The story of Def Leppard

Sheffield beginnings

The story starts at Tapton School in Sheffield in 1976, where Rick Savage, Tony Kenning and a few friends formed a covers band called Atomic Mass. Guitarist Pete Willis joined soon after, and Savage, who had started out on guitar, moved over to bass. In November 1977 an eighteen year old called Joe Elliott missed his bus, got talking to Willis, and ended up auditioning as a guitarist. By the end of the audition everyone agreed he was really a singer. Joe brought a name with him. He had dreamed up Deaf Leopard while designing imaginary band posters in art class. Kenning suggested bending the spelling so it looked less like a punk band, and Def Leppard was born.[1] [2] [3]

The band still needed a second guitarist. Pete Willis had spotted a young man reading a guitar book at technical college and invited him to try out. His name was Steve Clark, a classically trained player who worked as a lathe operator at an engineering firm. Clark never turned up. Then Willis and Elliott bumped into him again at a Judas Priest concert and repeated the offer. In January 1978 Clark finally came to rehearsal and, by Joe's account, won the job by playing the whole of Lynyrd Skynyrd's Free Bird on his own, solo and all. He would become the band's chief riff writer, nicknamed the Riffmaster.[1] [2] [3]

In November 1978, days before the band's first recording session, drummer Tony Kenning left. A local drummer called Frank Noon, from a group named the Next Band, filled in, and the band cut three songs at a small studio in Hull. The whole thing cost one hundred and forty eight pounds fifty. Meanwhile a fifteen year old drummer from Dronfield called Rick Allen, fed up with covers bands, saw a newspaper item about Def Leppard losing their drummer. His mother got on the phone for him. Rick auditioned at the end of November, played Thin Lizzy's Emerald with them, and Savage later said the song suddenly sounded six times better. He has been their drummer ever since.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The little record, known as The Def Leppard E.P., was pressed up and sold by the band themselves. In January 1979 Joe pushed a copy into the hands of BBC Radio One DJ John Peel at a student event in Sheffield. A few days later Joe's mum answered the phone to say John Peel was calling. Peel played a track every night that week. Record companies noticed, and in August 1979 the band signed with Phonogram, on its Vertigo label in Britain and Mercury in America. They fired their local managers after Joe got into a fistfight with one of them, and signed with Peter Mensch, the young American who managed AC/DC. Rick Allen spent his sixteenth birthday onstage at the Hammersmith Odeon, opening for AC/DC.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Hello America

Def Leppard's first album, On Through the Night, came out on the fourteenth of March 1980, produced by Tom Allom, who had worked with Judas Priest. Joe later said the backing tracks were done in a day, followed by three weeks of overdubs and only three days for his vocals. The album reached number fifteen in Britain, and the music press crowned them leaders of the new wave of British heavy metal alongside Iron Maiden and Saxon. The band never liked the label. Rick Savage said their music was nothing like Iron Maiden's. One song gave away where their hearts were heading. Hello America was inspired by the palm lined streets Joe saw in American police dramas on television.[1] [2] [3]

They spent much of 1980 touring the United States, opening for Pat Travers, Judas Priest, Ted Nugent and AC/DC, and some British fans took it as a betrayal. The music paper Sounds ran a cover story by Geoff Barton asking whether the Leppard had changed its spots. When the band played the Reading Festival in August, the crowd pelted them with cans and bottles. Rick Savage remembered a can of beer hitting his guitar strap within twenty seconds, and counted himself lucky, because some people were throwing bottles filled with urine. Barton later admitted he felt guilty about the story, while Joe has argued the press blew the day out of proportion, since every band on the bill got abuse.[1] [2] [3]

The next step was the producer Robert John Lange, known to everyone as Mutt, who had just made AC/DC's Highway to Hell and Back in Black. The wait for him was hard. His sessions with Foreigner ran long, money was tight, and in the winter of 1980 Joe hauled bricks on a building site for his girlfriend's father because the record company retainer was too small to live on. When the work started in February 1981, Joe called it boot camp. Lange pulled the songs apart and made Joe sing lines again and again until his throat gave out. Drumsticks and glasses got thrown. Savage said Lange became the sixth member of the band in every sense.[1] [2] [3]

High 'n' Dry arrived on the sixth of July 1981 and sold modestly, peaking at number twenty six in Britain and thirty eight in America. What saved it was a brand new television channel. The video for the power ballad Bringin' On the Heartbreak, filmed live in Liverpool, became one of the first metal videos on MTV, and heavy rotation sent the album back up the charts until it went platinum. The band toured with Ozzy Osbourne. Behind the scenes, Peter Mensch and his partner Cliff Burnstein left their management firm and, on the first of April 1982, started their own company, Q Prime, running it from their apartments in New York and London. Def Leppard were their first client.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Pyromania and the second British Invasion

