Def Leppard (v.l. Phil Collen, Rick Allen, Joe Elliot, Rick Savage, Steve Clark) on 01.12.1983 in ... [+]
Following the release of their 1980 debut LP On Through the Night, the British hard rock group Def Leppard was gradually building their following that continued with their sophomore record, 1981's High 'n' Dry, which marked their first and crucial collaboration with producer Robert John “Mutt” Lange. So when it came time to make their third album in 1982, the quintet from Sheffield, England, had a game plan.
“Mutt hasn't seen us for seven or eight months,” Def Leppard singer Joe Elliott recalled in 2023, “because you make the record, you go out and tour, and he goes off and does his work for other people. And then you see him again and it became like a thing in the first couple of days where we were listening to ideas for songs.
“He may have asked the question [to us]: ‘Do you wanna make High ‘n’ Dry 2 or do you wanna make a record that nobody else has ever made?’” Elliott added about Lange. “He said, ‘We're not gonna make High ‘n’ Dry 2–we're gonna make an album that no one else has ever made.'”
Released in 1983, the resulting work, Pyromania, became Def Leppard's breakthrough record in the States where it peaked at number two on the Billboard album chart (it has since sold 10 million copies in the U.S.). At a time when British synthpop and Michael Jackson's Thriller were the rages, Pyromania brought hard rock back to the pop chart buoyed by the now-classic tracks “Rock of Ages,” “Foolin’” and “Photograph.” As Rolling Stone's David Fricke wrote in the liner notes for the 2009 reissue of the album: “...the symphonic dynamics of Lange’s production, his pioneering use of new sampling and electronic-processing technologies and the band’s precocious invention as writers and players made Pyromania a truly rare thing: a heavy-metal album for everybody.”
“Sometimes it stands in the shadow of Hysteria [Def Leppard’s 1987 blockbuster album],” Elliott said of Pyromania. “But my God, Pyromania was an insane breakthrough. It was only kept off the top by Thriller, the biggest record of all time.”
To mark the 40th anniversary of Pyromania, the band re-released the album last Friday as a 4-CD/1 Blu-ray collection that also contains previously unreleased demos and rough mixes from the recording sessions; two live concert performances recorded in Germany and Los Angeles; and the official videos for the singles. Its release comes as Def Leppard is about to embark on a summer tour with Journey beginning in July.
In a 2023 interview promoting the band memoir Definitely, Elliott spoke about the new Pyromania box that he executive produced. “It's been long in the making and will be a very, very special thing,” he said back then. “We said, 'Look on, if we're gonna do this, we're not just gonna put that out as a 12-inch box. It's got to have some other stuff.'”
At the time of its recording, Pyromania was the first Def Leppard album to feature new guitarist Phil Collen, who replaced Pete Willis and joined co-founders Elliott, guitarist Steve Clark, bassist Rick Savage and drummer Rick Allen. In addition to his production work on the album, Lange also co-wrote all of Pyromania’s songs and sort of became an unofficial sixth member of the band.
“Mutt Lange had done fantastic records before we went into the studio in ‘82,” Elliott said, “having done [AC/DC's] Back in Black and Highway to Hell, Foreigner's 4...he did the Boomtown Rats, City Boy and all these great unknown bands in the 70s, and then he was writing songs for Huey Lewis. He was just the guy to go to. Someone like him with the belief in us to do something like that, you're just 10 feet tall. It's like, ‘We can do this.’”
In contrast to their hard-rock guitar-driven contemporaries, Def Leppard and Lange embraced the latest state-of-the-art technology more aligned with the pop and electronic music acts of the times. Especially under Lange's purview, Pyromania was painstakingly built to the very last sonic detail.
“There's all this digital stuff coming out – 'Oh, what does that do?'” Elliott said. “We were intrigued to incorporate it into the standard rock and roll sound. All this new stuff that was the domain of bands like the Human League, Joy Division, New Order—they were using drum machine sounds. It was starting to become a thing, so why not? We wanted to make a record that people would hear and go, 'What the hell is that?' We had the riffs and we started to put the pieces together and built them into songs.”
“These things take time,” Elliott later added, “because you spend hours and hours getting the sound that you’re recording. You’d come back the next day and go, 'Does it work?' And so you do it again. That's what we did. We were forever reinventing every song. every section of every song if needed to be done. If we got it right the first time, then we got it right. But a lot of the time, we'd be like, 'No, it’s not right.'”
