DEF LEPPARD Trivia — 250 Entries
250 sourced facts about DEF LEPPARD.
Trivia
Of their November 2011 visit to Japan, the band's own timeline notes the warmth of the welcome — Mirror Ball had reached No.1 on the chart of BURRN!, Japan's leading hard rock and metal magazine. They played one date each in Osaka and Tokyo before heading back to the UK to finish the year.
The biography on the site of the band's Japanese label, Universal Music Japan, refers to several albums by their Japanese titles: Pyromania appears as 炎のターゲット, High 'n' Dry as ハイ・アンド・ドライ, and the 2006 covers album Yeah! as イエーイ！.
According to the biography on Universal Music Japan's site, Def Leppard first played in Japan during the year-long world tour that followed the release of Pyromania. That tour ended in Bangkok on 7 February 1984.
Adrenalize entered the US chart at No.1, stayed there five weeks and sold six million copies. The band's own timeline then adds a detail that reads differently from outside America: in Japan, Mexico and many other countries, Adrenalize became their biggest-selling album to date.
The 2015 self-titled album came out worldwide on 30 October, and none of its songs had been played on the US arena tour that ran right up to it. The Japan tour that November — Nippon Budokan included — was therefore the first place in the world where the new material was performed live. It was the band's first visit to Japan in four years.
The 2015 Japanese tour, billed as a 35th anniversary run, played four dates: Nippon Budokan in Tokyo on 9 November, Orix Theater in Osaka on the 10th, Zepp Nagoya on the 12th and Sendai Sun Plaza Hall on the 13th, promoted by Udo Artists. Joe Elliott said beforehand that he wanted to dig out songs the band had not played for a while, because Japan was a place where that was possible.
Ahead of the 2015 Japanese shows, Joe Elliott name-checked the band's lighting engineer, Kenji, in his message to fans in Japan — describing him as, in the band's view, the best lighting engineer in the world.
In 2018 the Hysteria-in-full world tour reached Japan: Nippon Budokan in Tokyo on 24 October, Osaka on the 26th and Zepp Nagoya on the 29th. The full-album format had begun with the eleven-show Las Vegas residency in 2013, filmed and released as Viva! Hysteria.
Writing about 1987, BARKS describes a Japan where Def Leppard were on television and radio almost every day. The same piece puts Hysteria at twelve million copies in the US and 25 million worldwide, notes its seven singles, and traces their climb: "Women" stalled at No.80 in America, "Pour Some Sugar On Me" reached No.2 and "Love Bites" went to No.1.
The Japanese leg of The World Tour with Mötley Crüe took place over two nights, 3 and 4 November 2023, at K Arena Yokohama. The running order was swapped between them: Mötley Crüe closed the first night and Def Leppard the second. Creativeman and Udo Artists promoted the shows.
For both nights at K Arena Yokohama in November 2023, Masanori Ito appeared as the opening DJ — a piece of programming unique to the Japanese shows, scheduled while the doors were open.
The Japanese edition of Diamond Star Heroes Live From Sheffield carries liner notes by Masanori Ito and translated lyrics, and the CDs are pressed as SHM-CDs. The Blu-ray plus 2CD configuration also includes Japanese subtitles.
It took a while for the Mötley Crüe co-headline package to reach Japan. Following The Stadium Tour across North America in 2022, The World Tour opened in Mexico in February 2023 and worked through Latin America, Europe and North America before arriving in Japan and Australia that autumn. The Japanese dates were announced on 25 March 2023.
The band's first rehearsal took place in November 1977, in a spoon factory near Bramall Lane in Sheffield. Joe Elliott (vocals), Rick Savage (bass), Pete Willis (guitar) and Tony Kenning (drums) had just changed the spelling of the name from Deaf Leopard to Def Leppard. That Christmas they played for an audience of six friends, running through six songs — covers of David Bowie and Thin Lizzy plus their own "Misty Dreamer".
The phrase behind the name — "Deaf Leopard" — was coined by Joe Elliott while he was still at school in 1975, according to the band's own timeline. It began life as the name of a band that did not exist, and two years later it became the name of one that did.
Joe Elliott's official biography records that he had dreamed of being in an imaginary band called Deaf Leopard. What he actually joined was Atomic Mass, the group Rick Savage and Pete Willis had already started. The band's change of name to Def Leppard was, the biography says, partly down to that dream of his.
Rick Savage was considered a promising footballer as a teenager and was asked to join Sheffield United — a club he played for a couple of years, and, as his official biography is careful to add, one he supported against, being a Sheffield Wednesday fan. In the end he chose the band instead.
Steve Clark joined as the band's second guitarist in January 1978. What pushed them out of the rehearsal room, according to the band's own timeline, was Clark himself: from February to July they rehearsed endlessly, until he threatened to quit unless they started playing live.
It was Pete Willis who introduced Steve Clark to the band. One of the nicknames Clark earned, his official biography records, was "the Riffmaster" — for coming up with the most original guitar riffs in the band's history, over and over again.
The band's first public gig was at Westfield School in Sheffield on 18 July 1978. The fee was about £5, and it came out of a teacher's own pocket. The 50-minute set was all originals apart from the encore, Thin Lizzy's "Jailbreak", and the beer they used to settle their nerves was smuggled in inside the bass drum case.
At that first public show Steve Clark opened with a full Pete Townshend windmill — and nothing came out, because his amp had been left on standby. Joe Elliott tells the story himself on the band's own site.
The Def Leppard E.P. cost around £600 — roughly $900 at the time — for recording, sleeves and pressing together, and came out on the band's own label, Bludgeon Riffola. Drummer Tony Kenning had been fired that November, so Frank Noon sat in for the session.
When the deal with Phonogram in the UK and Mercury in the US was signed on 5 August 1979, every member gave up his day job. Rick Allen, then still 15, dropped out of school.
Through October and November 1979 the band supported AC/DC across the UK. Rick Allen turned 16 during that run, on 1 November, at London's Hammersmith Odeon. Their first single, "Wasted", produced by Nick Tauber, came out in the same weeks.
The band's own album page credits the debut to producer "(Colonel) Tom Allom", recorded at Startling Studios in Ascot, Berkshire in December 1979. Two guests are listed: Chris Hughes on synthesiser for "Hello America" and Dave Cousins' voice on "When The Walls Came Tumblin' Down".
According to the band's own album page, the debut released on 14 March 1980 reached No.15 in the UK and No.51 on the Billboard chart. Two songs from the self-released EP — "Rocks Off" and "Overture" — were re-recorded for it.
When the band came back to Britain for the Reading Festival in August 1980 they were greeted with a rain of bottles and beer cans. The band's own timeline explains why: the crowd was convinced they had sold out to the Yankee dollar and turned their backs on their own country.
The band's own album page credits the second album to producer Robert John "Mutt" Lange, recorded at Battery Studios in London, with Pete Willis listed under additional musicians on guitar.
In November 1981 the newly launched American cable channel MTV picked up the video for "Bringin' On The Heartbreak" and put it into heavy rotation. The band's own timeline credits that with sending High 'n' Dry back up the charts.
Recording for the third album began in January 1982, again with Robert John "Mutt" Lange. Partway through, in July, Pete Willis left and was replaced by Phil Collen, previously of the bands Lucy and Girl.
The band's own album page lists Pyromania as recorded at Park Gates Studios in East Sussex and Battery Studios in London, produced by Robert John "Mutt" Lange, with Pete Willis credited on guitar under additional musicians.
The Pyromania world tour ended in Bangkok on 7 February 1984. After it, the band relocated to Dublin.
Work on the fourth album began in the spring of 1984, with each member taking a drum machine away and working up song ideas on his own.
Recording began in August 1984 at Wisseloord Studios in Hilversum, Holland, with Jim Steinman producing. Mutt Lange had passed on the album: he was exhausted, having just finished The Cars' Heartbeat City. Steinman proved incompatible with the band and eight backing tracks were scrapped. On Lange's own suggestion he was replaced by Nigel Green, who had engineered High 'n' Dry.
