No one will ever explain the core appeal of Def Leppard more accurately than this lyrical excerpt taken from the band’s website:
The song is called “Women,” and there is no better way to introduce the most expensive album ever created at the time.
But for nearly a year, the most successful album of its time began with the sound of failure. Hysteria spun off enough inescapable hits to make over half its 63-minute runtime instantly familiar to anyone within earshot of a July 4th classic-rock block. The lead single wasn’t one of them. Def Leppard were, above all else, worried about the metal cred they forfeited the moment they showed up on MTV looking like themselves, i.e., a Van Halen that more closely resembled Duran Duran.
So in the video for “Women,” Def Leppard play a bunch of schmos in a box factory, a far cry from who they’d become by 1989’s Live: In the Round, In Your Face—the most successful starting five to hold court in the homes of the Denver Nuggets and Atlanta Hawks. “Women” peaked at No. 80 on the American charts and isn’t included on Vault, the 1995 greatest-hits package that includes previously unreleased tracks and something from The Last Action Hero. It’s still an awe-inspiring teaser of Def Leppard’s state-of-the-art pop metal, a song that might be more beloved if it had been the seventh single, rather than the first. “I heard that Stevie Wonder and Prince had commented on how great it had sounded when they first heard it,” guitarist Phil Collen told Apple Music, which, I need receipts here. Some albums are too big to fail, but “Women” is a necessary reminder that Hysteria once appeared doomed to failure because it was too big—the work of a band that lived out their dreams of being the next Led Zeppelin only after pulling the Hindenburg out of a tailspin.
At this point, even the most casual Def Leppard fans can recount the beats of Hysteria’s tragic origin story more readily than the lyrics of “Pour Some Sugar on Me.” Singer Joe Elliott contracted mumps as a grown-ass man and, naturally, was worried about its notorious side effects on the “nether regions” (“They swell up like elephant balls,” he informed Rolling Stone). If Hysteria’s lyrics (and tour lore) are to be believed, Elliott did just fine for himself. Guitarist Steve Clark was deep in polysubstance addiction that would take his life in 1991, yet the guitar parts on Hysteria are so pristine, they sound quantized. You cannot hear the hundreds of bottles of vodka and whiskey that littered the practice space.
There is no remnant of the failed initial sessions with Jim Steinman, but clearly the guy behind Bat Out of Hell and “Total Eclipse of the Heart” wasn’t thinking big enough for Def Leppard. These kindly lads didn’t have that dog in them until a man named Mutt showed up to put his ruthless perfectionism all over Hysteria. But you can’t hear the car accident that sent Robert John “Mutt” Lange to the hospital for three weeks—by an astronomical margin, only the second most influential car accident associated with Def Leppard.
After the tragic New Year’s Eve crash that took his arm, and nearly his life, Rick Allen spent countless grueling hours in physical rehab so you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between him and any other rock drummer who had an interest in electronic kits in 1987. Like The Wizard of Oz or the 2022 Qatar World Cup, Hysteria now remains a glittering monument to techno-opulence that contains no trace of the pain and misery that went into its creation.
Just about every member of Def Leppard has reiterated that their fourth album aspired to be the hard rock version of Thriller—the part of any Behind the Music episode where the group either pulls it off or misses the mark by so much that it’s played for laughs, a sign of a rock band at its most delusional. Even after Pyromania, Def Leppard were still not too far removed from where they started, a couple of blue-collar kids from Sheffield who practiced day and night in an abandoned spoon factory like it was a matter of life and death, because it mostly was in England’s decaying rust belt. Both Michael Jackson and Def Leppard were barely in their 20s on their respective breakthrough records, yet compare the polished pop professionalism of Off the Wall to On the Through the Night, an album whose cover is a big rig/guitar centaur, something Pen & Pixel might have cooked up for the Marshall Tucker Band.
