How Mick Jagger inspired a classic Def Leppard song
The influence that the The Rolling Stones had on Def Leppard can’t be overstated. The twin-guitar approach to rock and roll was just one element: flamboyant lead vocals, a potent mix of hard-edged rock guitar with pop melodies, and an embrace of evolving technology were concepts spearheaded by the Stones and perfected by Def Leppard.
To say that Def Leppard wouldn’t exist without The Rolling Stones is probably true, but the Stones also had a more direct impact on one of Def Leppard’s biggest albums.
Throughout most of the mid-1980s, Def Leppard were attempting to record their fourth studio album Hysteria. A number of setbacks befell the group, most notably the car accident suffered by drummer Rick Allen that cost him his left arm in early 1985. As they continuously laboured over the album, singer Joe Elliott began to feel stifled by the pastoral setting of Wisseloord Studios in Hilversum, Netherlands, where the band were working.
“We were stuck in Holland,” Elliott recalled to Consequence. “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.”
Hilversum is a relatively quiet town in North Holland that just happened to house one of the most popular recording studios of the 1980s. Everyone from The Police to Elton John to Iron Maiden had recorded at Wisseloord, and while Def Leppard were painstakingly crafting Hysteria there, Mick Jagger began working on his second solo album, Primitive Cool, in the same space.
“It was a four-studio complex, and Mick Jagger came in, and he brought Jeff Beck along with him,” Elliott recalled. “He took us all out to a nightclub. It just happened to be a gay nightclub that played loads of disco. That inspired us to write ‘Excitable’. It all came about from the little bit of networking that we did.”
“But the rest of it, you’re just listening to the music that’s happening at the time. When we first got together in 1984 in Dublin to start recording, Frankie Goes to Hollywood were just kicking off,” Elliott added. “The sonic sound that they achieved with producer Trevor Horn’s sounds … we would sit there listening to this. Even Mutt [Robert Lange, producer] would be going, ‘Wow. This is something else.'”
Check out ‘Excitable’ down below.
