If ever a rock band aimed high it was Def Leppard with their 1987 album Hysteria.
As singer Joe Elliott said: “We wanted to blow people’s minds. We wanted rock fans to go, ‘Yeah, this is way beyond what normal rock is.’ And we wanted pop fans to go, ‘They’re my rock band.’”
Hysteria became a landmark album for Def Leppard for many reasons.
The biggest selling album of the band’s career, with more than 25 million copies sold worldwide, it was their first UK and US No.1.
It was an album that was more than three years in the making, at a cost of £2 million.
What Hysteria represented for drummer Rick Allen, on a personal level, was something truly profound – an album he was able to complete after losing his left arm in a car crash.
This was also, sadly, the last album that Def Leppard made with guitarist and founder member Steve Clark, whose long battle with alcoholism led to his death on 8 January 1991.
As Joe Elliott said: “We had hellish moments making that record. There was all sorts of madness going on.”
Hysteria was designed to be what Elliott called “the Thriller of hard rock”, in which pretty much every track could or would be a single.
And the most important song on the album was the last one to be written and recorded.
The writing process for Hysteria began in Dublin in February 1984, where Joe Elliott, Rick Allen, Steve Clark, bassist Rick Savage and second guitarist Phil Collen got together with producer Mutt Lange.
More than two years later, in October 1986, the work was finished at last – until, that is, Joe Elliott told the rest of the guys about this new idea he had.
At that time, Aerosmith had just had a huge hit with a remake of their classic track Walk This Way co-starring hip-hop trio Run-D.M.C.
Inspired by this game-changing collaboration, Elliott pushed Leppard to create their own rap/rock hybrid – Pour Some Sugar On Me.
The first person to hear Elliott’s early version of the song was Mutt Lange. The producer was working on the track Armageddon It in the control room at Wisseloord Studios in Holland when Elliott picked up an acoustic guitar.
As Elliott recalled to Classic Rock: “We were having a five-minute coffee break. Mutt disappeared, and I went into the control room and started playing this thing.
“Mutt comes back and asks what it was. I said it was just this idea I’d got – no big deal. He said: ‘That’s the best hook I’ve heard in five or 10 years. We should absolutely do this song.’
“And, of course, I was thinking there was no way the guys were gonna go for it.”
When he told the other members of the band that he had a new song, it was met with some resistance.
“We’d done eleven songs,” he said. “Nobody wanted to do another except me and Mutt. But I said, ‘Sorry, boys – you can’t turn this chorus down!’”
According to Phil Collen, it was Lange who came up with the song’s hooky guitar riff.
“Mutt saw the intro as this kinda country guitar lick, played with his fingers,” Collen said. “I can’t actually do that, so Mutt had said: ‘Just make it very gappy.’ So I put this main riff in the gaps. It was really based on rap stuff – not your standard rock song.”
The whole track was cut in ten days. And this song, conceived in such uncharacteristic haste, would prove hugely significant.
When the Hysteria album was finally completed, the budget had reached £2m.
The album was released on 3 August 1987.
In the US, the first single was Women, and it bombed – peaking at No.80 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Sales of the album, however, were strong, quickly reaching one million.
The second US single, Animal, hit the top 20, and in January 1988 the album’s title track made No.10.
At this point, sales of the album were at three million. This was a huge amount by any normal standards, but such was the budget of Hysteria that Def Leppard were still $1m down.
It was the fourth single, Pour Some Sugar On Me, that took the album to a whole new level.
Joe Elliott had written the song specifically for strippers to perform to: the bump-and-grind rhythm, the to tongue-in-cheek come-ons in the lyrics (“Do you want sugar? One lump or two?”). And it worked. All across America, dancing girls and their patrons bombarded local stations with requests for the song, and with that airplay, plus heavy rotation on MTV, Pour Some Sugar On Me shot up the Billboard Hot 100, driving albums sales through the roof.
“When Sugar took off,” Rick Savage said, “the album went from three million to six million almost overnight. And then there was no stopping it.”
On 23 July 1988, as Pour Some Sugar On Me peaked at No.2, Hysteria was the No.1 album in America, beating out other multi-million sellers such as Van Halen’s OU812, George Michael’s Faith, Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite For Destruction and the Dirty Dancing soundtrack.
It had taken almost a year for Hysteria to reach the top, and it was Pour Some Sugar On Me that made it happen.
“It was a groundbreaking album,” Rick Savage said, “and people had finally got it.”
Pour Some Sugar On Me has remained a highlight of Def Leppard's live shows ever since – as recently seen at the Radio 2 In The Park 2025 event.
As Phil Collen said of the song: “I still get a buzz from it. For some bizarre reason, in America women seem to feel compelled to take their shirts off when we play it.
"Pour Some Sugar On Me is like anything – if you’re rehearsing it in the rehearsal room, it’s really fucking boring. But as soon as you play it in front of an audience who are into it, it makes all the difference.”
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