Material-wise, Hysteria features tunes that would eventually become arena anthems (“Pour Some Sugar on Me,” “Armageddon It,” “Animal,” “Rocket”), tracks that would help popularize the era’s “power ballad craze” (“Love Bites,” the title track, “Love and Affection”), and songs that satisfied their rock following (“Run Riot,” “Don’t Shoot Shotgun,” the epic “Gods of War”). As successful as that was, everyone else is copying that.” The group did heed the advice, and focused on a more electronic and sonically layered approach than their previous efforts. Lange finally reunited with the band and resumed production duties, and Collen recalled some important advice the producer offered to the band: “Don’t do Pyromania Part II. Admirably, the band stuck by their bandmate, who soon discovered he could still supply drums via an electronic kit that utilized pedals in which the drummer could play parts with his left foot he would have previously played with his left arm. However, just when it appeared as though the band was getting back on track, a tragic accident occurred - a car wreck on December 31st, 1984 that resulted in drummer Allen losing his left arm. When we first got together in 1984 in Dublin to start recording, Frankie Goes to Hollywood were just kicking off, and the sonic sound that they achieved with producer Trevor Horn’s sounds … we would sit there listening to this, and even Mutt would be going, ‘Wow. He continued, “But the rest of it, you’re just listening to the music that’s happening at the time. That inspired us to write ‘Excitable,’ and it all came about from the little bit of networking that we did.” He took us all out to a nightclub, and it just happened to be a gay nightclub that played loads of disco. It was a four studio complex, and Mick Jagger came in, and he brought Jeff Beck along with him. While all the other bands that people often compare us to were kicking off in the States doing the Sunset Boulevard thing, we were living next to a windmill in Holland, making this album! Isolated. Most rock bands wouldn’t have done that.”Įlliott added, “We were stuck in Holland. It’s all these different influences and they all came out. Collen recalled the band looking outside of just hard rock and heavy metal for inspiration: “There were elements of new wave, Prince is in there, Frankie Goes to Hollywood is in there. So it was like, ‘This is not working’.”Ī total of three recording studios would ultimately be utilized for the recording of Hysteria - Wisseloord in Hilversum (in Holland), Windmill Lane in Dublin (in Ireland), and Studio Des Dames (in Paris). Some of the songs we wrote with Mutt initially we tried to record with Jim Steinman, and they just didn’t sound as good as the demos. It wasn’t until Mutt came back into the fold that they started coming alive, really. He didn’t really get how we were working. “It didn’t work at all,” added Collen in the same interview. “He’s great at what he does, but we weren’t one of the artists that it was ever going to work with.” “It was a mismatch, sadly,” recalled Elliott in the exclusive video interview with Heavy Consequence above. However, with Lange not available at the time, Def Leppard opted to enlist Jim Steinman - best known for writing Meat Loaf’s classic Bat Out of Hell album - as the producer of “album #4.” Things didn’t go so well. When the tour in support of Pyromania wound down in February of 1984, work soon began on a follow-up. With super-producer Mutt Lange helping the group hone their sound, Pyromania went multi-platinum, spawned several hit singles and videos (“Photograph,” “Rock of Ages,” and “Foolin’”), and made them an arena headliner. But it was on 1983’s Pyromania that the band (singer Joe Elliott, guitarists Steve Clark and Phil Collen, bassist Rick Savage, and drummer Rick Allen) became one of rock’s top acts. Hailing from Sheffield, England, Def Leppard’s first two albums (1980’s On Through the Night and 1981’s High ‘n’ Dry) helped build a worldwide following among headbangers. Several reasons can be pointed to for the four-year lag between Hysteria and its predecessor, Pyromania – among them, the album’s original producer not working out having to wait for their preferred producer to become available and most seriously, having to overcome a horrific accident to one of the band members. One of those that proved to be truly worth the wait (from both a commercial and artistic standpoint) was Def Leppard’s fourth album overall, Hysteria – selling 12 million copies in the US alone, topping the Billboard 200, and spawning six Top 20 singles. There have been a handful of highly-anticipated albums by renowned rock artists that took a long time to see the light of day.
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