by Phil Collen
Even though Steve and I had known each other for a few years, when we lived together on tour we quickly became best friends. It wasn’t just the guitar playing or extreme boozing—we both found that we were soaking up all that we could and learning more on the road than we had ever learned at school, with a healthy appetite for new and exciting cultural discoveries. We also found that we loved each other’s company. We could get into deep conversations that would last for hours.
It was also on this tour that Phil Wilkie, our stage monitor engineer, came up with the term the Terror Twins for Steve and me. As I vaguely remember it, we had invited Phil out with us for an evening of drinking on one of our off nights on the tour, but he said to us, “I ain’t going out with you two—the Terror Twins.” And so the legend was born. Needless to say, Steve and I got into countless episodes of skullduggery and mayhem. Unfortunately, I was drinking at the time, so my memory serves no purpose here. You’ll probably be better off googling our antics and telling me about them. If we’ve offended any one of you, I sincerely apologize.
Both our lives were changing in massive ways, and we were going through it together, like brothers. We cracked up watching Spinal Tap together after Spandau Ballet made us watch it. We talked about our childhoods. We explored places like Paris and Munich, soaking up as much culture as we could. And we tried to make sense of the fact that the lives we’d known were now fading as we sailed toward something much bigger and unknown. We also explored where we could go with our music.
One day Steve said to me, “Phil, I’ve always felt this thing. Jimmy Page kind of does it, and Brian May kind of does it, but instead of doing harmony guitars like Thin Lizzy or the Allman Brothers, what if we did a more orchestral approach together, meshing our guitars together in a whole new way? Almost like keyboards might interact.” And that would eventually become the Def Leppard sound an album later. Like I said, Steve was just such a different kind of player. Honestly, he was. Totally unique and unencumbered by rules or anything. He was a lot like Jimmy Page, in my opinion. Page would have these ideas that were very orchestral; it really defined his sound. He used very complicated themes and exotic textures and melodies.
By March, the European part of the tour had just a couple of weeks left, and so we made our way through France and Switzerland, and played a few more shows in England before our last show on March 15 in Melun, France, at the Salle des Fêtes.
Then we had a couple of days off before boarding a plane and heading over to the States, where we would join the Billy Squier tour as the opening act in Atlanta on March 18. Billy Squier was touring his second album. All the success of the first album and notably of the song “The Stroke” was culminating with this tour. We would work our way up the East Coast, playing in Charlotte, North Carolina, all the way up to Portland, Maine, and then back down to Connecticut and Long Island, with a big show at the Nassau Coliseum.
Def Leppard already had a couple of American tours under their belt, opening for bands such as Ozzy Osbourne and the Scorpions, among others. But for me this was my first trip to the States since my cross-country Greyhound bus tour several years earlier. I was ecstatic to be going back.
We’d heard rumors that Pyromania was off to a decent start in the States and that the first single, “Photograph,” was starting to get a bit of airplay. That said, we were the opening act and so we didn’t have much of an idea of what to expect. I was excited I think mainly because of the American audience. Returning to this mythical place was almost surreal for me.
Each night, we noticed the crowds getting bigger and arriving earlier—they were coming to see us. We also started noticing that they really seemed to know the new music, too. That meant they were not just listening to the radio. They were watching their MTV. The videos had been a hit. We also couldn’t ignore the fact that each night we were outselling Billy Squier at the merchandise tables. It wasn’t even close. A lot of that had to do with the Union Jack insignias that were on our T-shirts, inspired, of course, by the Union Jack clothing that Rick and Joe wore in those first two videos. The Union Jack got a jolt of life because of our videos, and American teens were suddenly adopting the look.
City by city, the enthusiasm for Def Leppard was growing. So much so, we nearly forgot that we were the opening act, given how full the arenas were when we took the stage—a fact that was hard to ignore in Chicago. Def Leppard had not played Chicago since the High ’n’ Dry tour, back in 1981. That night at the UIC Pavilion, we went out and played our usual set and noticed that the arena was packed, much like it had been in recent venues. But tonight it seemed like the whole audience was there to see Def Leppard. At the end of our set, many of the kids actually left. And it hit us: they had come to see our band.