On New Year's Eve 1984, just outside Sheffield, Rick Allen's car overturned at speed and he was thrown clear. His left arm was severed, and microsurgery failed to reattach it.
His official biography records that Rick Allen came back using a semi-electronic kit. By 1986 it had become fully electronic; since 1995 parts of it have been acoustic again, depending on the studio or live setting. The same page quotes Joe Elliott's verdict that Allen became a better drummer than he had been with two arms.
In the summer of 1986 the band booked eight European Monsters Of Rock dates to break the cabin fever of recording, bringing in Status Quo's Jeff Rich as insurance alongside Rick Allen. During the warm-up shows in Ireland, Rich missed one of them — and the rest of the band realised Allen could hold the show on his own.
The last Monsters Of Rock show of 1986 was on 31 August in Mannheim, Germany. According to the band's own timeline it was hit by a torrential downpour that lasted exactly the duration of Def Leppard's set.
The band's own album page states that Hysteria was released on 3 August 1987 through Mercury Records, topped both the Billboard 200 and the UK album chart, has sold over 20 million copies worldwide and produced seven hit singles.
The band's own album page lists three studios for Hysteria — Wisseloord in Hilversum, Windmill Lane in Dublin and Studio Des Dames in Paris — and credits Philip Nicholas with Fairlight programming under additional musicians.
The Hysteria tour ran to 227 shows. Work on the next album began when it was over, in October 1988.
In 1989 the band played "Tear It Down" live at the MTV Video Music Awards. The band's own timeline records it as Steve Clark's last show with them.
Steve Clark died on 8 January 1991. The band's own timeline attributes it to alcohol mixed with painkillers he had been prescribed after breaking three ribs earlier that year. Def Leppard carried on recording as a four-piece; for the first time in four albums Mutt Lange did not man the controls, serving as executive producer instead, while long-time mixer and engineer Mike Shipley sat in as co-producer alongside the band.
The new line-up was revealed to the world at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert at Wembley Stadium in April 1992. Vivian Campbell, already respected for his work with Dio and Whitesnake, had joined, and Adrenalize came out around the same time — entering the US chart at No.1 and staying there for five weeks.
His official biography records that Vivian Campbell was asked to join in 1992, to fill the place Steve Clark had left. After being formally introduced at the Freddie Mercury tribute at Wembley, his first job was to take the band through the Adrenalize tours of 1992 and 1993.
The Seven Day Weekend tour began in June 1992 and by the time it ended some eighteen months later the band had played 241 shows — by far their most ambitious tour to that point, and the first time they had played in the round in the UK.
In March 1993 the producers of Arnold Schwarzenegger's Last Action Hero asked the band for a song for the end credits. Still out on tour and unable to make time to record something new, they sent a B-side that had only been released in the UK: "Two Steps Behind".
On 6 June 1993 Def Leppard became the first band ever to play the newly opened Don Valley Stadium — a homecoming to Sheffield almost fifteen years after their first gig, in front of a sell-out crowd of 40,000.
The band's own page describes Retro Active, released on 5 October 1993, as an album of touched-up B-sides and previously unreleased recordings from sessions between 1984 and 1993. It reached No.6 in the UK and No.9 on the Billboard 200, and was the first album to feature Vivian Campbell.
The compilation Vault, released in October 1995, gathered sixteen tracks and one new song, "When Love and Hate Collide". That song peaked at No.2 in the UK — the band's biggest hit at home, according to their own timeline. Vault itself went on to sell four million copies.
In October 1995 Sheffield honoured the band with plaques at the Crookes Working Men's Club and at Don Valley Stadium. They handed over the first exhibit to the National Centre For Popular Music and went to tea with the Mayor. The day finished with an acoustic show at the Wapentake, a 300-capacity pub where they had played one of their earliest gigs back in 1978.
On 23 October 1995 the band played three continents in a single day. They opened at midnight with an acoustic set in a cave in Tangier, Morocco, flew to London to play at midday, and finished in Vancouver, Canada at 9.30pm — 5,845 miles in one day, and a mention in the Guinness Book of Records.
The band's own album page lists an unusual cast for Slang: sarangi samples from Ram Narayan and Shyam Vatish on "Turn to Dust", dhol played by Av Singh, and string and percussion arrangement and conducting by Craig Pruess on the same track. The Spanish voice on the title track is Gloria Flores.
As part of the Slang tour the band toured South Africa for the first time in December 1996, culminating in a sold-out show for 47,000 people at Johannesburg Stadium.
The band's own album page credits the closing guitar solo on "Demolition Man" to Damon "Demon" Hill, and lists Ciaran McGoldrick, Gary Sullivan and Ricky Warwick as the voices and handclaps on "Back in Your Face".
On 16 March 1999 Def Leppard were among the first recipients of the newly launched Diamond Awards in the United States, given for a single album selling over ten million copies there — Hysteria had by then reached twelve million in the US alone. According to the band's own timeline only 61 albums and 45 artists had ever reached that level, and only eight of them were British.
In September 2000 the band were inducted into Hollywood's RockWalk, receiving a plaque and leaving their handprints in cement.
The album X, released in July 2002, is named for the Roman numeral for ten. Its first single, "Now", came out that June.
Before the X tour officially started, the band played a handful of UK shows. One of them, in Leeds, was attended by Queen Elizabeth.
The band's own album page lists X as recorded in three places — Joe's Garage in Dublin, Polar Studios in Stockholm and Rumbo Studios in Los Angeles — and credits production jointly to Def Leppard, Per Aldeheim, Andreas Carlsson and Pete Woodroffe.
The X tour ran to 151 shows and ended in Moscow. According to the band's own timeline it took them back to places they had not visited in a long time, such as Germany and Poland, and to countries they had never played at all — Latvia, Lithuania and Russia. Japan was also on the itinerary.
Most of 2004 went on recording an album of covers, but the first taste of it arrived on a compilation. Best Of Def Leppard, released at the end of that year, carried one new recording: The Kinks' "Waterloo Sunset". The North American compilation that followed in May 2005 swapped it for another preview — Badfinger's "No Matter What".
According to the band's own page, Yeah! reached No.16 on the Billboard 200 and No.52 on the UK album chart. It was their first covers album.
Songs From The Sparkle Lounge takes its name from the backstage set-up the band carried on the road, where a lot of the material was recorded during the 2006 tour. It came out in April 2008, and its lead single "Nine Lives" featured a guest turn from country star Tim McGraw.
2010 was the first year in almost 29 that the band took off entirely — and during it three new songs were written for their first live compilation, Mirror Ball (Live & More): Joe Elliott's "Undefeated", Phil Collen's "It's All About Believin'" and Rick Savage's "Kings Of The World".
Of "Kings Of The World", the band's own timeline says the influence of Queen's "We Are The Champions" is obvious and deliberate. Rick Savage set out to write his own version of songs like Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive" and Sinatra's "My Way".
On 5 June 2012 the band digitally released newly re-recorded versions of "Rock of Ages" and "Pour Some Sugar On Me" to support the Warner Bros. film Rock of Ages. The following day they played a rare club show at the House of Blues in Los Angeles, doubling as an after-party for the film's premiere.
On 19 November 2012 the band announced their first Las Vegas residency, VIVA Hysteria, at The Joint inside the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino. The format was Hysteria performed in full plus a set of hits and rarities; the eleven-show run opened on 22 March 2013.
The self-titled album was the first the band had made without being contracted to make one. As Joe Elliott puts it, there had been expectations even for the debut On Through The Night; this time there were none. They went into the studio without expecting to make an album at all — the plan was simply to embrace their influences and write a few songs they could be proud of.
