Def Leppard were shooting for the stars with their fourth album. As singer Joe Elliott put it: “We wanted to push the envelope of what rock music was.”
That album, Hysteria, would become the band’s biggest seller, with more than 20 million copies sold worldwide. It was also the adventurous, big-production masterpiece that they’d set out to create.
But it was a long, hard struggle to get that album made. The entire process took three and a half years – from the first writing sessions in early 1984 to the final release date in August 1987.
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On a human level, Hysteria also represented a personal triumph for the band’s drummer Rick Allen, who reinvented the way he played after losing his left arm in a car crash on New Year’s Eve 1984.
And it was during Allen’s initial period of rehabilitation that he was able to persuade the band’s trusted producer Mutt Lange to complete this album with them – after they had endured a disastrous spell with Jim Steinman, creator of Meat Loaf’s Bat Out Of Hell, in the producer’s chair.
Joe Elliott told the story of the ‘Leppard versus Steinman’ saga in an interview with MOJO magazine.
He began by describing how the first songs for Hysteria were written and demoed in Dublin – with Mutt Lange’s involvement.
This process started just days after the band had finished touring in support of their third album Pyromania, which had sold six million copies in the US, powered by the hit singles Photograph, Rock Of Ages and Foolin’.
“We finished the Pyromania tour in Bangkok on 8 February 1984,” Elliott reported. “We then flew directly from Bangkok to Dublin. We rented a house, 1 St Helens Road – which was off Rock Road!”
Here, the five members of the band – Elliott, Rick Allen, bassist Rick Savage and guitarists Steve Clark and Phil Collen – lived and worked together for several months.
“We set up shop in this house,” Elliott said, “and we turned the back lounge into a mini-studio. So, armed with Fostex 4-track machines, Oberheim DMX drum machines and a few smatterings of ideas, we set about writing our album. We then spent until August of that year writing – with and without Mutt. He came over from London and we’d do Mondays to Fridays and then he’d go back.”
Lange’s influence on Def Leppard’s sound, as producer and co-songwriter, was so important that he was considered their “sixth member”. He had produced the Pyromania album and its predecessor High ’N’ Dry. Moreover, on Pyromania he co-wrote all 10 tracks.
But in April 1984, after Lange had written several songs with the band in Dublin, he told them he was too exhausted to produce their new album, having worked flat out for years on end, making hit records for AC/DC, Foreigner and The Cars as well as Def Leppard.
“Mutt was going to do the album with us,” Elliott said, “but then he dropped the bombshell that he wasn’t ready to start work straight away. I think working on Heartbeat City by The Cars had drained him emotionally, and he just wasn’t ready to back in and do it all again. He’d been working non-stop and he needed a break.”
By this stage, many of the key songs for the album were taking shape.
“We had a load of ideas,” Elliott said. “I’ve got a cassette at home that’s got like a hundred bits on it, and nearly everything that’s on Hysteria is on that tape. They just needed gluing together.
“So by August we’d got about eight of the 12 songs that made the album written. We also had the stuff that eventually got elbowed off – things like Ring Of Fire and I Wanna Be Your Hero, which was originally called Love Bites before we stole that title for the other Love Bites.”
He continued: “We went to Holland in August ’84 to start working in Wisseloord [studios], armed with Women, Gods Of War, Don’t Shoot Shotgun, Animal, Ring Of Fire, the original Love Bites and a couple of others. And of course, Mutt had said no way was he doing it, so we’d sit down with him and think, ‘OK, who do we get?’”
One of the first candidates was Chris Thomas, famed for producing Roxy Music, Wings, the Sex Pistols and The Pretenders.
“We tried to get Chris Thomas, but he didn’t want to work with us,” Elliott shrugged. “To this day, I don’t know why. We’d sold six million records and he didn’t fancy it. Fine, fuck you then, Chris Thomas! I’m sure he’s a lovely guy, but, y’know, we were in a strange situation. We couldn’t think of anybody that we wanted to work with, and the ones that wanted to work with us, we didn’t want to work with.”
It was the band’s co-manager Cliff Burnstein who suggested Jim Steinman – much to everyone’s surprise.
Elliott recalled: “We all just went, ‘What?!’ Cliff says, ‘Think about it for a minute… Bat Out Of Hell!’ And we said, ‘But he wrote it – Todd Rundgren produced it!’”
Despite the band’s reservations, Steinman was promptly hired.
Elliott complained: “We were kind of press-ganged into using him, because of his name, I imagine. We weren’t really happy about it. But Mutt, to his credit, said, ‘You’ve got some songs, give it a go, and if it doesn’t work, get rid of the guy.’ And that’s exactly what we had to do, because he was less than useless!”