Still, if Def Leppard were simply interested in moving units in 1987, it would have been easier to make Pyromania II: Mo’ Fire. There’s little difference between “Photograph” and “Rock You Like a Hurricane,” which came a year later and also had a video concept requiring women in cages. But whereas the Scorpions looked like a middle-aged German biker gang thrown onto a Mystery Science Theater set, Def Leppard were a barely legal metal brigade that could have passed for new wave pin-ups. The four-year gap between Pyromania and Hysteria spawned hair-metal albums, like Slippery When Wet, Shout at the Devil, Out of the Cellar, W.A.S.P., and Great White, that held a mirror up to Def Leppard; they did not love the world created in their image. “With rock bands in general, they’re usually not very open-minded; they’re kind of genre-specific and like to stay in their little boxes,” Collen mused, which is admittedly a funny thing to tell Guitar World in 2012.
Def Leppard could’ve shot for Purple Rain or Born in the U.S.A., but Thriller wasn’t just shorthand for “an album that sold more than ours.” Before they accumulated so much bad luck to garner their own “Def Leppard curse,” their only misfortune came in releasing Pyromania within the blast radius of a Michael Jackson album that would generate a record-breaking seven Top 10 singles and quickly become the best-selling album of all time. Though “Photograph” and “Rock of Ages” were inescapable on MTV and helped their third album sell 100,000 copies a week throughout 1983, those weren’t Thriller numbers and they never would be. Pyromania might have been the slickest, shiniest hard rock album in existence, but it was still just a hard rock album; Def Leppard were not a part of the monoculture, something that bled into film, television, sports, politics. In the video age, five against one is always a losing battle—no band could be a Michael or Prince or Bruce or Madonna. But the guys in Def Leppard could be Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant and Macho Man Randy Savage, action figures subservient to a greater, stadium-filling spectacle.
Lange had nothing but good instincts throughout the creation of Hysteria, including recognizing CDs as the future of music commerce. Hysteria might not have been the first album explicitly designed for the digital fidelity of compact discs, but it was the album most explicitly designed for the format. “The sticker on the album proudly announces Hysteria has 12 songs and 63 minutes, as if it’s a squeezably soft supermarket item,” Creem sniffed, and indeed, Lange wanted to test the limits of what could be contained on a single compact disc at the time.
The sheer ubiquity of Hysteria’s singles makes for a disorienting full-length experience at first. Swap the title track with “Gods of War” in the running order and Hysteria is the most top-heavy album ever made. Each deep cut feels like meeting out-of-state cousins or great-uncles at a family reunion; they’re part of the same genetic pool but strangely alien. There’s no secret weapon, no “Baby Be Mine” or “No Surrender” celebrated by the real heads. (I had tricked myself into thinking the closer “Love and Affection” was that song, but it turns out I got it confused with Nelson.) “Gods of War” stands out for being the one time Def Leppard addresses something other than rock, women, and rockin’ women. I mean, if Scorpions could end the Cold War (with the CIA possibly taking co-writing credits), who could fault Def Leppard for thinking the same? Still, “Wind of Change” was a true metal power ballad, which Def Leppard did not do, at least until they did. “Gods of War” uses the same militaristic call-and-response as “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” just as suited for Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston doing a superhero battle as it was for Reagan and Gorbachev.
Every moment of Hysteria works at this scale. “In the beginning,” “White lights,” “A wild ride”—these are the respective opening words of its first three songs, each like a tagline for a blockbuster movie trailer. Most singles on Hysteria could be shaved by at least a minute and often were; “single edits” would ditch the backmasked intros, the pitch-shifted narration, the extended guitar harmonies, everything that signified Hysteria as something beyond mere rock—“operatic” and “symphonic” for people who would never set foot in an actual opera or symphony.
But critics wanted Pyromania, not Wrestlemania—“Def Lep have lost their youthful kick, attitude, and focus,” Creem wrote amid an extended constipation metaphor that ends with them comparing Hysteria unfavorably with Metallica’s The $5.98 EP. All of which completely missed the point. Hysteria drew in adolescents who saw the spandex, the exaggerated musculature, the implied sexuality, and the catchphrases signifying battles completely beyond their understanding, whereas the adults could just appreciate the physicality and Manichaean stakes. The only people who couldn’t buy in were all making the same complaint—this isn’t real, you know.