Elliott said the band’s lyric writing was evolving with an emphasis on more drama and less predictability for Pyromania: “They were more stories like “Billy's Got a Gun” or “Die Hard the Hunter.” The longingness of someone in “Photograph,” the “let's celebrate/we’re at a gig” type song in “Rock of Ages” or “Rock! Rock! (Til You Drop).” We were starting to develop.”
In addition to the dramatic 'Foolin'” and the celebratory “Rock of Ages” (with its memorable "Gunter glieben glauten globen” intro), “Photograph,” with its power riffs and killer hooks, became Def Leppard’s biggest song up to that point. On the origin of that track’s title, Elliott said: “I think we were just singing (sings the riff), and I think it might be Mutt who went ‘photograph.’ We went, ‘That’ll do, that’s good, photograph. Let's just use that as the hook for the chorus.’ I was the one that suggested, ‘Let's make it about the ultimate woman you can't have because she's no longer around.’ I felt like I had this epiphany, brilliant idea.”
Elliott brought in the lyrics of “Photograph” after the band worked on the music. “It was born out of the fact that I got a Shawshank Redemption sort of hole in my bathroom wall that I covered up with a poster of Marilyn Monroe,” he explained. “The previous tenant must've got angry and punched a hole through, and I covered it up with this picture of Marilyn Monroe, which I saw every day when I went to the bathroom. And I remember saying, ‘What about something like Marilyn Monroe?’ It could have been Jayne Mansfield – it didn't matter. It was that kind of iconic beauty: 'die young, stay pretty.' So Marilyn became like a focal point.‘
“It was that poster that made me suggest the idea,” he continued, “so we just worked on that: ‘Gotta photograph, picture of.’ It was that whole longing thing. The lyrics are great. More importantly, the songwriting arrangement is just great. It jumps like a lot of great rock songs jump, but it's just got an extra little bit magic to it, which was really great melodies, good attitude.”
Although driven by good-old-fashioned guitar rock that borrowed from glam and metal (cases in point included the blistering “Stagefright,” the haunting power ballad “Too Late for Love,” and the meaty “Coming Under Fire”), Pyromania made use of synthesizers. And a little-known fact: Thomas Dolby of “She Blinded Me With Science” fame guested as a keyboard player on Pyromania under the pseudonym of Booker T. Boffin. “Tom Dolby was like, ‘I don't want a credit. I don't want people to know I'm working with a band like you,’” Elliott remembered. “As soon as he said that, we told everybody. We’re paying him money, take the credit. Mutt admired his work so he came along and he did a fantastic job.”
The emphasis on technology and sleek production techniques complementing their hard rock sound reflected Def Leppard’s desire to push the boundaries. “We did things that most other bands don’t do,” said Elliot. “[People would say,] ‘That's the domain of the Human League. They're the enemy.’ We never saw them as the enemy. We saw it as different. Some of that stuff was great —[the League’s] “Don't You Want Me,” Thompson Twins. All those bands that were doing stuff like that, and then later on it would be Frankie Goes to Hollywood with [producer] Trevor Horn. [He] brought it to Yes and totally changed Yes from the prog rock band doing “Yours Is No Disgrace to “Owner of a Lonely Heart”—they sounded like a completely different band.
“That's what we wanted: we wanted that freedom to do that. We were getting there. Pyromania was like the learning curve to get there so that we had the freedom to do it on every record since if we wanted to – we have the knowledge because we learned how to do it.”
ROCHESTER, NEW YORK: Def Leppard performing in concert in Rochester, New York. (Photo by mICHAEL ... [+]
A year-long world tour followed the massive critical and commercial success of Pyromania. Afterward, it took Def Leppard four years to make and release Hysteria—a long and tortured process that has since become part of band lore. That record generated more hits (including “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” the title song, “Animal” and “Love Bites”) and elevated Def Leppard as one of the biggest acts on the planet by the end of the 1980s. But it was Pyromania that made it all possible.
“Pyromania set that all up for us,” Elliott reflected, “and the work that we put into that record was very important for the rest of our career because Mutt allowed us the freedom to be who we were. But at the same time, it gave us the discipline that we needed to not just waffle around too much. People joked it took nine months to make [Pyromania]. These days, to make a record in nine months is like rapid fire.
“When we heard it, we thought we made a great record. But it's not up to us, isn’t it? We've done our bit. It's up to the rest of the world after that.”