For the next two weeks, we played all throughout the Midwest, hitting Indianapolis; Cincinnati; Lexington, Kentucky; and Kansas City. We went down to New Mexico and up to Minnesota. And each night was more and more exciting for us.
At the start of the tour, Michael Jackson’s Thriller all but owned the charts. The singles “Billie Jean,” “Beat It,” and the title track were all in heavy rotation across the States, competing with other big radio hits by the Police, Billy Idol, and Prince, among others. In May 1983, Pyromania would go on to become No. 2 on the charts, behind Thriller, and it stayed there for about six months.
That was mind-blowing to us, but we never really stopped to bask in the glow of anything. We were a very working-class band—we just concentrated on playing our best. We never took anything for granted. And for all the drinking we did on the road, we remained amazingly disciplined when it came to playing. We actually had a rule that no matter what went on offstage, no one went onstage drunk. It simply would not happen. We were always very serious about the music part of it. We felt we owed too much to ourselves and to our fans who had forked out considerable money to see their favorite band. After all, this was a dream come true. Why would you fuck it up? We drank plenty after the show. There was always time for that. But the shows were sacred.
By April, we learned that plans were being put in place for Def Leppard to embark on their first-ever headlining U.S. tour, which would start the next month. We were thrilled. America was falling in love with us and the record was approaching gold status. It seemed that the British rock press went the other way, slagging us for selling out to America and being too polished. But that was okay, as Pyromania was becoming huge in the United States. So it seemed obvious that we would do the lion’s share of our touring there.
We wrapped up the Billy Squier tour with shows all along the West Coast, and then on an off day, we went and taped an episode of American Bandstand with Dick Clark. It didn’t really hit me then how important that was, given that I had been weaned on shows like The Old Grey Whistle Test. But it really was an important TV appearance for us in America. Pyromania was officially on fire.
It was the perfect recipe at the perfect time. Culturally, it seemed, we had the look and the songs—the perfect hybrid of pop and hard rock—that hit a nerve with young American fans. For all of the upbeat pop on the radio, there was really no one else like us at that point, and I think that’s why we stood out so much with Pyromania. Radio programmers appreciated how accessible our songs were, while we still maintained the integrity of a hard-rock band.
Steve and I both knew something was happening when, one night in a Midwestern hotel restaurant, some fans saw us and went crazy; we both had to be escorted out to the kitchen. That had never happened to either of us before. We just looked at each other and laughed. There was something almost absurd about it. Like the old black-and-white newsreels of the Beatles in public with all the girls crying and fainting. That’s the night that I think we first felt the full force of the MTV effect. Girls were falling in love with us, and guys thought we “rocked, dude.” So it was really a win-win.
It was stunning to us that things could change so quickly. We were about to get swept up in a mania that I don’t think any of us had ever i
magined for Def Leppard. Sure, we had always wished for that sort of thing, but knowing how hard it was to achieve, for us, it was just a fantasy. The thought of making it always seemed to be on the local level. Like, you’d play and get recognized locally in the street and be able to fill your local cinema-type theater. I don’t think any of us thought about how far-reaching our success would be. We also didn’t think about how big geographically America was.
We would get crazed pop star attention, something we never thought could exist for a rock band. For example, when we played a charity soccer game in Omaha, more than 10,000 people showed up. We had to stop doing record in-stores after an incident in Denver involving a collapsed platform and 3,000 people who were trying to enter the store where we were signing autographs. The other interesting thing we learned about was the boundaries otherwise normal people would remove for themselves.