The 2015 self-titled album started out as a plan to cut a couple of tracks and perhaps put out an EP. Co-producing with long-time collaborator Ronan McHugh, the band found themselves riding a wave of ideas and came out with fourteen songs.
On 22 April 2017 the band reissued The Def Leppard E.P. as a 12-inch 45rpm record for Record Store Day — the same release whose original run of 1,000 copies had sold out within a week in 1979.
The Hysteria 30th anniversary editions, released on 4 August 2017, added B-sides and live tracks and put the audio of In The Round In Your Face on CD for the first time. The reissue took the album back to No.1.
On 19 January 2018 the band finally released their entire catalogue for streaming and download worldwide. The band's own timeline calls it "Def Leppard Day": digital song sales jumped 1,422%, they reached the top ten in over 30 countries, and they held the top three places on the US catalogue album chart. Hysteria climbed back to No.3 on the Billboard 200, while Pyromania and Vault posted their highest chart positions ever.
On 18 July 2018 the band marked 40 years since their first gig at Westfield School. That same year they appeared on the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ballot for the first time.
The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inducted Def Leppard in 2019, describing them in its own citation as the most commercially successful New Wave of British Heavy Metal band, the one that ignited the 1980s reign of metal. Brian May of Queen inducted them.
Six signatures appear on Def Leppard's plaque at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame — the five current members plus Steve Clark, who died in 1991.
The induction was announced on 12 December 2018 and the ceremony took place on 29 March 2019 at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York. Def Leppard went in alongside The Cure, Janet Jackson, Stevie Nicks, Radiohead, Roxy Music and The Zombies.
The artwork for Diamond Star Halos was built from images by the photographer and director Anton Corbijn, styling concepts by Maryam Malakpour and graphics by the UK-based Munden Brothers.
The title Diamond Star Halos is lifted from a line in T. Rex's "Bang a Gong (Get It On)". Two guests appear on it: Alison Krauss sings on "This Guitar" and "Lifeless", and Mike Garson, David Bowie's pianist, plays on "Goodbye For Good This Time" and "Angels (Can't Help You Now)".
On 12 July 2022 the band were presented with Pandora's Billionaire plaque, marking over 2.5 billion total plays on the platform. Executives from Pandora and SiriusXM surprised them with it backstage at their exclusive club show at the Whisky a Go Go in West Hollywood.
The vinyl edition of Diamond Star Heroes Live From Sheffield was pressed on red, white and black splatter — the home kit colours of Sheffield United, who play at Bramall Lane. The release was also the band's first in 4K UHD.
Drastic Symphonies, released on 19 May 2023, reimagines the band's best-known tracks with London's Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. It was recorded at Abbey Road Studios and includes new vocals and instrumental parts from the band. The album reached No.4 on the UK chart and went to No.1 on Billboard's Classical and Classical Crossover charts.
On 9 October 2025 Def Leppard were honoured with the 2,825th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Bob Buchmann acted as emcee, with Jon Bon Jovi and Bruce Resnikoff as guest speakers.
On 3 February 2026 the band opened a sold-out Las Vegas residency at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace, with a new stage show and set list. A video for "Personal Jesus", filmed during the residency, followed on 23 May.
A 30th anniversary edition of Slang appeared for Record Store Day on 18 April 2026. For the first time it came as a double album, with a second LP of B-sides and rarities from the period personally curated by Joe Elliott.
The band's own member page lists Phil Collen's other groups as Dumb Blondes, Lucy, Tush, Girl, Cybernauts, Man Raze and Delta Deep. He was born in London on 8 December 1957.
The band’s own album page describes Adrenalize, released on 31 March 1992, as the first album to follow Steve Clark’s death in 1991. It was produced by Mike Shipley and Def Leppard with Robert John "Mutt" Lange as executive producer, and debuted at No.1 on both the UK and US charts.
According to the band’s own album page, only one outside player appears on Adrenalize: Phil Nicholas, on keyboards for "Stand Up (Kick Love into Motion)".
The band’s own album page credits Songs From The Sparkle Lounge to Def Leppard and Ronan McHugh, and lists exactly one additional musician: Tim McGraw, on vocals for "Nine Lives". It came out on 25 April 2008 in Europe and 29 April in North America, and entered the Billboard 200 at No.5.
Songfacts notes that the deliberate misspelling came from the example of Led Zeppelin, whose own name is "Lead" with a letter taken out. Def Leppard applied the same trick twice over, to both halves of Deaf Leopard.
At his audition Steve Clark played the closing solo from Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird". It was good enough that Joe Elliott said "He's in" without hesitating. Clark joined in January 1978, five months after the band had formed in Sheffield.
The money for the self-financed debut, The Def Leppard E.P., came from the singer's father, Joe Elliott Sr, who emptied his bank account to hand over the £150 it needed. The bill at Fairview Studios in Hull came to £148.50 — and the band spent the £1.50 change on a celebratory bag of fish and chips before driving home to Sheffield.
The label name Bludgeon Riffola started life as an insult. Record Mirror used the phrase to dismiss the band's September 1978 support slot for The Human League at Sheffield's The Limit. Pete Willis remarked that it sounded like tinned Italian food, and the joke stuck long enough to end up on their own record label.
The band's first national radio play began with an ambush. When BBC Radio 1's John Peel appeared at an event at Sheffield University, Joe Elliott jumped on stage, pressed the EP into his hands and told him to play it. Peel rang the next afternoon to say he would — and that evening at half past seven "Ride Into The Sun" went out across the country.
The deal was settled from the American end. A copy of the EP reached Cliff Burnstein, head of A&R at Mercury in Chicago, who telephoned his UK counterpart and told him to sign the band whatever it took. Def Leppard duly signed to Vertigo in Britain — and once the ink was dry Burnstein left Mercury to co-manage them with Peter Mensch.
The contract was signed in August 1979, the day after Joe Elliott, Rick Savage, Pete Willis and Steve Clark had been at Knebworth Park to watch Led Zeppelin. Rick Allen was still legally a minor, so his parents signed on his behalf.
Frank Noon, who drummed on The Def Leppard E.P., was offered the job permanently the very next day. Out of loyalty to The Next Band he turned it down — a decision he later called the biggest regret of his life. Within a week the seat went to Rick Allen, who had just turned 15.
On the night Rick Allen turned 16 at the Hammersmith Odeon, AC/DC's Bon Scott walked into the dressing room singing Happy Birthday and handed him a big bowl of Smarties. Allen remembers it as Scott's own funny way of showing some affection.
Joe Elliott was 20 when Def Leppard opened AC/DC's Highway To Hell tour of the UK, and he still remembers a night at a shared hotel: the four of them were splitting a single beer when Bon Scott threw some money over and told them to get a round in. Elliott has said he never got the chance to return the favour. Scott died a few months after that tour, on 19 February 1980, at the age of 33.
Joe Elliott has said the band watched AC/DC every night of that support run in order to learn from them, and that the biggest lesson was the value of repetition. If you want to last, he argues, you do not rebuild the set every night: AC/DC never changed their sound, their look or their work ethic.
The debut album was recorded at Tittenhurst Park near Ascot in Berkshire — the house where John Lennon was filmed singing "Imagine", and where Ringo Starr took up residence after Lennon moved to New York. Joe Elliott says he drew the long straw and got Lennon's bedroom.
The debut was finished in three weeks at a cost of £16,000 — minimal even by the standards of the time. The band had been playing most of the songs live for the best part of a year, and got nine backing tracks down on the first day alone.
The cowbell you hear on "It Don't Matter" is not a cowbell. There wasn't one in the studio, so the band hit a kettle instead. It sounded right, Joe Elliott says, but they dented the thing beyond saving — and the woman who came in to cook and clean was not amused when she found it the next day.
