and stadiums armed with enduring tunes like “Photograph,” “Love Bites,” “Rock of Ages” and “Pour Some Sugar on Me.” Now here they are — singer Elliott, guitarists Phil Collen and Vivian Campbell, bassist Rick Savage and drummer Rick Allen — on a tour with another purveyor of glossy ’80s rock-radio hits, Journey.

“We get onstage, and we wink at each other and go, ‘Can you believe this?’ Forty-seven years in and we’re playing places this big after everybody said we were done,” says Elliott, 65. “We were the only five that said, ‘No, we’re not.’ ”

The frontman is wearing a black Taylor Swift T-shirt, a souvenir from the Eras Tour date in Dublin where he introduced his 8-year-old daughter to the pop megastar. “It was a very magical moment,” he says, “and I will be forever grateful to Taylor for making Daddy look cool for a couple of days.”

This interview with Elliott has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: Def Leppard played an episode of CMT’s “Crossroads” with Taylor in 2008. Could you see where she was headed?

A: I don’t think anybody could. You look at it now and it kind of makes sense. But if you think back to 2008, there was no such thing as what she’s accomplished. I know anybody that was there when the Beatles and the Stones came over will go, “Wait a minute ...” But for people born this century or in the ’90s, this is a phenomenon that’s never been seen before — technically bigger than the Beatles and the Stones combined, at least commercially. It’s insanity, the amount of tickets she sells. But I always knew she’d be big. And for all the hardships she’s gone though — the people who’ve tried to trip her up over the years at certain parts of her career — she’s just dusted herself down. She’s a fantastic role model for a generation of kids.

Q: The core of Def Leppard hasn’t changed in decades, which is fairly unusual for a touring legacy act these days. Do you think fans care whether they’re watching the original members of a band?

A: My experience of watching Journey is that the crowd is really into it. Are there some naysayers that I can’t see going, “I wish it was Steve Perry”? Probably. We have people that still wish (guitarist) Steve Clark was in the band, or even (guitarist) Pete Willis — the keyboard warriors who make a bit of noise. But the majority of people, I think, just want to hear the songs. The song is the boss, not any one person in the band.

It’s not (Journey guitarist) Neal Schon, it’s not Joe Elliott, it’s not Robert Plant — it’s not even Taylor Swift. It’s the song. So to a certain extent it really doesn’t matter. …

We fight tooth and nail to keep this band together because we saw the way that U2 were. Until just recently, when (drummer) Larry (Mullen Jr.) couldn’t do the Sphere residency, they’d never changed the lineup at all. We lost Pete along the way, and then we lost Steve, but this lineup’s been together now for 32 years, which is four times as long as the Beatles were together.

And we genuinely like each other! I got this respiratory thing in Boston the other week, and I isolated because I didn’t know what it was. They put me in my own room, and I (expletive) hated it. I said to the guys, “I don’t understand these bands that have different dressing rooms.” We share the same room, and we always have for 40-odd years. Apparently so do the Foo Fighters, because Phil was talking to Pat Smear recently, and he goes, “Well, yeah — this is what proper bands do, right?”

Q: Def Leppard’s hits have always had a home on the radio. What do you enjoy hearing segued into or out of one of your songs?

A: When I hear one of ours shoved between “Gimme Shelter” and “Kashmir,” that’s good company. That’s how you judge it. The other day we were being driven into the gig in San Antonio, and “Sugar” came on some station. It was “Brick House” by the Commodores, then “Sugar,” and that was followed by “Billie Jean.” Again, good company.

Q: Who made records in the ’80s that sounded better than yours?

A: Nobody. I don’t mean that in a disrespectful way — I just don’t think anybody made records that sounded as good as ours. Bands made records that sounded different to ours. And they would argue now that their record sounded better because it sounded more organic. But what we were trying to do was use machinery and technology to push the envelope — to take a Queen-type thing and literally bring in the technology of a Joy Division or a Kraftwerk or a Human League. Why can’t a band that plays rock ’n’ roll utilize these drum sounds and these sequencing effects to enhance what hasn’t really progressed too much? When we were making “Pyromania,” we were listening to stuff that was on the charts in ’82, and it didn’t sound any different to anything that came out in ’75.

Q: Which is better: “Pyromania” or “Hysteria”?

A: Jesus, man, come on. Obviously, the breakthrough was “Pyromania” — the memories from that tour of being this band that got out of a bus and walked into a hotel to being this band that got off the bus, and we couldn’t even get into the hotel because there were too many kids blocking the way. But by 1987, when it’s the second time, it’s the second time, you know what I mean? So what you had was the first and then the bigger. Which of them is better? I just blend them together and go, “The ’80s were great.”