Nothing about this was supposed to sound like five guys in a room. But Def Leppard flaunted their process rather than hiding it, breaking down pop metal to reconstruct it into something bigger, brighter, more suited to mass scale. Clark and Collen recorded their parts on a tiny Rockman, the headphone amp developed by Tom Scholz, the MIT-trained frontman of Boston. Marshall stacks look cool on stage, but in the studio, the crunch and grit overpowered the things that pop songs emphasized—the vocals and the beat. Hysteria is misremembered as an album where all chords were overdubbed one string at a time, a tidy summary of Lange’s inefficient attempts to achieve mechanical perfection. Ironically, that method was only used for the pre-chorus of “Hysteria,” the most strummed-sounding guitar part on the record. “A guitar player friend of mine came in the studio to say hello, and I was sitting there going ‘bing, bing, bing’ on one note…and doing another note, ‘ding, ding, ding,’...and he goes, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’,” Collen recalled in 2013, which prompted the response, “Wait ’til you hear it all together.”
Unlike more celebrated rock-to-robot pivots, Hysteria did not result from Def Leppard getting bored with rock music or having serious misgivings about the Singularity. Elliott saw his childhood favorites Mott the Hoople and T. Rex and even the Rolling Stones in a lineage of British pop, and their contemporary models were other pop acts that happened to use guitars—INXS, Prince, and of course, the Michael Jackson of “Beat It.” Rather than calling up Eddie Van Halen or the guys from Toto to provide whatever they needed, Def Leppard went digging in the crates.
“Rocket” begins with a sampled stampede of drums over a scaly riff, meant to pay homage to both John Kongos and Siouxsie & the Banshees. Somewhere in there, Elliott free-associates a short history of glam rock. None of this stuff registered with the typical parking lot hesher, the 10-year-old glued to MTV, or the parent they’re going to beg to buy a Hysteria cassette. They did not need to understand the “Satellite of Love” reference in the chorus, because it’s barely intelligible. “ROCKET! YEAH!” says it all.
“Rocket” isn’t even the most overt T. Rex homage, as “Armageddon It” bangs a gong big enough to echo throughout Donington. But the chorus takes a fascinating turn by revisiting the jangly, droning arpeggios that peeked through “Photograph,” anticipating R.E.M.’s stadium-status phase years in advance. In the videos for both “Armageddon It” and “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” Elliott is wearing a Def Leppard shirt, the message being that no one’s a bigger fan of Def Leppard than himself.
Def Leppard’s earnest pop optimism ran counter to the cynicism embedded in most hair metal, as did their approach to power ballads. There was one way to do them in the mid-’80s: You bring out the acoustic guitar, pretend you’re a cowboy, film a video where you’re passed out on the back of the tour bus. Hysteria needed its love songs to keep the party going. Lange would still be a decade away from realizing his visions of country arena rock with Shania Twain, but he gave it an honest go on an initial, twangier version “Love Bites.” The end result was Def Leppard at their most syncretic; Clark and Collen layer chorused, complex chord voicings like a Robocop version of the Police, while the chorus lunges toward impossible harmonies, Elliott hitting the desperate high notes like a silk-shirt R&B singer crying on his knees in the rain. The title track is the most thematically suited for a slow dance, though it skips on a lush, metronomic sophistipop beat, a halfway point between Roxy Music’s Avalon and the Blue Nile’s Hats.
These are examples of Def Leppard at their subtlest, and they would probably still be paying off Hysteria’s recording fees if they hadn’t also been able to dumb things down. Of all the tall tales of excess, the one part of the origin story I just can’t wrap my mind around is “Pour Some Sugar on Me” starting out with Joe Elliott strumming the chorus on an acoustic guitar. Somehow, this evolves into Def Leppard making the first nü-metal song, Aerosmith and Run-D.M.C.’s “Walk this Way” after a corporate downsizing (the second line is “Walk this way”—again, Def Leppard’s musicology was broad, not deep).
