There have been a handful of highly-anticipated albums by renowned rock artists that took a long time to see the light of day, reports Greg Prato for Heavy Consequence. One of those that proved to be truly worth the wait (from both a commercial and artistic standpoint) was Def Leppard’s fourth album overall, Hysteria - selling 12 million copies in the US alone, topping the Billboard 200, and spawning six Top 20 singles.
Several reasons can be pointed to for the four-year lag between Hysteria and its predecessor, Pyromania - among them, the album’s original producer not working out; having to wait for their preferred producer to become available; and most seriously, having to overcome a horrific accident to one of the band members.
Hailing from Sheffield, England, Def Leppard’s first two albums (1980’s On Through The Night and 1981’s High ‘N’ Dry) helped build a worldwide following among headbangers. But it was on 1983’s Pyromania that the band (singer Joe Elliott, guitarists Steve Clark and Phil Collen, bassist Rick Savage, and drummer Rick Allen) became one of rock’s top acts. With super-producer Mutt Lange helping the group hone their sound, Pyromania went multi-platinum, spawned several hit singles and videos (“Photograph”, “Rock Of Ages,” and “Foolin’”), and made them an arena headliner.
When the tour in support of Pyromania wound down in February of 1984, work soon began on a follow-up. However, with Lange not available at the time, Def Leppard opted to enlist Jim Steinman - best known for writing Meat Loaf’s classic Bat Out Of Hell album - as the producer of “album #4.” Things didn’t go so well. “It was a mismatch, sadly,” recalled Elliott in the exclusive video interview with Heavy Consequence. “He’s great at what he does, but we weren’t one of the artists that it was ever going to work with.”
“It didn’t work at all,” added Collen in the same interview. “[The songs] just sounded terrible. He didn’t really get how we were working. It just sounded ordinary and flat. It wasn’t until Mutt came back into the fold that they started coming alive, really. Some of the songs we wrote with Mutt initially we tried to record with Jim Steinman, and they just didn’t sound as good as the demos. So it was like, ‘This is not working’.”
Read more and watch a video interview with Joe Elliott and Phil Collen at Heavy Consequence.