Joe Elliott's first ever concert, at 12 years old, was Marc Bolan and T.Rex at Sheffield City Hall. In late 1978 he chalked "DEF LEPPARD WILL PLAY HERE IN 1980!" on the wall beside its front doors. The prediction came true on 10 April 1980, when the band headlined the hall to a sell-out crowd — travelling in from their parents' houses that afternoon on the number 52 bus.
At that April 1980 Sheffield City Hall show the band also played three unreleased songs. Two of them surfaced on 1981's High 'n' Dry as "Lady Strange" and — retitled from "When The Rain Falls" — "Let It Go". The third, "Medicine Man", was restructured into "Rock! Rock! (Till You Drop)" and opened Pyromania in 1983.
Joe Elliott has admitted that some of the Reading debacle was self-inflicted. He went on stage in bright red trousers and a white shirt covered in hearts, precisely because he refused to dress like every other band in a movement Def Leppard did not think they belonged to. It was also the day a flying sod of turf hit Pete Willis squarely in the groin.
The same paper that first championed the band also turned on them. Sounds, the birthplace of the NWOBHM, had held the EP up alongside Iron Maiden as the best of the crop — then accused Def Leppard of chasing the American dollar rather than success at home. The title of the single "Hello America" did nothing to help.
Geoff Barton, who had written the Sounds cover story accusing the band of changing their spots, gave High 'n' Dry a rave review a year later. The damage in Britain was already done: the album peaked at No.26, lower than the debut's No.15.
Working with Robert John "Mutt" Lange began with waiting. Manager Peter Mensch had wanted him for the first album and could not get him; for the second, Lange was still finishing Foreigner's 4. Told in January 1981 that they faced another month's delay, Joe Elliott pulled Foreigner's Double Vision out of his record collection and snapped it in half.
Lange chose Battery Studios for its 1976 Cadac analogue desk. The building had been known as Morgan in the 70s and had hosted Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Paul McCartney; Iron Maiden had just vacated it, having been in there with Martin Birch making Killers.
"Let It Go" started out as "When The Rain Falls", with introspective words about being stuck indoors at his parents' house in the rain. Mutt Lange heard it as their potential "Highway To Hell" and told them to go global with it. The band rewrote it thinking of Queen's "We Will Rock You", and gave it a new title.
"Bringin' On The Heartbreak" was another retitling — it began as "A Certain Heartache". Stuck on the vocal, Joe Elliott went next door to Battery's Studio Two, where Whitesnake were making Saints & Sinners, to ask David Coverdale for advice. He watched Coverdale nail a vocal in one take, then got talked through a bottle of brandy and a run of Deep Purple stories; his only other memory of the day is being sick on the pavement. The next day his own vocal fell into place.
"Bringin' On the Heartbreak" failed to chart on its 1981 release. After Pyromania broke, a remix was added to the 1984 reissue of High 'n' Dry and put out again as a single, this time reaching No.61 in the US. It was written by Steve Clark, Pete Willis and Joe Elliott.
On the Hysteria tour of 1987-88 the band reworked "Bringin' On the Heartbreak", opening it on acoustic guitars and switching to electric for the solo. Phil Collen says the idea was his, and that other acts picked it up fast — Tesla, who were on the tour with them, and then Scorpions, Bon Jovi and much of the rest of the 80s.
High 'n' Dry did nothing much on release. US sales stalled at around a quarter of a million, less than half what the label had projected. Then MTV started rotating "Bringin' On The Heartbreak", and telexes began arriving: 10,000 copies that week, then 30,000 a month. By the time Pyromania came out, High 'n' Dry had sold 800,000 in America.
The title track, "High 'n' Dry (Saturday Night)", was one of the fifteen songs named on the "Filthy 15" list issued by the Parents Music Resource Center, which formed in 1985. The stated reason was drug and alcohol use.
"High and dry" normally means stranded and helpless, an expression that comes from ships left behind by a receding tide. Def Leppard read it another way: here "high" means blind drunk, and setting it against "dry" — which in drinking terms means the opposite — turns the idiom inside out.
Songfacts traces the band's famously meticulous production method back to High 'n' Dry. They had already tried Queen-style overdubbing on the debut, but quickly and roughly. Working with Mutt Lange is where they learned to treat an album as an intricate, layered piece of work.
Pete Willis' drinking became critical during the High 'n' Dry tour. Joe Elliott took to phoning Phil Collen, formerly of Girl, from America — asking whether he could learn 18 songs in three days, then ringing back in the cold light of day to say Willis had apologised so it wasn't happening, but to bear it in mind.
Joe Elliott has described the morning that settled Pete Willis' dismissal: Willis turned up at ten so drunk that he had his guitar on backwards, strumming the back of it with the strings facing his body. Mutt Lange laughed, then sent him home. What frightened Elliott was not the guitar — it was the thought that Lange might walk off the project.
Joe Elliott is careful to stress how much of Pyromania is Pete Willis. Willis co-wrote four of its ten songs, "Photograph" among them, and played the rhythm guitar on every track. Phil Collen came in for the final stages and played solos on five songs; Steve Clark took the other five.
When Pyromania was being made the band owed their record company £700,000, and each member was living on £40 a week. The final mix was finished just before Christmas 1982 after nine months' work, at a cost of over £1m — meaning the album had to sell at least three million copies just to clear the debt.
Before the third album Mutt Lange told the band they could make a record nobody had made before — and warned them in the same breath that they would go down a lot of dead ends, and that even he did not know where it would end up. Joe Elliott reckons that worked precisely because the band had no previous success to argue with him about; Lange could try anything.
"Photograph" started from a single line. Mutt Lange came up with "All I've got is a photograph", and the song was built around the idea it suggested: a man obsessed with a woman of whom he has nothing but a picture.
The band sometimes dedicated "Photograph" to Marilyn Monroe on stage, and the video featured a Monroe lookalike, so listeners concluded the song was about her. Songfacts records that the Monroe association was constructed for the sake of a good story — the lyric had no specific inspiration behind it.
Ringo Starr had a US No.1 in 1973 with a song also called "Photograph", on similar subject matter. The band worried the two were too close; Lange thought nobody would notice. In 2005 Nickelback had a huge hit with a "Photograph" of their own.
Thomas Dolby, fresh from "She Blinded Me With Science", played on Pyromania. He felt his own name on a rock record might confuse people now that he was known as a solo artist, so Mutt Lange invented a pseudonym for him: Booker T. Boffin.
Bringing in Thomas Dolby was Mutt Lange's idea. Lange had already used him on Foreigner's 4, where Dolby played the synthesiser on "Waiting For A Girl Like You". On Pyromania he layered massed synth chords over the intro to the opening track "Rock! Rock! (Till You Drop)", and added colour to "Foolin'" and "Die Hard The Hunter". Joe Elliott has said the band wanted an album that sounded the way Spielberg's films looked.
The words at the start of "Rock of Ages" — "Gunter Glieben Glauten Globen" — mean nothing at all. Mutt Lange got tired of counting the band in with "one, two, three, four" and started saying that instead. When people asked what it meant, the band made things up.
The title of "Rock of Ages" comes from a hymn. The music existed but the words would not come; one night a bible study group met in the studio, and the next day Joe Elliott found a bible lying open at "Rock Of Ages". He started singing the phrase, Mutt Lange decided it was perfect for the chorus, and the rest of the lyric grew out of it.
Joe Elliott has said that "Rock Of Ages" would not exist if the band had not heard Joan Jett's "I Love Rock And Roll". What they took from it was not the sound but a single idea — that a song built to be an anthem was something they could write too.
The druid mouthing the opening words and playing chess in the "Rock of Ages" video is the band's manager, Peter Mensch. David Mallet directed it.
There is an owl in the "Rock of Ages" video for the sake of a pun. According to Joe Elliott, director David Mallet thought it would be funny to put the bird in at the line "all right", because it sounds like "owl-right".
