Def Leppard guitarist Vivian Campbell has revealed that his cancer has come back, fourteen months after he told fans he was completely free of it for the first time in more than a decade.
Campbell, 63, made the disclosure in an interview with Francisco Sigüenza of El Salvador’s Radio YSKL FM, in comments transcribed by Blabbermouth. Talking about the donor stem cell transplant he underwent in January 2025, the guitarist said plainly: “Unfortunately, it didn’t stick. So the cancer has returned. And I’m continuing treatments to manage it.”
It is a hard reversal for a man who, a year ago, was describing himself as cured. And yet the striking thing about the interview is not the diagnosis. It is how thoroughly Campbell refuses to let it be the headline of his life.
Thirteen years, three rounds of chemo and two transplants
Campbell went public with his Hodgkin’s lymphoma diagnosis in June 2013. What followed was not a single battle but a long campaign of attrition: three separate spells of chemotherapy, years of immunotherapy, and a stem cell transplant using his own cells, which he later said simply “didn’t work.”
For most of that period he kept touring, and that was deliberate. “I think you have to keep moving forward,” he told Sigüenza. “And I do think that that’s what helped me, even when I was at a really low ebb with cancer treatment. The fact that I could still continue to work, that gives me something to live for.”
He has been candid that his approach is not universal. “Unfortunately, I have met people in my life who, when they’ve gotten a cancer diagnosis, they’ve only focused on that,” he said. “I’ve never felt that way. I’ve always felt like I’m gonna continue to live my life as much as possible. In fact, even more so.”
There was one exception. “There’s only been one time that I felt it was gonna kill me,” Campbell admitted. “In the winter of 2023, I got really scared about what was happening and the pace at which it was happening.” That fear is what pushed him toward the option he had until then avoided: a transplant using a donor’s stem cells rather than his own. “It was my only hope to survive.”
The road to that procedure was itself brutal. After the heavy chemotherapy needed to prepare his body in late 2024, Campbell lost his donor days before the operation was due to take place. A replacement was found, and the transplant went ahead in January 2025.
The remission that lasted a year
The cost was immediate. Campbell missed Def Leppard’s first show of 2025, in León, Mexico, with Phil Collen’s guitar tech John Zocco stepping in on stage. Joe Elliott explained the absence to the crowd on camera, in remarks reported by Guitar.com: “Vivian is recuperating from cancer surgery and he’s doing very well, but he’s in a bubble, he’s not allowed to travel.”
Campbell’s own message at the time was upbeat. “I recently had a bone marrow transplant as part of my treatment plan, and it’s safe to say that thus far it’s been a very successful transplant,” he wrote. “I just have to keep my head down and my spirits up for the next 100 days of primary recovery.”
For a while, it looked as though it had worked completely. A PET scan in April 2025 came back clear, and Campbell shared the result on SiriusXM’s Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk: “I’m a hundred percent 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.”
That is the sentence this week’s news undoes.
Accounts differ slightly on how urgent the situation now is, and it is worth being precise about the gap. Greek outlet Rockpages, which reported the interview hours before it was picked up in the English-language press, framed it as Campbell needing another bone marrow transplant, and added that the January 2025 procedure did not prevent a rise in his cancer markers — a detail that does not appear in the transcribed quotes. Campbell’s own words are less immediate. “I’ll probably have to do another transplant within a few years with another donor,” he said, “to try and see if maybe that would cure me.” For now, the plan is management rather than another operation.
“Life is for the living”
What Campbell did not do, at any point in the conversation, was talk about stopping.
“In the meantime, I’m certainly not slowing down,” he said. “I’m doing as much with my life as possible, not just with Def Leppard and with Last In Line. I’m also rally driving, because I always wanted to do that. And as a child, I thought, ‘If I don’t play guitar for a living, I’m gonna be a race car driver.’ So I’m very, very, very fortunate and blessed that I get to do both.”
He closed with something that read less like a statement about his own prognosis than advice to anyone listening who might be at the start of the same road. “Life is for the living. And I encourage everyone to look after their own health. And if you are unfortunate enough to get a cancer diagnosis, to overcome the fear. Fear is inevitable when you’re first told those words. But once you get over that, you gotta realize just how to manage it and how to deal with it as best as possible, and just don’t give in.”
Campbell, who turns 64 on August 25, joined Def Leppard in 1992 to fill the place left by Steve Clark, and was introduced at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert at Wembley Stadium. Before that he was the young guitarist who cut Holy Diver with Dio. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the band in 2019.
Neither Campbell nor the band has announced any change to Def Leppard’s schedule.
