The Def Leppard opening line so dumb that not even the band themselves understand it
For a moment in glam metal’s late 1980s peak, the only UK contenders that were taken seriously by the rest of the spandex cohort were Ozzy Osbourne, Whitesnake, and Sheffield’s very own Def Leppard.
While the other two were elder statesmen of rock who had slipped into the cloud of MTV hairspray, Def Leppard were the hotshot newcomers catapulted across the Atlantic with enough beefy hard rock attack for the decade’s metalheads to enjoy. But they were also slathered with plenty of synthy gloss that would endear them to eager pop pickers.
It was a formula that would propel 1983’s Pyromania to hefty unit shifts, but everyone in the Def Leppard camp knew that album number four needed to blow the Billboard doors off. Nobody was more aware of this than their producer, Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange.
He boasted an impressive rock CV, including two former Leppard LPs and overseeing AC/DC’s classic run between Highway to Hell and For Those About to Rock We Salute You to phenomenal success. He knew how to bring pop and hard rock together, laying his vision out to the band when starting recording sessions at Dublin’s Windmill Lane in early 1984.
Make every song a hit. It was an approach that worked for Michael Jackson when he dropped his chart-dominating Thriller into the pop world, Lange thought, so why not a hard rock version? Working out every track as possessing a single potential, and immersing themselves further in all of the Fairlight CMI’s digital sampling shine, years went into 1987’s Hysteria’s pop-rock polish to ensure maximum impact. Some songs, such as ‘Animal’, took as long as three years to crack. Its most defining number, however, was conceived and finalised in the last two weeks of album sessions.
It started out as an idle riff while passing the time during a tea break. Noodling on an acoustic guitar, frontman Joe Elliot stumbled upon a riff he later brought with him to the recording booth in between vocal takes. Lange saw potential in the lick and quickly assembled a demo with a drum machine and rudimentary instruments, prompting the pair to smash out some impromptu, stream-of-consciousness lyrics for their ephemeral jam by swapping takes on Dictaphones and trying to guess what the other was saying.
Naturally, such an approach will yield some high-octane, comic blustering chants that mean very little, an admission Elliot made on the Ultimate Classic Rock Nights radio show when confessing he “doesn’t even know” what the opening lines to Def Leppard’s mammoth ‘Pour Some Sugar on Me’ mean even after singing the mammoth hit as a live standard all these years later: “Love is like a bomb, baby / C’mon get it on / Livin’ like a lover with a radar phone.”
If it was good enough for the original UK glammer, however. “It was like we were Marc Bolan,” Elliott reflected, referencing T Rex’s ‘Bang a Gong (Get It On)’s similarly evocative lyrical nonsense. “That whole lyric took us right back to being the ‘hubcap diamond star halo’ lyrics that Marc Bolan did.”
Leonard Cohen, it ain’t, but neither’s ‘Tutti Frutti’ or ‘Be-Bop-a-Lula’ and they’re destined to echo through the rock and pop canon for near certain eternity. Elliot, Lange, and the Def Leppard crew were interested in pop whirlwinds scoring big fat metal escape over chin-stroking poetry, so “Lookin’ like a tramp, like a video vamp” and “Razzle ‘n’ a dazzle ‘n’ a flash a little light” were just the pleasingly phonetic pizzazz needed for their Billboard gobbling glam behemoth.
It worked. ‘Pour Some Sugar on Me’ would explode all over the day’s rock radio and MTV rotations, thrusting Hysteria to the top of both the UK and US charts and overseeing a world-conquering peak Def Leppard would never see again, attesting to an age-old truism in pop: you can talk any old bollocks so long as there’s a good tune.
