FEATURE:
Pour Some Sugar on Me
Def Leppard’s Hysteria at Thirty-Five
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A classic album…
that is coming up to its thirty-fifth anniversary, Def Leppard’s Hysteria is in my thoughts. The fourth studio album from the Yorkshire band, it was released on 3rd August, 1987. Def Leppard's best-selling album to date, it went on to sell over twenty million copies worldwide, including 12 million in the U.S. It hit number one in the U.S. and U.K. It is good that Hysteria did sell so many copies as it was an incredibly expensive album to make! Running in at over an hour, Hysteria is a long album. Not that one gets bored listening to it. I feel it is a rightful classics whose singles – such as Animal and Pour Some Sugar on Me – rank alongside some of the best from the 1980s. I will get to a couple of reviews for Hysteria. Before that, there are features that explain and explore the making of the album. Loudwire investigated Hysteria on its thirty-fourth anniversary on 3rd August, 2021:
“They were one of the first bands the British press categorized as part of the NWOBHM (New Wave of British Heavy Metal) movement, but by the time Def Leppard released their fourth record, Hysteria, on Aug. 3, 1987, they had completely shattered the mold and discovered a sound based on catchy melodies, heavily processed drums, layered, shimmery walls of guitar and clean, crisp vocals. If 1983’s Pyromania marked Def Leppard’s toe-dip into pop, Hysteria was a cannonball off the deep end. Then again, guitarist Phil Collen says they never liked being categorized with British metal bands.
“Even when we were grouped as part of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, we didn’t think we were at all like the other bands people were talking about [including Iron Maiden and Diamond Head],” he told me in 1999. “We never wanted to be a metal band, ever. We're about as close to metal as we are to Madonna.”
Despite their disenchantment with metal, Def Leppard still had a slew of commercial metal fans and glam rock fans who didn’t bail on them, and with radio hits like “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” “Love Bites,” “Animal” and “Rocket,” Def Leppard attracted a new fan base from fans of U2 and Prince to kids who had just one or two hard-rock records in their collections.
“We’ve always wanted to be a band for the people,” Collen says. “When we started working on Hysteria we had just sold eight million records with Pyromania so we knew we had a fanbase. We weren’t necessarily trying to top that because you can’t go into something saying, ‘Okay, yeah, this one’s going to sell more than 8million copies.’ That’s a lot of records. We just wanted to make a record with good songs that we really liked and that were maybe a little more polished and more modern sounding. Even when we finished Hysteria we had no idea how it was going to do, but it felt like a triumph for us.”
Within days of its release, it was clear that others viewed it as a triumph as well. Hysteria reached No. 1 on both U.S. and UK album charts and went on to sell over 12 million copies in the States and over 20 million copies worldwide. And it proved that after a four-year wait for a new album, the public was still eager to embrace Def Leppard’s heavily processed sound.
Hysteria wasn’t an easy record for the band to make, and came to life only after some serious drama and soul-searching. By the time it was released, Def Leppard’s drummer Rick Allen had lost his arm in a near-fatal car crash and the level of stress they were under while writing the songs made the band consider breaking up. Then, after they toured for Hysteria, guitarist Steve Clark died from an overdose.
“People talk about ‘The Curse of Def Leppard,” and that’s so strange to me,” Collen said. “We’ve been a band since 1977. We’ve been like a family, and things happen in any family. People have accidents, people die. You enjoy the good times, and you stick together and help each other through the bad times.”
There were both good and bad times while producer Mutt Lange -- who had been with Def Leppard since their second album, 1981’s High ‘n’ Dry -- worked on Hysteria. From the start, his goal was to help create the most commercial hard rock album of all time, and reaching that goal put everyone in a pressure chamber, from the engineers to the band members. “His blueprint for Hysteria was Thriller,” recalled Collen. “He figured, ‘Well, that album's got six or seven hit singles on it. Let’s make a rock version of that.’ Talk about a challenge. And to be honest, Hysteria was a difficult record to make. Nothing came easily. We worked on it for a long time and it cost lots of money, but eventually we got there.”
To give Hysteria a sound that would stand out from the rock records flooding the marketplace, Lange used a variety of technology. All of the guitars were recorded on a Rockman amplifier and dozens of tracks were recorded and layered for every take. Then the drums were sampled individually and played through a Fairlight digital sampling synthesizer. Finally, the takes were saturated with echoey reverb, giving the songs a stadium rock vibe, even without the low, booming tones of most hard rock”.