The backwards voices in the "Rock of Ages" guitar solo are real, but they do not mean anything. Joe Elliott has explained that the band were playing with new studio toys, recording whatever phrases came to mind against the backdrop of the Cold War and the Falklands, then reversing them and keeping whatever sounded strange enough.
David Mallet directed the "Foolin'" video, filling it with fire and gothic symbolism to play up the album title. The mysterious woman playing a harp — an instrument that appears nowhere in the song — is Perri Lister, who turned up in several Billy Idol videos while the two were together.
For a spell in August 1983 Pyromania was selling 100,000 copies a day in America. It reached No.2 on the Billboard chart, held off by Michael Jackson's Thriller — although Joe Elliott points out that they did outsell Thriller for one week, and that in that particular week the Flashdance soundtrack was No.1, Def Leppard No.2 and Jackson No.3.
The gap between the two countries was extreme. Songfacts puts Pyromania at nearly seven million copies in America against roughly 60,000 in England. It took the 1987 album Hysteria for the band to break through properly at home.
The band's first headline US tour opened on 29 April 1983 in a 10,000-seat arena in Odessa, Texas that was a quarter full. Within weeks the shows were selling out. On 17 September, 55,000 people packed Jack Murphy Stadium in San Diego — the biggest headline show of their career to that point, with Mötley Crüe, Uriah Heep and Eddie Money supporting.
In September 1983, ahead of a show at the LA Forum, word reached the band that Brian May wanted to come. Joe Elliott offered to sort out a pass — and was told May did not want to watch, he wanted to play. May brought his own gear, set it up, and started playing the riff from "Photograph" while the band watched from the mixing desk. That, Elliott has said, was the moment he realised how far they had come.
In 1983 "Photograph" was voted the most popular video on MTV, beating Michael Jackson. Joe Elliott calls it a landmark moment — and notes in the same breath that airplay does not pay immediately: nothing came in until that tour was over, and the band were living on $100 a week while their arenas sold out.
British bands who leave the country to escape high taxes after they make money are said to become "tax exiles". Songfacts records that Def Leppard did exactly that in 1984, moving to Ireland.
After Lange withdrew, the band and their managers approached Chris Thomas and Trevor Horn; both were too busy, and Phil Collins was briefly considered. It was co-manager Cliff Burnstein who put forward Jim Steinman.
The reasoning behind hiring Jim Steinman had a hole in it from the start: Steinman wrote the songs on Bat Out Of Hell, but Todd Rundgren produced it. Joe Elliott says he pointed this out at the time, and that Steinman was simply the only option they had.
Jim Steinman's first day in the producer's chair was 11 August 1984. That afternoon, while the band were loosely running the riff and part of the melody of "Don't Shoot Shotgun" — not even tuned up yet — Steinman announced that he thought they had it. Phil Collen pointed out that they had not tuned; Joe Elliott remembers that as the first bad sign.
What ended the Steinman era was not music but carpet. When he demanded a better quality of carpet in the control room, Joe Elliott told the rest of the band they should be changing the producer before they changed the carpet. The contract was cancelled after eight weeks, and by mid-October Steinman was gone.
Joe Elliott still has a box of tapes marked "Hysteria: The Steinman Sessions". By his own account nothing on them is finished, the band would never release them, and they will stay where they are — locked away in his library.
The songs worked on during those eight weeks with Steinman included "Animal", "Women", "Gods Of War", "Love And Affection", "Don't Shoot Shotgun" and "Run Riot", all of which reached Hysteria. One more, then called "Love Bites", was later rewritten as "I Wanna Be Your Hero" — the "Love Bites" that ended up on the album is a different song.
By Rick Allen's own account he was told in hospital that he would be there for at least six months. Producer Mutt Lange came to visit and lit a fire under him, and a group of Hare Krishnas brought him healthy food every day. He was out within a month.
Allen writes that he was told over and over that he would never drum again, and that he only began to believe otherwise when Steve Clark and Phil Collen came to see him. He started practising on a large piece of foam at the foot of his bed, and learned to play again with the help of a man named Pete Harley, who built him an electric kit. Back home in Dronfield he shut himself in a room at his parents' house and played and played.
Backstage at Castle Donington on 16 August 1986, everyone from Ozzy Osbourne to the Scorpions came by to wish Rick Allen well, and he and Joe Elliott got through the better part of a bottle of whiskey. When Elliott introduced him and the crowd roared, Allen burst into tears — and wondered whether crying onto his pedals would electrocute him. He counts that day among the five most important of his life.
The album title came from Rick Allen. In February 1984, when the band had just moved into a shared house in Dublin, he woke up after another night out in the city and observed: "This is hysteria!" The name stuck.
Mutt Lange's brief to the band was simple. As Phil Collen tells it, Lange proposed making a rock version of Thriller — an album you could take seven singles off. In the end, seven of Hysteria's twelve tracks were released as singles.
When Mutt Lange came back, the band scrapped 16 months of recordings and started again. Joe Elliott says the material was not bad — it was as good as Pyromania — but Lange asked why they would want to make Pyromania 2: they had leapt from High 'n' Dry to Pyromania, and now they had to leap that far again.
To get the sound of Hysteria the band abandoned big amplifiers in favour of Rockmans — Walkman-sized units whose tone could be controlled to the nth degree. They also began experimenting with multi-layered vocal effects and with samplers so primitive they had to be triggered by hand.
"Rocket" grew out of a recording of tribal drums that Joe Elliott happened to hear. He took the tape, looped it and built the song on top of it. The lyric is a stream of consciousness naming things he had grown up with, from Ziggy Stardust onwards.
The lyric of "Rocket" is essentially an index of the songs that shaped the band. "Jack Flash", "Rocket Man", "Sgt. Pepper and the band", "Ziggy", "Bennie and the Jets", "Jet", "Johnny B", "Jean Genie", "Killer Queen" and "Major Tom" call up the Rolling Stones, Elton John, The Beatles, David Bowie, Paul McCartney, Chuck Berry and Queen, one phrase at a time.
Played backwards, the voice at the start of "Rocket" says "We're fighting with the gods of war" — a nod to another track on the same album, "Gods Of War". More Def Leppard song titles are hidden backwards in the instrumental break.
The line that follows the word "Rocket" in the chorus — "satellite of love" — is the title of a 1972 Lou Reed song. When Joe Elliott first heard the title "Rocket", Reed's song was the first thing that came to mind.
"Love Bites" was written by Mutt Lange himself, out of his country influences, and then given the full Def Leppard balladeering treatment. Small breaths and squeaks that Joe Elliott calls the "Simon Le Bon bits" lifted it above the ordinary — and one set of Lange's backing vocals was rejected by the band, the only time on the whole album that they vetoed an idea of his.
"Love Bites" was the fifth US single from Hysteria and reached No.1 in October 1988 — the band's only Billboard Hot 100 chart-topper. Two more singles followed from the same album: "Armageddon It" (No.3, January 1989) and "Rocket" (No.12, April 1989).
According to Songfacts, "Love Bites" is the only track on Hysteria with keyboards on it.
A long-running rumour held that something sinister is hidden in the final seconds of "Love Bites". The band have refuted it repeatedly, notably in a Hysteria documentary: what is actually there, Songfacts records, is Mutt Lange muttering in a Yorkshire accent through a vocoder.
"Gods Of War" began with an opening riff by Steve Clark. Joe Elliott's lyric turned outward, expressing bewilderment at the world leaders running the Cold War for their own ends — the one track on Hysteria with any political colour to it.
Towards the end of "Gods Of War" you can hear recordings of US President Ronald Reagan addressing terrorists, telling them they can run but cannot hide.
With eleven tracks done, Mutt Lange alone kept insisting the album was missing something. The budget was gone, the band were exhausted, and nobody agreed with him. Then, during a break, Joe Elliott picked up a guitar and played an idea of his own — and Lange came back into the room calling it the best hook he had heard in five years. It became "Pour Some Sugar On Me".
