The horror behind making the Def Leppard’s ‘Hysteria’
Any average Def Leppard session felt like going to rock and roll boot camp. When the lads from Sheffield worked with superproducer Mutt Lange on the album High ‘N’ Dry, they hit on a formula for dead-on accuracy, making songs with the force of AC/DC coupled with the enormous sounds of Queen. When they were about to reach their creative pinnacle, everything started falling between their fingers.
After settling in for the Hysteria sessions, Lange initially said he wouldn’t be available to produce the record, which completely mortified the rest of the band. For the past few years, Lange had been the unofficial sixth member of the band, and his knack for making the music leap out of the speakers would be sorely missed. Though the band initially thought they would make a record with Meat Loaf cohort Jim Steinman, it became apparent that things wouldn’t work out from the first few sessions.
As opposed to Lange’s style of making the band do take after take until they got it right, Steinman was going for a lively atmosphere, not even caring if some of the instruments were in tune before rolling the tape. According to their manager Peter Mensch, Steinman wouldn’t go quietly when he was asked to leave either, telling Classic Albums, “We paid Steinman a ton of money to get him out of this deal, which meant essentially we had to sell a couple of million records to break even”.
The band had already gotten word that the record needed to sell in the millions to break even, but their break for the Christmas holiday would be shortlived. On New Year’s Eve, drummer Rick Allen was involved in a car crash and wrecked his Corvette in a field, severing his arm. Being caught in the safety belt, Allen got medical care straightaway, only for his reattached limb to become infected, having to amputate it again.
After saying he was determined to play the drums again, Leppard took a break in the studio for Allen’s sake. After a long bout with physical therapy, Allen returned a mere weeks after his accident and tried out a kit that was being built for him. This way, he could play left-handed beats with his left foot.
Although the rest of the group was hesitant to see Allen struggle with his drums, Joe Elliott mentioned it all being worth it after a few weeks, remembering, “He came in one day and told us ‘Come here, I wanna play you something’. He gets behind the kit and starts playing ‘When the Levee Breaks’ by Led Zeppelin and we all immediately got goosebumps”.
After a huge homecoming gig at the Monsters of Rock festival, the band reassembled in the studio to cut the rest of the album, earning them some of the biggest hits of their career, like ‘Animal’ and ‘Pour Some Sugar On Me’. Even still to this day, Elliott never takes Allen for granted behind the kit, saying, “When we play live, 99% of the time I’ve got my back to him, and there’s never a moment where I listen and say, ‘that sounds a bit bizarre’. It sounds like a drummer”.
The work on Hysteria may have cost hundreds of thousands of pounds, sleepless nights, and the loss of a limb, but nothing would stop Leppard from reaching even greater heights than Pyromania.