In a year where harder-edged acts like Gun N’ Roses were releasing sweaty and sleazy albums (Appetite for Destruction), Hysteria might have seemed a bit soft and effete in comparison! That is no bad thing. I actually respect and prefer albums like Hysteria compared to some of the so-called ‘best’ of 1987. Guitar World wrote about Hysteria in 2012 and its making of. Def Leppard guitarist Phil Collen revealed and shared some of his thoughts:
“Not that everyone was receptive to it at first. “When Hysteria first came out, a lot of people went, ‘Dude, this is lame. This isn’t rock. It’s pop. It’s wussy,’ ” Collen recalls of the reaction from certain corners of the hard rock and metal world. “But actually it had the absolute effect it was supposed to have had. Because the point was to not just play to the rock audience but rather to play to everybody. And we achieved that.”
Indeed, Hysteria was a huge crossover success, and its cross-format appeal was due in large part to the creative vision of producer Robert John “Mutt” Lange, who had helmed Def Leppard’s two previous albums, High ‘n’ Dry and Pyromania, and entered into the new project with the band with the express intent of making what Collen calls “a hard rock version of [Michael Jackson’s] Thriller.” Says the guitarist, “The fact that with Thriller you had an R&B artist who crossed over not just into pop but into everything, even rock, with Eddie Van Halen playing on ‘Beat It,’ that really appealed to Mutt, and to us. But I think without Mutt’s vision the record would have been a more standard-sounding thing. He definitely pushed it.”
Just how far Lange and the band—which at the time also included singer Joe Elliot, bassist Rick Savage, drummer Rick Allen and guitarist Steve Clark, who passed away in 1991—would ultimately push things could not have been anticipated. Over the years, in fact, some of the more outlandish details of the recording sessions have seemingly passed into rock and roll mythology.
From the outset, did Mutt Lange explicitly state that with Hysteria he wanted to create something that could be as successful and have as much crossover appeal as Thriller?
Absolutely he did. That was it in a nutshell. But I think even more than that, Mutt wanted to make something that was unique. 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. I think the whole thing with Mutt was he wanted to open it up and do a hybrid thing, which obviously he’s amazing at. Just listen to all the stuff he did with Shania Twain later on, which basically brought country to the masses. It was the same with us: it was all about crossover appeal. Because, you know, I hear a lot of people say, “High ’n’ Dry is my favorite Def Leppard album.”
And it’s like, yeah, but that sound was kind of borrowed from AC/DC, which in some ways was a Mutt thing as well [Lange had produced three AC/DC albums, including Highway to Hell and Back in Black]. It very much had that vibe. To me, Def Leppard didn’t start to sound unique until Pyromania, which crossed over, and then Hysteria, which really crossed over.
Perhaps the most enduring guitar legend surrounding Hysteria is that Lange had you and Steve record many of your parts by breaking chords down into single notes and then building the chords back up by layering the tracks. But the truth is you only used this technique on the title song, correct?
Yes. I’ve heard the rumors taken as far as people saying we did the entire album one string at a time, which is crazy! [laughs] We really only did it on the bridge in “Hysteria”—the part that begins, [sings] “I gotta know tonight…” If I remember correctly it was just Mutt and me, sitting in a little jingle studio in Dublin, with me playing the part on one string, then stopping and doing it again on the next string and so on.
What was Mutt’s reasoning for having you do it this way?
He heard a certain sound in his head and he knew he wanted it to be a guitar and not a keyboard, but he also didn’t want there to be any sort of arpeggiation to it. And when you strum a chord on a guitar there’s always a certain amount of that. He wanted all the notes to hit right on the nose, so that everything about the sound hit the listener at the same time. And it worked.
What do you consider the legacy of Hysteria?
To me, it sounds like a classic rock album. And not classic in the sense of classic rock but in the sense of one of those albums that you put on and it takes you somewhere. People always talk about the production element and how long it took and all the tracks and all these things, but at its heart the music means something, and it achieves what it sets out to achieve. Even though it’s got all this stuff going on, it’s very real sounding. And I think over the years people have started to appreciate it for what it is. But you know, I remember when the record was just finished and Steve and I were first sitting there listening to the whole thing. We were so happy. We figured it was a masterpiece, and we felt that even if everyone else thought it sucked, that was okay. We said, “Even if only our mothers buy this album, we’ll be cool with it because we’re so proud of it.” [laughs] Of course, a few other people bought it, as well”.