The lyric of "Pour Some Sugar On Me" was assembled by Joe Elliott and Mutt Lange each dictating ideas into a recorder and then listening to the other's tape. The opening line came off Lange's. It was the fastest song on the album: the whole thing was banged out in about two days.
The first record Joe Elliott ever bought was "Sugar, Sugar", the 1969 hit by the cartoon band The Archies. Near the end of it comes the line "Pour a little sugar on me, baby" — which Elliott has acknowledged as at least a subconscious source for his own song.
The words to "Pour Some Sugar On Me" started as phonetic sounds fitted to the music and were only later turned into actual language. Joe Elliott has said this was done in the manner of T. Rex's "Bang A Gong (Get It On)", whose lyrics sound great without necessarily meaning anything.
The rapped feel of the verses is deliberate. Joe Elliott told Kaos2000 magazine that the song exists because Run-D.M.C. and Aerosmith had done "Walk This Way": once it was clear rock and rap could mix, Def Leppard wrote their own.
Hysteria stalled on the way up. Sales faltered at around five million — then strip club dancers in the United States started using "Pour Some Sugar On Me" as their backing track, word of mouth spread, and radio picked it up across the country. After that the album was shifting tens of thousands a day, and finished at 16 million.
"Animal" was Def Leppard's first hit in their own country. Even Pyromania, a ten-million seller in America, had been largely ignored at home; "Animal" broke through, and earned the band their first appearance on Top Of The Pops.
"Animal" began as a Phil Collen demo. During sessions in Paris, Mutt Lange heard a vocal Joe Elliott had put down, decided it was a killer, and had the song rewritten around it. The track took three years to finish — and became the band's first UK top ten single.
Choosing "Women" rather than "Animal" as the first US single was a calculation. The band thought "Animal" was the natural choice, but wanted the first taste of the album to land with the hardcore American audience — largely male — who had bought over ten million copies of Pyromania. "Women" only grazed the chart at No.80, but rock radio played it, and Hysteria sold around 1.5 million before "Animal" was released.
For a song called "Women", the video contains none — not a single woman appears on screen for its duration, unless you count the ones inside the magic comic book a boy is reading. Jean Pellerin, who also directed "Hysteria" and "Love Bites", was behind it.
Phil Collen has said that the title track "Hysteria" is about finding spiritual enlightenment. The name leads people to hear it as a song about getting hysterical; by his account it is pointing somewhere else entirely.
The title track started from a guitar part Rick Savage was playing. Phil Collen sang a melody over it on the spot in Dublin, Savage answered with another section, and the two were excited enough to take it round to friends of theirs — clothes designers in the city — and play it on acoustic guitar. They thought they had the chorus. Mutt Lange told them they had a great verse and a great bridge, and that the chorus was still to come.
Joe Elliott told Kaos2000 magazine that "Hysteria" has eleven guitar parts layered into it. Since that cannot be reproduced on stage, the band made a hybrid of them — separating the parts an audience can actually hear from the ones it cannot — and reduced the song to two guitars live.
"Armageddon It" is a pun: "Are you getting it?" folded into "Armageddon it". The band pulled the same trick with "Rocket" — rock it.
Songfacts credits Def Leppard as the first major rock band to play on a stage in the middle of the arena, a format they adopted for the American leg of the Hysteria tour. It let them sell more tickets — and set them apart from the rest of the era.
Playing in the round on the Hysteria tour meant the band had to get from the dressing room to a stage in the middle of the crowd. The solution was to be wheeled through the audience in laundry carts.
Mutt Lange spent five months mixing Hysteria, most of it setting the mood, and lost three more weeks to hospital with a leg injury. The album was finished in early 1987 with twelve tracks instead of the usual ten: as Rick Savage explains, new songs kept arriving during the long gestation, and once they were down to twelve nobody wanted to throw two more out.
In September 1990 the band had given Steve Clark six months' leave of absence — unconditional and very informal, with an explicit assurance that he had not been fired and that no replacement would be sought. Joe Elliott told him they would carry on working on the album and see how things stood in February. Clark went back to his new home in Chelsea, London.
Steve Clark was deeply involved in the early writing. Six of the ten songs on Adrenalize carry his name. The band went back to work the day after his funeral: the songs were too good to lose, Joe Elliott said, and Clark would not have wanted them to quit.
Phil Collen decided early on that he would play all the guitars himself; bringing someone in would have meant teaching them what the band was about. To do it he had to learn Steve Clark's parts off the four-track demos the two of them had made together — an experience he describes as listening to a ghost.
Mutt Lange could not produce Adrenalize because he was working on Bryan Adams' Waking Up The Neighbours. The band turned instead to his right-hand man Mike Shipley, who had mixed Hysteria and engineered Pyromania. Lange stayed close anyway — on the phone every day, writing with the band in gaps in Adams' schedule, and contributing backing vocals.
Only two songs were written after Steve Clark died: "White Lightning" and "Let's Get Rocked". Phil Collen alone wrote the music for the first, shaping it with direct reference to "Gods Of War" from Hysteria. Joe Elliott's words hold Clark's story alongside those of other rock musicians who died young, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin among them. Elliott calls it the most personal and most moving lyric he has written.
After finishing "White Lightning" the band needed something completely ridiculous. "Let's Get Rocked" was it — its mood and title taken from "Let's Go Crazy", the funk-rock explosion on Prince's Purple Rain. Joe Elliott and Phil Collen were infatuated with Prince at the time and wanted something he might have done, built for a stadium. Elliott wrote the words after watching an episode of The Simpsons.
Joe Elliott told Kaos 2000 magazine that critics missed the joke in the line "I suppose rock's out of the question". He argues that the song is structurally just a voice over drums and bass — theirs simply enormously bigger — and not a million miles from Prince's "When Doves Cry" or "Little Red Corvette".
There is no such word as "adrenalize" in the dictionary, as Joe Elliott points out. It was chosen anyway because it sounded right for what the band meant by it: plugging the power back in and re-energising themselves musically.
Vivian Campbell has said that his two big experiences before Def Leppard — Dio and Whitesnake — neither of them ended well for him. What he thinks makes the difference is where the ego sits: in Def Leppard everyone is in service of the music, and there is no latitude at all for being an arsehole.
"Two Steps Behind" first appeared in 1992 on the UK release of the "Make Love Like A Man" single. The following year Michael Kamen added orchestration for Last Action Hero; that version went onto the soundtrack and was released as a single in its own right, becoming a hit. It is one of the few Def Leppard songs written entirely by Joe Elliott.
Retro Active is both Vivian Campbell's first album with the band and a record of his predecessor's last work. Louder singles out the weighty "Desert Song" — styled on Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir" — and "Fractured Love" as the tracks driven by Steve Clark's signature riffing.
"Miss You in a Heartbeat", on Retro Active, was written by Phil Collen but first recorded by The Law, whose sole self-titled album came out in 1991. That band was fronted by Collen's friend Paul Rodgers and also included Kenney Jones and Pino Palladino. Collen has said he wrote the song about being away from his family when his son Rory was a baby.
While it was being made, Slang carried a bleakly humorous working title inside the band: Commercial Suicide. Joe Elliott says they knew people would wonder what on earth they were doing, but that they could not make another Adrenalize. He calls it their grown-up album.
Slang was made in a house in Spain — the one used as the setting for the second series of the British comedy drama Auf Wiedersehen, Pet. The band lived there and worked there. Rick Savage describes the recording as old-fashioned: the backing tracks were almost live, close to how they sounded in a rehearsal room, and enhanced from there. Rick Allen reverted to a semi-acoustic kit for it.
Slang was the first full album Vivian Campbell made with the band. By his own account the only clear directive was that they could not make a record that sounded like Def Leppard — so he kept his head down and went with the flow, while privately wondering what on earth was going on.
