Adrenalized

by Phil Collen

  The time arrived for the first of the warm-up shows in Ballybunion, down in the south-west, beyond Limerick. We were all good to go onstage. We were just waiting for Jeff Rich to arrive from England, where he had played the night before with Status Quo. However, his plane was delayed, and getting to Ballybunion was proving difficult. When we got the message from Jeff at the airport, we were already late going onstage. Rick would have to play on his own. We delayed the show as much as we could, but the time came for us to perform. Rick was thrown in the deep end and totally rose to the occasion. In fact, when Jeff did arrive halfway through our set, he said to Malvin, “I think he’s good to go. He doesn’t need me anymore.”

  We powered through the warm-up shows—they did the job: we sounded great and everyone was really confident—and made it to Donington. It was obviously wonderful for Rick to have achieved this. Now there was the even bigger test—the Donington Festival, where there were about 70,000 people including press and media everywhere waiting to see if Rick Allen could play a Def Leppard set with one arm. This gig was one of the most memorable shows we ever played. Apart from Rick and all of us being on fire, the audience gave an extremely emotional ovation. People were in tears, which choked us up as well. Rick was twenty-two years old. I was twenty-eight.

  After Donington, we did a bunch of other European festivals, and the reaction to Rick was always the same: loud, proud, and triumphant. It was always beautiful to watch the audience react to his efforts. Mission accomplished. He was going to be able to carry on. We still needed to finish the Hysteria album, so we soon returned to Holland.

  While we were back in the Hilversum recording studio, I heard that Mick Jagger was there working on his second solo album, Primitive Cool, just down the hall. Supposedly, he also had Jeff Beck on guitar in there along with Simon Phillips on drums. So I was listening at the door one day, my ear pressed up against it, straining to hear anything at all. I was dying to know what was going on inside. All of a sudden the door opened and I practically fell through. And who had opened it but Mick Jagger himself. As I fumbled and tried to explain myself, Jagger invited me in, saying, “Hey, man. Come in!” He told me to take a seat on the couch so I could listen to what they were working on. There was Jeff Beck in the flesh with his Stratocaster on the other side of the glass.

  But on my side of the glass, right in that very room, Jagger picked up the microphone and started singing the live vocals right in front of my face. It was pretty surreal. I actually showed Mick around our studio and we had some pretty cool chats. When Mick came into our studio once, there were a few tabloid newspapers on the table in front of us. Someone picked up a copy and he said, “You know you shouldn’t read that. It’ll pollute your mind.” Nowadays we quote this phrase all the time and never has it been more relevant than in this day and age, thanks to gutter/reality TV. There is a very knock-on negative effect on its entranced disciples.

  Another band that was in the studio at the same time as us was Mink DeVille. They were great guys from New York City working on their album Sportin’ Life. One day they asked us to come in and sing on a track called “Italian Shoes,” so we did. Ironically, this was the same room in which I’d previously recorded the guitar solo for “Animal.”

  Mink DeVille also told us later that they loved us being in the studio because every day after we were finished recording they would go and eat all the leftovers that we had left in the studio kitchen. Actually, they were partaking in Jim Steinman’s over-ordering of food.

  Adding to the entirely bizarre experiences that the making of Hysteria had become—the false starts through Rick Allen’s tragic accident and all of the other months we burned with other producers and engineers before Mutt came back, was the night that we almost lost Mutt himself.

  In November 1986, while we were recording in Holland, our friends in Iron Maiden were playing nearby in Leiden, Holland. We knew all the guys in the band and got on great with them, so we all wanted to see them play live. We made plans to head over there.

  Before we left, Mutt warned us to not let Rick Allen stay out too late because there were some drum parts he wanted to complete later in the evening. That didn’t happen, as we didn’t see Rick for the rest of the night. Meanwhile, this changed plans for Mutt, who left the studio. He had a car accident that night, which resulted in him breaking his leg, though it could have been a lot more serious. This, however, didn’t slow us down as much as I thought it would. Mutt bounced back into the studio with his leg in a cast and a hospital bed complete with controls from which he continued on as if nothing had ever happened.

  And good thing, since we were putting finishing touches on the rest of the album, which was already two years late. One day Joe was sitting in the corridor, goofing off on a guitar and singing a very simple, almost nursery rhyme–like vocal. A little bit of a phrase, over and over.

  Mutt looked at him and said, “What is that?” And Joe answered, “I don’t know. Just a little thought I have.”

  Within ten days and at Mutt’s insistence, we’d recorded “that little thought”—a song called “Pour Some Sugar on Me.” “Sugar” had all the elements of rap and country music. Mutt came up with the intro guitar riff and played it with his fingers. It actually sounded very country. When Mutt told me to try it, I was told my finger-picking sucked. He told me to play it the way I would play it. So I played it with a metal guitar pick, making a weird hard-rock/country hybrid that you hear on the record today.

