Pete Willis: The guitarist who drank his way out of Def Leppard at the worst possible time
If your name is Pete, you’re from the north of England, and you’re in a band that seems on the verge of a breakout success, the fates may be unavoidably aligned against you.
In the summer of 1982, Sheffield rockers Def Leppard were recording their third studio album in London, working with producer Mutt Lange. The band hadn’t toiled in complete obscurity up to this point, but the heavy metal sound of their first two albums—On Through the Night and High ‘n’ Dry—hadn’t scored them any major hits or much mainstream radio play in the UK or the US. For their new record, Pyromania, there was a strategic effort to shift the Def Leppard sound in a much slicker, poppier direction, and that plan would, of course, pay off handsomely.
Powered by the singles ‘Photograph’, ‘Rock of Ages’, and ‘Foolin’’, Pyromania became one of the best-selling albums of 1983, vaulting Def Leppard to the front of the pack of a new MTV glam metal hierarchy. Not everybody who worked on the album got to bask in its success, however.
On July 11th, 1982, nearly 20 years to the day after the Beatles had unceremoniously sacked drummer Pete Best, Def Leppard axed their rhythm guitarist and founding member Pete Willis. This was in the middle of the Pyromania sessions, meaning that Willis’s contributions as a songwriter and guitarist would still be included on the record; he just wouldn’t get to join in the worldwide victory tour that followed.
Unlike Pete Best, who was supposedly fired simply because he wasn’t as good as Ringo, Willis’s dismissal did have a more behaviour-based, self-inflicted inevitability to it. “Pete back then would readily have gone in the ring with Mike Tyson after a few pints of beer,” Def Leppard frontman Joe Elliott recalled in a VH1 Behind the Music documentary.
While Willis’s drinking problem had been tolerated up to a point as an acceptable form of rock n’ roll excess, it soon clashed with Mutt Lange’s perfectionist approach in the studio. “There was a lot of tears shed on that record,” Elliott said, “A lot of drum sticks thrown and a lot of guitars slammed down… Mutt was like a train: ‘Do it again, do it again, do it again.’”
The combination of those gruelling Pyromania sessions and Pete Willis’s spiralling lifestyle soon led to a proverbial fork in the road. “I just really got out of my brains one night,” Willis remembered in the same doc, “drank a bottle of brandy or something like that, and I was very ill. I shouldn’t have gone into the studio the next morning.”
“We thought he was choking,” added Mutt Lange. “We tried the take again, and finally, I said, ‘Pete, listen, you’re gonna have to go back to Sheffield. Just cool out and come back when you’ve got yourself together.’”
Lange and the other members of Def Leppard seemed to know, though, that this hiatus for Pete Willis wasn’t going to be a temporary one. “We gave him what we call the Spanish archer,” Elliott said, nudging his elbow outward as he spoke. “Elbow.. he had to go.”
Guitarist Phil Collen was the Ringo Starr of this situation, quickly brought in as Willis’s replacement, and thus the lucky chap, at the age of 25, who was about to be a part of one of the biggest rock bands in the world.
For Pete Willis, the drink had sadly reduced him to permanent footnote status in the Def Leppard story, but he did bounce back and overcome many of his demons. After playing with a couple of other bands in the ‘80s (Gogmagog and Roadhouse), he settled into a pleasant, post-rock lifestyle back in Sheffield with his wife and two kids, eventually starting up his own property management firm.
Willis was also inducted into the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 2019 as a founding member of Def Leppard, but 37 years after his departure from the group, he opted to skip the reunion.