The three songs that close Slang — "Blood Runs Cold", "Where Does Love Go When It Dies" and "Pearl Of Euphoria" — are where the album's real depth lies. "Blood Runs Cold" is a second elegy for Steve Clark, written by Joe Elliott and Phil Collen. Elliott describes "White Lightning" as the grandiose, big-screen version of Clark, and this one as the down-and-dirty version.
The middle section of "Blood Runs Cold" carries a female vocal solo. Phil Collen has said it came from co-producer Pete Woodroffe suggesting they skip the standard boring middle eight and take the listener's attention somewhere else instead. The same track pushes the bass to the front — another thing, Collen notes, the band had never done before.
The title Euphoria was in place before the album was made. It echoed Pyromania and Hysteria, and announced a band re-embracing its own history. Joe Elliott calls Slang ground zero, and Euphoria the fresh start that followed: the harmonies came back, the songs got more melodic.
The key track on Euphoria, "Promises", had a Phil Collen riff but no chorus. The band sent the multi-track to Mutt Lange in Switzerland; a week or two later it came back sliced and diced, and they realised the chorus had been there all along. Lange then flew to Dublin for a long weekend, co-writing two more songs — "It's Only Love" and "All Night" — and singing backing vocals with them.
"Back in Your Face" on Euphoria is a throwback to early-70s British glam. Joe Elliott says the target was the sound of The Glitter Band — so the band tracked down the engineer who had worked with producer Mike Leander on those records and asked him for the exact millisecond delay on the handclaps and snare. It was supposed to be a guarded secret; they got it anyway.
The lyric of "Paper Sun" on Euphoria was written in the aftermath of the 1998 Omagh bombing in Northern Ireland, which killed 29 people and injured more than 200. Phil Collen has said Def Leppard are an apolitical band, but that this one genuinely affected them.
Outside writers were used on five songs on X. "Now", "Everyday" and "You're So Beautiful" were co-written with Marti Frederiksen, who had worked with Aerosmith; "Long, Long Way To Go" came from Wayne Hector, author of Westlife's "Flying Without Wings"; and "Unbelievable" from the Swedish trio Per Aldenheim, Andreas Carlsson and Max Martin. Joe Elliott has said he was against bringing in outside writers at all.
X was not a flop: No.14 in the UK, No.11 in the US. But Louder's verdict is that where one experimental album, Slang, produced some of the deepest music of the band's career, X came up short. Joe Elliott's own assessment is that it is not a standout album, but not a complete duffer either.
Yeah!, released on 23 May 2006, gathers the songs the band grew up on in the late 60s and 70s — The Kinks, Badfinger, T. Rex, David Bowie, Sweet, Roxy Music, Mott The Hoople, Free, Faces and Thin Lizzy. The track list includes ELO's "10538 Overture", T. Rex's "20th Century Boy", Thin Lizzy's "Don't Believe A Word" and Bowie's "Drive-In Saturday".
Yeah! took a mauling from the British press — Louder cites a one-word review that read simply: "No." Louder's own view is that the album deserved better, singling out the band's remakes of David Essex's "Rock On" and ELO's "10538 Overture".
A state fair on the banks of the Mississippi in 2005 was the turning point. Phil Collen lost his temper — the band were better than this — and everyone agreed. Management moved from Q-Prime to Howard Kaufman's HK Management, and Def Leppard went back to arenas on co-headline packages. In 2006 two tracks from Yeah!, "Rock On" and "No Matter What", brought them renewed American rock radio play, which Joe Elliott says gave them their biggest US tour since Hysteria.
"Nine Lives" was co-written and performed by Tim McGraw together with Phil Collen, Joe Elliott and Rick Savage. The wheels were set in motion in 2005 by McGraw's long-time tour manager Robert Allen — brother of Def Leppard drummer Rick Allen — and the collaboration itself began a year later, when McGraw sat in at the band's Hollywood Bowl show.
"Nine Lives" was debuted inside the video game Guitar Hero III. Joe Elliott explained to NME that radio no longer had a format for a new Def Leppard song, so games were deemed the next best thing.
Louder rates Songs From The Sparkle Lounge as the best Def Leppard album since Hysteria, and singles out "Love" — Rick Savage's richly textured, left-field power ballad — as its most adventurous moment, an homage to Queen.
The Taylor Swift collaboration began with a remark of hers. In 2008, on the Songs From The Sparkle Lounge tour, someone put a laptop in front of Joe Elliott backstage: on it, a rising country-pop singer was saying there was only one band she would ever do a Crossroads with, and it was Def Leppard. Making contact was easier than it might have been — Swift's tour manager at the time was Robert Allen, brother of the band's drummer.
The Crossroads episode was recorded over two shows at the Acuff Theater in Nashville in early October 2008 and broadcast on CMT on 8 November, three days before Taylor Swift's second album Fearless came out. The two acts performed eleven songs together, opening with Swift and Joe Elliott duetting on "Photograph".
Rick Savage reckons the CMT Crossroads show with Taylor Swift opened a few people's eyes — a reminder, as he puts it, that there is more to this band than just heavy rock.
The band's contract with Universal Music was fulfilled by Songs From The Sparkle Lounge, and no new deal was offered. Joe Elliott describes what they became next as effectively the biggest cottage industry on the planet: they still had their own label, Bludgeon Riffola, and could licence it to whoever they chose. Two albums came out through independent distributors — Mirrorball – Live & More in 2011 and Def Leppard in 2015.
"Undefeated", the first single from Mirror Ball, was premiered on 12 April 2011 on Rob Birnie's show on Planet Rock — a station where Joe Elliott himself has a Saturday evening programme.
Phil Collen explained the self-titled choice to Billboard: given the state of the industry, nobody knew whether there would be another Def Leppard album, and this one genuinely represented them. It was the first record they had made for themselves rather than to please a label or a business agenda — which, he said, was frightening in itself.
Joe Elliott has said that every time he tried to describe the finished album to someone, the only answer that worked was that it sounded like Def Leppard. Other titles were considered and none stuck, until Phil Collen suggested simply calling it Def Leppard — and everyone agreed. After 35 years without a self-titled record, the reasoning went, it was about time.
On the 2015 self-titled album, Joe Elliott says, the band stopped being afraid of their own past. Phil Collen brought in a bass line he was worried sounded too much like Queen's "Another One Bites The Dust"; ten years earlier that might have killed it, but this time the reaction was enthusiasm. The song became "Man Enough".
The title of "Man Enough" came from Joe Elliott. Phil Collen recalls that at Rick Allen's 50th birthday party Elliott announced he had a great idea for the song and that it was called "Are You Man Enough To Be My Girl". The bass riff underneath it was Collen's, written with a "Billie Jean"-like disco feel in mind.
The hardest part of making the 2015 album, according to Joe Elliott, was the running order. The arguments went round in circles until every member wrote down the sequence he wanted, and they worked out a compromise by comparing each other's lists.
"Sea Of Love" on the 2015 album features Debbi Blackwell-Cook, Phil Collen's bandmate in Delta Deep, on vocals. Collen has said he wrote the song assuming it would be a Delta Deep track — then played it to Def Leppard, who liked it. Once Rick Allen put drums on it the feel shifted again, away from its original Lenny Kravitz-ish rock-soul and towards something jazzier.
In 2018 the band recorded a cover of Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus" at Spotify Studios in New York. The official video followed that November, and the track went onto the compilation The Story So Far – The Best Of, released on 30 November; first-pressing vinyl copies came with an exclusive 7-inch single of it.
The plan for Diamond Star Halos was the one the band had used since 1999: work at Joe's Garage, Elliott's home studio in Dublin. The first lockdown began in the very week they were due to gather there. Instead they recorded ideas and individual parts at home on laptops, shared them via Dropbox, and left producer Ronan McHugh to assemble the finished tracks from a studio in his back garden.