Especially American girls. When we toured the States, we learned a hell of a lot more about what some girls would do to gain access. When we arrived at one gig, we saw a huge line of girls outside the venue. They were actually waiting to go down on crew members just to get to us. They wanted to give head all the time—almost as if we were doing them a favor instead of them performing one. For instance, during our first U.S. headlining tour, I was waiting for an elevator in a hotel. A really hot girl whom I had never seen in my life came up to me, pulled my pants down, and went down on me and didn’t say a word. This type of stuff didn’t happen before with total strangers. So you assess the psychology of the situation. There were girls in the nighttime, different girls in the daytime, and different ones the next night.
I didn’t chase women or adventure. Both seemed to find me. My conclusion was not to take all the fame stuff too seriously, as the reasons for this type of behavior are quite superficial, as great as it was. Eventually we created a backstage pass known as a “boiler pass.” It was given to any girl who had done this favor to get backstage. Instead of saying Def Leppard, the pass said Dik Likker in the band’s logo font. At first glance it looked like a regular Def Leppard backstage pass. But you had to look closely for the wording and the smiley face to differentiate official guests from extreme groupies.
The other really interesting thing about this kind of fame is that it isn’t sustainable. We were to have bigger albums later in our career and more attention. But this type of pop frenzy seems more exciting and over-the-top when a band or artist first explodes onto the scene. It was always different after the Pyromania tour. The next album, Hysteria, had a different dynamic—but we’ll get to that later.
On April 21, 1983, we did one last opening gig for Billy Squier, in Portland, Oregon, then headed to Texas, where we would have a week or so to get ready for our first headlining tour, which we would take very seriously. What I’ve noticed over the years, especially with other touring bands, is that a lot of them seem to think that being on tour is just an excuse to act out a lot of these crazy stories that provide fuel and fodder for future anecdotes. It’s almost like it’s some giant frat party. We never really fell into that. Yeah, we’ve got some crazy stories, but we were always more serious about the music we made and about being a great live band. We were young, but our music always took precedence over the shenanigans.
We would also now have our own opening acts for the tour, and those would include the Jon Butcher Axis, Krokus, Gary Moore (from Thin Lizzy), and eventually Uriah Heep. Let me talk about Gary Moore for a moment. Gary’s guitar playing was a huge influence on me. His vibrato and technique were astonishing, so when I found myself backstage jamming with Gary, I stayed there as long as I could. In fact, probably for over an hour, because I got a blister on my finger from extreme shredding. Gary let me play his classic and very famous Gibson Les Paul that had belonged to Fleetwood Mac’s Peter Green. Gary was also using heavier strings than me—hence the blister. But the experience also influenced me to use heavier-gauge strings, because you could play way more aggressively and the guitar would stay in tune.
One fascinating thing we noticed as we set off through Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Mississippi was that the size of our crowds could almost be measured directly depending on whether or not these cities and towns were already wired for cable television.
I know it sounds strange, but places that had cable TV had MTV, and places that had MTV had us all the time. That was the part we were sort of disconnected from. We were becoming bigger than life as a band in all of these key places that happened to have cable. So by the time we came to town, we’d already become rock gods to these kids in places like Norman, Oklahoma, and Monroe, Louisiana, that didn’t always have big bands rolling through. I just can’t state strongly enough how important MTV was to Def Leppard. As all of the previous bands we’d looked up to shied away from being presented in such a commercial medium, we took it in stride. We were young and pretty, but we were a hard-rock band. That paradox made us hugely successful. We were slotted in seamlessly next to artists like Michael Jackson, Billy Idol, U2, and INXS. But, as I stated before, this kind of fame isn’t sustainable. When formats change along with how people perceive and get their music, everything else is affected. This was all brand-new for us. We were at the perfect place at the right time. When this leg of the tour started, Pyromania had really begun to go to the next level. In just a few weeks it would be selling 100,000 copies a week for pretty much the rest of the year.