  Joe’s vocal on the verse is reminiscent of a lot of popular rap music at the time, like Public Enemy and Run-D.M.C. I was loosely inspired by the “verse guitar riff” of Grandmaster Flash’s bass line on “White Lines.” Mutt said that it sounded a bit complex and to put a gap where the snare drum was. That changed the whole feel of it and gave it this very hard-rock-style riff with a rap-style vocal meter over the top. Usually, people don’t mix genres within one song. And rock bands hardly liked rap music. But if you listen to another record Mutt produced, AC/DC’s Back in Black, that title track also contains a rap-styled vocal meter as well. Mutt did a similar thing with us on “Sugar,” and it worked beautifully. The song, in the verses, worked less as a melody and more as a collection of rhythmic sounds, and then all of this was rewarded with a big, sing-along, hooky chorus, “Pour some sugar on me,” that had this amazing melody. In a nutshell, that was the whole hybrid approach Mutt encouraged.

  The backing vocals became a defining part of the song. Mutt had me almost screaming the chorus, using a thick, throaty chest voice that actually hurt for days after. When I told him this he said, “Yeah, but it sounds great!” It was that huge chest-beating machismo that was the perfect antithesis to a grown man requesting to have sugar poured on him.

  Mutt liked us to sing that way to differentiate us from all the other bands that sang harmonies, like the Beach Boys and Journey. We maintained an almost punk bravado ethos where we would scream in tune, making us sound different even from our heroes, Queen. This effect and attitude gave the song an extra power. We’ve always used our backing vocals as another instrument—hence that’s why we spent so much time on them—in the studio and live. The last-minute addition proved to be the best decision we ever made. The album was finally completed with the recording of “Pour Some Sugar on Me” in Holland.

  The record company wasn’t too thrilled about recording yet another song on an album that had already taken two years, but Mutt was convinced that this could be the most important single on the album. It also pushed the album’s already long run time to an unprecedented sixty-three minutes of music. Again Mutt said, “I think this new CD thing is really where it’s going to be. When you put too much information on vinyl records, like too many songs, you lose quality. But with everything going toward digital, all of that will change.” So in this case length didn’t matter.

  While we waited for Mutt and Mike Shipley to mix Hysteria, the band members had some downtime. I took this break to officially stop drinking completely. To be e
xact, it was on April 14, 1987. That was Liz’s birthday. We would be on and off again for a few more years to come and were in Paris together when I announced, “I’m not drinking after your birthday. Really, I’m not.” We had a glass of champagne each and that was it. She stopped as well. We would always support each other on stuff like that. Liz is Jewish, and whenever she fasted on Yom Kippur I would do it with her so she wouldn’t have to face the headaches on her own. I had slipped back into social drinking again, and I knew where that would lead, so it really was time to stop. I felt like I gave myself a huge chunk of life back that day.

  The next day, we left for India on holiday. I’d always wanted to visit this mystical place. It was different from any place I had ever been. It was LIFE at its most extreme. India was teeming with movement—unlike, say, a city such as New York, which seems frenetic at times. In India it felt like the energy was different, along with the colors, aromas, and textures.

  I remember one of the first impressions I had when I saw people sleeping everywhere in the street at night in Bombay. I thought they were dead bodies at first, so I asked the driver of my car from the airport, “Shit! What’s going on here? Why are all these bodies by the side of the road?” He replied, “They’re just people sleeping. They live in villages that are too far out so they sleep on the side of the road and just go back to work the next day in the city.”

  I’ve been back to India a few times since. Now it’s drastically changed and has become Westernized. There are big modern buildings and skyscrapers everywhere and what seems to be a loss of culture. There were certainly some painful images that remain, like people with no fingers begging at the airport (having had their fingers cut off as small children to make themselves more appealing to receive money from tourists). But among all the extremes we experienced in India, they were some of the happiest, most enlightened people I have ever met in my entire life. Once Liz and I went back to Paris from India, we were far more relaxed and felt as if our souls had been cleansed a bit. And it was time to hear the final mix of Hysteria that Mutt and Mike Shipley had been slaving away on for the last few months.

  When Steve and I heard the completed album, we felt we had achieved an artistic apex and that if the only people who bought this album were our parents, that would be more than enough. It was the best thing we’d ever done and it was way beyond any of our expectations or our ambitions. Plus we finally had an album title. It was suggested by Rick Allen after seeing the word hysteria on a trashy British tabloid. He said, “Ay, that would be a good album title, huh?”

  Completing the package, I also loved the Tron-style art that our graphic designer, Andie Airfix, created. It was a perfect visual backdrop for the way the record sounded—very high-tech and futuristic. Hysteria sounded international, iconic, and very expensive. It turned out to be all three.

  Right before Hysteria was released, we were all back in Dublin and went to see Elton John, who was in town. Me, Steve, and a bunch of Elton’s people hung out after the show and went back to his hotel room. For an entire night we sat there spellbound. It was like a master class on the industry. He told us the most amazing hysterical stories and anecdotes and spoke about his experience in the industry thus far. It was fascinating to hear a real icon talk that frankly about a path we were about to embark on ourselves.