Joe Elliott reckons the separation worked in their favour. Different time zones meant he would wake up in Dublin to a message from Phil Collen with a new idea waiting. He has said he does not think the band will ever make an album the traditional way again.
Alison Krauss explained to Mojo why the bluegrass world has a soft spot for Def Leppard: stacking a baritone part under a high male lead is a heroic sound to bluegrass ears, and an album like Hysteria is full of exactly that. When she told Joe Elliott, he was floored — he had no idea the bluegrass crowd were listening.
Diamond Star Halos was already finished at fourteen tracks when "Kick" arrived. Phil Collen had written it with songwriter Dave Bassett, with a female artist in mind — until he played it to Joe Elliott, who told him it was obviously a Def Leppard song. The album became a fifteen-song record and "Kick" became its lead single; Collen's demo guitars and demo backing vocals are still on the finished recording.
"Fire It Up" on Diamond Star Halos was built on Queen's "We Will Rock You" and Joan Jett's version of "I Love Rock 'N' Roll". Phil Collen says he wanted a rock anthem, and that the hard part is writing one that does not come out naff and contrived.
"This Guitar" had been knocking around for some seventeen years before it reached Diamond Star Halos. Phil Collen had co-written it with CJ Vanston, and Joe Elliott pushed for it to be tried at last. He sang it onto his laptop at home in Dublin through a two-hundred-dollar microphone, and calls it one of the best vocals he has ever done.
The lyric of "From Here To Eternity", which closes the album, comes out of film noir. Rick Savage says he was thinking of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall: a 1940s gangster scenario in which a man watches his lover shot dead, shoots the man who did it and goes to the electric chair. Joe Elliott calls it the band's murder ballad.
Diamond Star Halos was voted album of the year for 2022 in the Classic Rock writers' poll. Louder's report calls it comfortably the best album by this line-up.
On 22 May 2023 the band played Bramall Lane in their home city of Sheffield — the opening night of the European double-headline tour with Mötley Crüe, and a homecoming 47 years after they formed. It was only the second time they had played a stadium in their own city, in front of a near-capacity crowd of some 40,000. The recording was released on 21 November 2025 as Diamond Star Heroes Live From Sheffield.
The single "Just Like '73", released on 13 June 2024, features a guest solo by Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine. It came about because Morello heard the early demo with only Phil Collen and Joe Elliott on it; the approach was made through Brian Monaco of Sony Music. Morello has said he used to play "Rock of Ages" in his college covers band.
The sound of "Just Like '73" was aimed at a specific target. Phil Collen has said they went for the drum sound producer Mike Leander got on Gary Glitter's early-70s records, and layered a Slade-style backing vocal over it — shouty, loud, close to a football chant. Joe Elliott wanted a lyric that reflected that same very British glam moment.
The single "Rejoice", released on 22 January 2026, reverses the band's usual method. Normally Phil Collen arrives with a riff and Joe Elliott builds a lyric on top of it; this time Elliott turned up with the blueprint — a narrative about hitting bottom and climbing back — and asked whether Collen had music to match. Collen dug out a riff he had been sitting on.
What gave "Rejoice" its shape was a drum loop. After hearing Joe Elliott's lyrical idea, Phil Collen built a loop out of traditional instrument sounds, matched it to an arrangement he had been holding onto, and sent it over; Elliott sang straight across the top of it. Producer Ronan McHugh then rebuilt the loop properly with different sounds, and the song settled into a powerful chant.
Joe Elliott did not get the job because he could sing. By his own account, at that first session in 1977 he attempted Led Zeppelin's "Stairway To Heaven" and could only manage it an octave down: with no older brother to introduce him to music, he was a T. Rex fan who barely knew Zeppelin, Sabbath or Deep Purple beyond the singles. David Bowie's "Suffragette City" went better — but Elliott reckons the real reason he stayed was that he had helped clean up the rehearsal room and they felt sorry for him. Nobody else wanted to sing anyway.
Joe Elliott has told the story of how he was recruited the same way more than once: he ran into Pete Willis on his way home from work, heard that a band was being put together and jumped at it. What clinched it, he says, was his record collection — and the fact that he was tall. If he had not missed his bus that night, he would never have met Willis at all.
Asked where the band's cohesion comes from, Joe Elliott points to where they started. In a working-class town in the north of England, he says, if you were not going to work in a factory your options were footballer, musician or bank robber — and you probably got one shot at it. By the time Rick Allen lost his arm they had been together more than five years, and the feeling was simply that you do not throw your brother out of the family because he has had an accident. Telling Allen that only he could decide whether he could still do it is what gave him the confidence to try.
Joe Elliott has pushed back on the complaint that Def Leppard never change the set. They do change it, he says — not by 360 degrees, but here and there. Most people at a given show have not seen them for a year or two and have come to hear those songs again. He adds that he would happily see the Rolling Stones twice in two years and get 90% of the same show.
Joe Elliott has been specific about why the 2001 VH1 biopic Hysteria – The Def Leppard Story did not work. It was a low-budget experiment, and to speed the story along it put Phil Collen on the 1981 High 'n' Dry tour — before he had joined. Elliott asked for the correction and did not get it. It was also filmed in Canada, so the cars are driving on the wrong side of the road.
Phil Collen's physique is a direct consequence of a decision he made in 1986. After the years when he and Steve Clark were known as the Terror Twins, Collen stopped drinking, and has since built his life around kick-boxing and a vegan diet. He says he feels better now than he did in his twenties.
Vivian Campbell was diagnosed with cancer in 2013. He has described the first moment of hearing the word as the bottom falling out of your world — and everything after it as simply dealing with it. He does not think it changed him profoundly; it cemented what he already believed, amplifying a long-standing awareness that we are all on the clock.
Vivian Campbell joined in 1992 and the line-up has not changed since. By 2022 that was thirty years unchanged, in a band that had by then existed for forty-five.
Rick Savage has described a mid-90s flight from Shreveport, Louisiana to Chicago in which the whole band nearly died. A hailstorm hammered the plane, he heard the engines cut out, and it plummeted two thousand feet before levelling off. The stewardess was screaming; Savage was certain they were going down. What went through his head, he says, was that after everything they had been through — the Steve stuff, the Rick stuff — dying in a plane crash would be absolutely typical of them.
On the band's internal dynamic, Rick Allen sets Joe Elliott and Rick Savage against each other as opposites: Elliott the driving force and the life and soul of the band, Savage understated but the one who actually thinks. Savage sees his own role as arriving at the conclusion once an argument has worn itself out — the bass player, he says, is the bridge between the music and the rhythm, and so ends up as the man in the middle.
Songfacts notes the contrast: individual members had serious problems with drink and drugs, yet on the road the band were remarkably tame. Joe Elliott sums up the change with a line about rock bands discovering accountants — after which nobody throws a £500 television out of a window any more.
Four singles were taken from Pyromania and all four charted. "Photograph" went to No.1 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock chart and No.12 on the Hot 100; "Rock Of Ages" also topped the rock chart and reached No.16; "Foolin’" made No.9 rock and No.28 on the Hot 100; and the last of them, "Too Late For Love", reached No.9 on the rock chart.
"Animal" reached No.6 on the UK singles chart, giving the band their first top ten at home. From the same album "Love Bites" went to No.1 in the US, "Pour Some Sugar On Me" to No.2 and "Armageddon It" to No.3.
High ‘n’ Dry peaked at No.38 on the Billboard 200. The video for "Bringin’ On The Heartbreak" became one of the first played on MTV in 1982, but the song itself never entered the Hot 100 — the highest it managed was No.61, with the 1984 remix.
The expanded edition of Pyromania released on 26 April 2024 added demos and rough mixes plus a previously unreleased song, "No You Can’t Do That". Joe Elliott describes it as digging out dusty old cassettes, restored by the band’s long-serving engineer Ronan McHugh, and finding the long-lost unfinished "11th track".