Def Leppard ripped off The Police for a hard rock classic: “Steve was really good at that”
Def Leppard were never snobs about their musical tastes.
Though it was easy to put them under the umbrella of hard rock in their early days, some of the band’s best material came from the British pop that they listened to in their teens in the ‘70s. As they started to make their breakthrough album Hysteria, some pieces of their record collection ended up seeping into the mix as well.
This is all par for the course. Artists are meant to pilfer the work of their main influences. Where would The Beatles have been without Chuck Berry and Bob Dylan? Where would Bob Dylan have been without Woody Guthrie, and where would the metal world be without Black Sabbath? It is when the influences come from slightly stranger parts of the musical spectrum that things get weird.
Until Hysteria, Leppard had been pulling from some of the biggest acts of the time, like AC/DC and Queen, creating a hybrid of melodic pop and blistering hard rock on their album Pyromania. In an effort to outdo what they had already done, producer Mutt Lange thought the band could aim higher with their next album, making something that could stand alongside classic pop albums like Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
Though the album spawned almost half of its track listing onto the hit parade, one of the fan favourites from the album remained ‘Gods of War’. It’s a powerful song and one of Def Leppar’ds finest creations, but despite its tough exterior, the interior of the track is actually far more nuanced than you might assume.
Written as one of their few political tracks, Joe Elliott talked about writing the song from the perspective of a man on the street, telling Classic Albums: “There was something on the news. It was probably Russia versus the Americans, as usual. That song was about ‘I don’t know what these bombs are capable of other than they’re probably very destructive…so why would you want to set them off in the first place’”.
To match the scope of the subject matter, Leppard were ready to use the force of both lead guitarists Phil Collen and Steve Clark. Being the first album where Collen could contribute creatively, he mentioned that Clark came up with some of the greatest songs out of the blue, with the main lick of the tune starting out as a guitar showcase that Clark would play live.
When breaking down the different sections, Collen explained: “When working with Steve, you break up the riff into totally different parts. One person would just be playing power chords, and the other guy would be playing the riff, which is centred around ‘Message in a Bottle’ by the Police. Steve was really good at that, where he would play something that you kind of knew, but when he played it, it sounded like Def Leppard”.
This approach to songwriting wasn’t uncommon for Clark to come up with either, as Elliott remembers, “He rarely ever wrote songs. He wrote bits. He would never come up with all the music, but there would be little musical pieces where Mutt would say, ‘Oh, that’s great’. And it would be like the intro to ‘Gods of War’”.
The Police weren’t even the only classic rock influence on the final mix of the record. When listening to the song’s outro, it’s easy to see the influence of Pink Floyd in the guitar picking part, reminiscent of the same tender playing on ‘Goodbye Blue Sky’ from The Wall.
Once the band assembled the final track, they had made one of their most ambitious songs to date, even adding in sounds of radios to simulate someone being struck down by bombing attacks. Def Leppard was never meant to make music with a political message, but beyond the hits lay tunes that had much more on their mind than rocking for the hell of it.