  The album dropped August 3, 1987. We were excited to get it out because we thought it was the best thing since sliced bread but were also nervous about how much debt we had incurred recording it. But things were lining up well, and initial reviews were positive, especially MTV’s take:

  This album sounds terrific. Every track sparkles and burns. There is no filler. . . . 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.

  Metal Hammer magazine jumped on board, too, naming Hysteria Album of the Month and stating,

  Well, it was something like three years in the making and Def Leppard suffered all sorts of severe trauma during that time, but came out the other side with an album that any major band would be proud to count as one of their catalogue. Not only have Leppard superseded the achievements made with Pyromania, but they have come up with a collection that will finally see them broken on a massive scale in Europe, which will be especially sweet for them as they were without acclaim in their own country, the UK.

  To satisfy the ever-growing demands of MTV, we set up a soundstage in Holland and started making videos for the album. This time out, we were more hesitant about doing videos than we had been for Pyromania. A lot of things in the industry had changed since the last album, and it seemed like videos were being made en masse and were stale, perfunctory, and at times downright silly. It wasn’t really about doing anything cool anymore, but I suppose that was just the natural progression of things. MTV was so universally huge by now, and the things just had to look and feel bigger on-screen. That said, as grandiose as it was, the video for “Animal” was actually pretty cool. The video’s concept was built around a circus theme, and the elaborate production made us feel we essentially joined the circus for two days. In filming one scene, the director told me, “Hey, when you play the guitar solo we’ll have a guy throwing knives around you.” I said, “Fuck that, there’s no way you’re throwing a knife at me.” They wound up talking Joe into it, and when you watch the video, you can see him really flinch when the knives strike. Malvin, Steve’s guitar tech at the time, even got a part balancing a guitar on his nose.

  We filmed the “Women” video in a dockland area in Amsterdam. And for “Sugar,” we shot in an abandoned hotel that was being demolished in Dublin. In hindsight, I don’t think the video represented the song very well. It lacked the sort of style and hipness (for the time) that our other videos always embraced. Fortunately, though, we’d get another shot at a music video for this song, and that time I think we got it right.

  “Animal” gave us our first top-ten hit in our home country of England, but the single “Women” did nothing in the States. We had high hopes for the album itself—we thought it would just explode. And it did, in England. When the album dropped, it went straight to number one.

  But in America, Hysteria failed to ignite. Our numbers were okay, but it didn’t do what Pyromania had been doing. We were in the hole for about $4.5 million, which meant we would have to sell at least five million units to break even. We stalled at three million. I know I’m complaining about going “triple platinum,” but this is where we ended up after three and a half years in studio time. In the red. To top it all off, there were some critics who had no problem telling us that we were finished and indulgent, that the album didn’t sound rock enough, it sounded too pop, and that it was “all over for Joe Elliott and the little girls.”

  But we carried on. We had already hit the road for the Hysteria tour in June, and we played in Europe throughout the summer and into early autumn. From there we would hit the United States, beginning in October and ending in February 1988, and then come back and hit Europe again before heading off to the Far East.

  While we were in Europe, Peter Mensch came up with an ingenious idea after seeing a production by Frank Sinatra. Using an “in the round” presentation, the old crooner was able to roam the stage more freely and connect with fans in a more intimate way. It changed the dynamics of a concert. All of a sudden, there were really no “bad” seats. So we would play “in the round”—meaning the stage would be where a boxing ring would be: stationary, in the middle of the arena, which basically meant four front rows for the audience, giving everyone in the hall an equal view of the band when we came to America. It made for a spectacular show once we got the feel for it—and it totally affected how we were as performers. Everyone does it nowadays, but back then it was a novel thing for a rock band to do. Phay MacMahon, who was our lighting designer at the tim
e (and who is our production manager today), came up with the actual set designs. He had some brilliant ideas about how to bring it all together.

  PHAY MACMAHON: It may not seem like it today, but back in 1987 the Def Leppard stage setup for Hysteria was really something out of this world. Their manager, Peter Mensch, had the idea to do a show in the round. The only band up to that point that had really attempted something like that was Yes, back in the late 1970s.

  Performing in the round was good for a number of reasons. The first was, obviously, the entire arena would get equally great looks at the band, because the guys would be free and mobile to run all over the place. The other thing was, the fact that you could place it in the middle of an arena meant that you could also sell many more seats that would otherwise be lost behind the stage.

  As for the design of the stage itself, it truly was state-of-the-art. The album artwork was plastered on the floor of the thing, and it had several different levels and a rotating drum set for Rick. It also had a very uncluttered look and feel to it, because all of the guitar techs worked underneath the stage, and all of the guitar amps were also located offstage.

  The lighting rig was also wonderful and elaborate and featured many movable parts and lasers that had never been used for concerts before. We would hang four black curtains featuring the album artwork around the stage before they came out for their first song.

  There was some short intro music, and then, as the band kicked into “Stagefright” the curtains would drop to reveal the boys.

  Now, the only thing was, how do you get the band to the stage? The stage itself had no facilities for changing rooms or anything. It was just a stage; but it did have some space underneath it where the guys could be brought up from. So here’s what we did.