As Elliott reiterated to MOJO, Def Leppard were aiming high with Hysteria. Referencing The Beach Boys’ 1966 masterpiece, he stated: “We wanted a Pet Sounds for the ‘80s generation. We didn’t want to make an album that sounded like an Ozzy album or a Thin Lizzy record – where you just plug in and play. We wanted songs that were going to rock the way that [Queen’s] Tie Your Mother Down did, but we wanted Beach Boys harmonies on them.
“And we were the only rock band that I’m aware of that actually saw all the toys that Frankie Goes To Hollywood and the Pet Shop Boys and The Human League used, and went, ‘Why can’t we use that on a rock record?’ That’s what we were trying to do.
“We weren’t trying to make Appetite For Destruction. We wanted to make a Def Leppard record that was gonna be a bit more – I don’t want to use the word ‘clinical’ – but a lot more thought-out.”
Jim Steinman didn’t exactly see it that way.
Elliott recalled: “We’d run through Don’t Shoot Shotgun all kind of raw and swaggery, and I don’t mean in a good way – we’d be messing with the amps and changing the words – and Jim would say, ‘I think we’ve got one!’ Steve and Phil would be looking at each other going, ‘What planet is this guy on?’ Steinman wanted us to just plug in and play. It’s like, ‘Well, you got the wrong fucking band, mate!’”
For Def Leppard, working with Jim Steinman was an expensive mistake.
“He was a lovely guy,” Elliott said, “and certainly knew how to order every single piece of food off a menu! Our food budget for the Steinman sessions was probably as much money as The Dark Side Of The Moon cost to record. He once chartered a plane while he was working with us, and he flew to Switzerland just to go and eat in this one restaurant. That’s when we knew the priorities were upside down.”
It was also suspected that Steinman was covertly working on his next Meat Loaf project during this time.
Elliott claimed: “He was doing Bat Out Of Hell II in his head and in his hotel room till nine in the morning, and then getting up and turning up at the studio at two in the afternoon, completely knackered, and we’d been waiting for him since noon. We couldn’t put up with it for very long.
“He had a great engineer with him, Neil Dorfsman, who’d worked with people like Dire Straits. Neil was a saving grace. He was the reason we didn’t get rid of Steinman earlier.”
In the end it was Steve Clark and Phil Collen who called time on Jim Steinman.
As Elliott remembered it: “I came in to start banging some vocals down one day, and Phil and Steve called a meeting. They said, ‘He’s got to go.’ I said, ‘We haven’t even started doing any vocals yet!’ And they said, ‘Trust us, you don’t even wanna go there.’
“I certainly didn’t rate him as a producer. As a human being, he told great stories – but on our dime! Four hours of listening to him talk about Meat Loaf having his own piss injected into himself when he lost his voice is great, but not at $1500 an hour. So, fine, let’s get rid of him.
“We started with Steinman in August and he was gone by November. I think it was just over eight weeks.”
In Steinman’s absence, Neil Dorfsman stayed on for a short time as a favour to the band before they turned to Mutt Lange’s right hand man Nigel Green, who had served as engineer on High ‘N’ Dry and Pyromania.
“We thought that between Nigel and us we’d have a fair idea of what a pseudo-Mutt Lange would do,” Elliott explained. “So Nigel came in around mid-November, late ’84, and we did about two or three months with him.
“But what we got was an extremely clinical version of ourselves. That might sound ridiculous, but Mutt is a lot looser than everybody gives him credit for. There are certain things that he wants tight, but there’s other things that have gotta be very human.
“Nigel would be so scared with this ‘what would Mutt think?’ mentality that everything ended up being just way too perfect. We we got lost with Nigel. He’s a great guy and a good engineer, but it sounded like Pyromania. It sounded like a great record but it didn’t sound like any progress had been made.
“Mutt would come over for a day, or we’d play him some stuff down the phone, and he’d start saying, ‘Yeah, it needs to be a bit looser than that’, or ‘That bit needs to be a bit tighter.’ We’re like, ‘Come on, make your mind up! How come that’s too loose and this is too tight? How do you know the difference?’ We were still learning, we couldn’t tell what Mutt could tell, and Nigel was second-guessing it the wrong way. Everything was out of step.”
It was only in the aftermath of Rick Allen’s car crash that Lange made the decision to resume his role as Def Leppard’s producer.
As a frequent visitor to Allen in hospital, Lange was insistent that Allen could play drums again with the use of an electronic kit. During one of Lange’s visits, Allen made a plea on behalf of the band. He recalled: “I just said to him Mutt, ‘We really need your help. We’re not a good place at the moment. Would you spend some time with us and see if we can’t get this record made?’ I think it was a combination of things that pulled him back in. And it was the best thing that could have happened.”
With Lange’s return, and Rick Allen’s rehabilitation, Def Leppard created one of the greatest and biggest selling rock albums of all time.
As Joe Elliott said of Hysteria: “We wanted to apply the science of great pop and clever arrangements to the banality of three-chord rock ‘n’ roll. And we got that.
“We made a new kind of rock record that had never been heard before. And we couldn’t have done it without Mutt.”