As we continued our trek across America, we started developing other rules of the road. A big one was that nobody was allowed to bring girls on the bus. Ever. We had really started bonding as a group and were very protective of each other and our space. There were plenty of bands that always had their bus jam-packed with chicks, but our thing was different. We hadn’t started a band to “get chicks,” as so many guys liked to say back then. We genuinely all shared the idea that we were in a band to make music. The “roadie mentality,” which we didn’t allow, was that you just live for the moment, don’t care who is on your bus, just go for the quick kill. We were wired differently. We took it all a bit more seriously and really did put the music first. We didn’t want any strangers infiltrating our little bubble. Of course, if one of our girlfriends came to visit and travel with us for a week or two, that was fine. But no strangers were allowed, especially on the bus.
We were also lucky to have the managers that we did because it would have been very easy at that time to throw money away like so many bands were doing. Our managers at the time were still Peter Mensch and Cliff Burnstein. They were the ultimate “good-cop/bad-cop” duo. Cliff was hyperintelligent, very soft-spoken, and always on point. Peter would roar like a lion at anyone who was trying to take advantage of us, even getting people fired from our record label. We were so fortunate to have this team in place, especially at this time when musical formats were about to change. One of the greatest things Peter and Cliff did for us was make sure that if a new format of music ever came onto the market, the record label would have to get Def Leppard’s permission before they released music on that particular format. Peter and Cliff obviously saw into the future and realized that cassettes would be long gone when CDs emerged and that ultimately digital formats would change the music industry forever. Record labels did not adjust artist royalties accordingly for the release of their music on digital media even though their overhead (i.e., the cost to produce hard copy music) became almost nonexistent. This is why to date a lot of original Def Leppard music is not on iTunes, etc. Many artists would be completely ripped off because they did not have the Mensch-Burnstein clause in their contract. We were lucky.
Mensch also kept expenses in line—and our heads on straight when it came to finances. Early on in the tour we would take limos to and from hotels and venues, thinking we were pretty cool. Mensch soon pointed out the ridiculousness of this perk, saying, “You know how much those things cost?” No, we didn’t. But here’s the true breakdown that Mensch would do for us on paper: Limos (two-hour minimum). Two cars to get to the venue and two cars to
get back to the hotel. The hotel run was after midnight—an extra charge. At four or five shows a week, we realized that was about $10,000. We all looked at each other and said, “Why not save that money for something we really want to do? Why throw it away on a limo when there is a hotel van that will take us to the gig for free?” We all heard many stories of bands blowing money on anything and everything. Not us. Coming from mostly nothing, we didn’t want to waste anything. So right away we became very different from a lot of the other bands out there who were being very destructive and blowing tons of money while destroying hotel rooms and living out of limousines.
In June of 1983 we reconnected with our music video director David Mallet. He met us at a place called the Ritz Theatre in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where we recorded our third video from the Pyromania album, for “Foolin’. ” It entered the heavy rotation of MTV in August and was played into the ground as much as “Photograph” and “Rock of Ages.”
We got back on tour and hit Fort Myers, Florida, where my hotel room was broken into and everything was stolen—all of my clothes, everything. The hotel was a motel-type number with direct access to the beach. I’d just come back from a stroll wearing only shorts, a T-shirt, and flip-flops. This was the first real hassle I experienced on what was otherwise the greatest tour I’d ever been on in my life. But I was saved by a group of local teenagers in the next town, which was Hampton, Virginia. This included a young lady whom we now know as Doctor Dot, a brilliant masseuse who runs a successful chiropractic and massage empire. I told them what had happened, and they took me to a nearby army/navy surplus store where they bought their clothes. I got loaded up with a bunch of camouflage clothing, and that’s what I wore for the balance of the American tour. If you see photos of me from that period, that’s why I am suddenly wearing camo onstage. And similar to the Union Jack clothing, the camo look started to catch on as a result. A week later, the police contacted me with news that they had found some of my stuff (they probably saw a homeless guy wandering aimlessly in my blue silk blouse and tight white pants), but I already had a new look.