I will round off with a couple of reviews for Hysteria. Press for the album has been largely positive. As it spawned a host of singles, there was no escaping Def Leppard’s fourth studio album! As Wikipedia explains, Hysteria has been placed high in critical ranking lists (“In 2005, Hysteria was ranked number 464 in Rock Hard magazine's book of The 500 Greatest Rock & Metal Albums of All Time. Hysteria got the same placement on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 best albums of all time, the magazine also ranked the album atop its list of the 50 greatest hair metal albums. Loudwire placed the album at No. 2 on their list of the top 30 hair metal albums”). This is what AllMusic had to offer about the hugely acclaimed Hysteria:
“Where Pyromania had set the standard for polished, catchy pop-metal, Hysteria only upped the ante. Pyromania's slick, layered Mutt Lange production turned into a painstaking obsession with dense sonic detail on Hysteria, with the result that some critics dismissed the record as a stiff, mechanized pop sellout (perhaps due in part to Rick Allen's new, partially electronic drum kit). But Def Leppard's music had always employed big, anthemic hooks, and few of the pop-metal bands who had hit the charts in the wake of Pyromania could compete with Leppard's sense of craft; certainly none had the pop songwriting savvy to produce seven chart singles from the same album, as the stunningly consistent Hysteria did. Joe Elliott's lyrics owe an obvious debt to his obsession with T. Rex, particularly on the playfully silly anthem "Pour Some Sugar on Me," and the British glam rock tribute "Rocket," while power ballads like "Love Bites" and the title track lack the histrionics or gooey sentimentality of many similar offerings. The strong pop hooks and "perfect"-sounding production of Hysteria may not appeal to die-hard heavy metal fans, but it isn't heavy metal -- it's pop-metal, and arguably the best pop-metal ever recorded. Its blockbuster success helped pave the way for a whole new second wave of hair metal bands, while proving that the late-'80s musical climate could also be very friendly to veteran hard rock acts, a lead many would follow in the next few years”.
I want to round up with Rolling Stone’s view on Hysteria. A big success in the U.S. and well as their native U.K., it was a worthy follow-up to their 1983 release, Pyromania. In fact, I think Hysteria might be Def Leppard’s defining statement. The band released their latest album, Diamond Star Halos, in May (which gained a load of love from critics):
“This album sounds terrific. Every track sparkles and burns. There is no filler. That is not to say, however, that the Leppards are actually great songwriters (as opposed to consummate riff-smiths). Because here, as on Pyromania, producer Mutt Lange gets full credit as a cocomposer. He is, in fact, the sixth Leppard — the one who takes their riffs and choruses and assembles them into spectacular tracks. A veteran producer of such metal superstars as AC/DC and Foreigner, Lange is a genre master, and this LP is thick with his trademarks: the deep, meaty bass sound; the fat, relentless drums; the dazzling guitar montages; the impeccable sense of structure and separation; the preternatural clarity. Lange also brings a certain ironic wit to the record: one suspects it was he who dreamed up the whispered intro to “Excitable” — an aural pun on an old Mothers of Invention track — although no doubt the band had a hand in fashioning the rap-chant vocals that turn “Pour Some Sugar on Me” from a good-natured Aerosmith salute into a more complexly admiring tribute to Aerosmith and Run-D.M.C.
None of which is to suggest that Lange could have made this album on his own. Def Leppard is a sharp, hot and dedicated stage band that really delivers live. Steve Clark and Phil Collen are a two-man guitar firestorm in the best metal — or any kind of rock — tradition (note the pulsing slabs of sound they pump into “Rocket” and the keening leads on “Don’t Shoot Shotgun” and “Love and Affection”). Drummer Allen (despite his accident) and bassist Rick Savage remain a formidable rhythm section, and singer Joe Elliott, this time out, has convincingly deepened his range (avoiding the castrato effect that so amuses most nonmetalheads).
So what’s wrong — or should we say, not quite right — with this picture? Def Leppard seems primed to burst out of the metal ghetto. The band has shed most of the genre’s more irritating stylistic tics, and it can rock with the best of today’s young bands, categories be damned. But in terms of songwriting — which is the key to any future growth — the Leppards remain trapped within metal’s tired old socio-sexual paradigm. It’s not simply that women are portrayed here as mere lifestyle accessories (“One part love, one part wild/One part lady, one part child” — or, as Elliott bluntly sings, “You got the peaches, I got the cream”). What’s most dismaying is that when the Leppards attempt to communicate more subtle emotion, as in “Love and Affection” or the title track, they inevitably fumble it. (The former tune actually boils down to “Don’t give me love and affection,” and “Hysteria” — a near ballad, despite its title — reduces love to mere carnal hysteria, then shrugs it off, lamely, as “such a magical mysteria.”) Is this all they want to say? Or is it, more sadly, all they’re capable of saying?
The lyrics throughout Hysteria are undistinguished at best. But nobody in his right mind ever assessed a metal album on the basis of its poetic integrity — it’s not the point. This is head-banging music of a very high sonic order, executed with great élan by what remains the most exciting metal-pop band on the scene. Where they’ll be able to go from here remains anybody’s guess. For now, here is a pretty impressive place to be”.
As it will be thirty-five on 3rd August, I wanted to spend a bit of time with the sensational Hysteria. Because the production and sound is quite dense at times, I think Hysteria is still revealing layers. It does not sound that dated to me, despite the fact it has some very ‘80s-sounding tracks – which, in a lesser producer’s (Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange) hands could have been overly-naff; as it is, Hysteria never comes off as weak, cheesy or too commercial. Because it is coming up to a big birthday, go and seek out Def Leppard’s Hysteria and…
TURN it all the way up!