Work on the third album began in 1982 with a new method. At Lange's suggestion the band brought him riffs and vocal ideas rather than finished songs, and they built the tracks together. Guitars and bass went down first against a drum machine click, with the real drums added last, so parts could be rearranged at will. They struggled so much to find the right guitar sound that they joked about setting fire to their amplifiers, which gave the album its name. But one founder was falling apart. Pete Willis's drinking had got so bad that he could not play his part on a song called Stagefright, and Lange refused to go on working with him.[1] [2]

Joe Elliott drew the job of telling him. On the eleventh of July 1982 Willis was dismissed. He had already recorded rhythm guitar for the whole album, and he later said leaving was the best thing that could have happened to his health. His replacement was already lined up. Phil Collen, a Londoner from Hackney who had worked as a motorbike courier and played in the glam band Girl, had jammed with the band before. The day after meeting them, he walked into Battery Studios and cut a solo for Stagefright in one take. Collen played on five tracks, and his flashy, aggressive style locked straight in with Steve Clark's melodic playing.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Pyromania came out on the twentieth of January 1983 and turned Def Leppard into household names in America. The lead single, Photograph, ran for six weeks at number one on the American rock radio chart and landed just outside the pop top ten, and its video overtook Michael Jackson's Beat It as MTV's most requested clip. Rock of Ages followed it to the top of the rock chart. The album sold about six million copies in 1983 alone, more than a hundred thousand a week, and the only record that kept it from number one was Michael Jackson's Thriller. The American tour ended in September with a headline show for fifty five thousand people at Jack Murphy Stadium in San Diego.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The numbers kept climbing. Pyromania was eventually certified diamond for more than ten million American sales, and it is often credited with setting off the whole wave of eighties pop metal. Rolling Stone counted the band among the Second British Invasion, and a Gallup poll in 1984 found American fans picking Def Leppard as their favourite rock band, ahead of the Rolling Stones. Home was a different matter. In Britain the album stalled at number eighteen. Joe also remembered meeting Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy, who told him the album was the reason he had split his band, because he could not compete with it. Joe called it the crappiest backhanded compliment he ever received.[1] [2] [3]

The accident

In early 1984, partly for tax reasons, the band moved to Dublin to write the follow up. Mutt Lange helped with the songs, then told them he was too exhausted to produce another album. After Trevor Horn and Chris Thomas said no, the managers suggested Jim Steinman, the writer behind Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell. Joe pointed out that Steinman was not really a producer. Sessions began in Holland on the eleventh of August 1984, and on the first afternoon, while the band were still warming up, Steinman declared that they had the take. The band wanted a huge, polished record and Steinman wanted raw feel. After about eight weeks they paid him off, went into debt, and shelved everything.[1] [2] [3]

Then came the worst day in the band's history. On the afternoon of the thirty first of December 1984, Rick Allen was driving his Corvette with his girlfriend on the A57, a winding road in the hills west of Sheffield. He was twenty one. Trying to overtake another car at speed, he lost control. The car left the road, hit a dry stone wall and rolled into a field. His seat belt had not held him properly, he was thrown from the car, and his left arm was torn off and left inside it. An off duty policeman and a nurse stopped to help. Surgeons reattached the arm, but a severe infection set in and it had to be amputated.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The rest of the band never considered replacing him. Joe said Rick was like a brother, and it was up to Rick to tell them if he could not play. In hospital, the staff had put a block of foam at the foot of his bed, and Rick began tapping rhythms on it with his feet, playing along to his favourite records. That became the plan. With Simmons and an engineer called Pete Harley he developed an electronic kit with extra pedals, so his left foot could play the parts his left arm used to. He practised for months, locked away at his parents' house in Dronfield. When he was ready, he gathered the band and played the opening of Led Zeppelin's When the Levee Breaks. Joe called it a very emotional moment.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In August 1986 the band played a few warm up shows in Ireland, with Status Quo's drummer Jeff Rich set up on a second kit as a safety net. Then Rich missed a flight and Rick played on his own until he arrived. At the next venue there was no room for two kits, so Rick played the whole show alone. Afterwards Rich told him he could clearly manage without him. On the sixteenth of August 1986 Def Leppard played the Monsters of Rock festival at Castle Donington, their first big show in more than two years. When Joe introduced Rick, the roar of the crowd was so loud that Rick burst into tears, and he wondered if crying on his electric pedals might electrocute him.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Hysteria

Mutt Lange came back in 1985 and decided most of what had been recorded sounded too much like Pyromania, so the album took another eighteen months. His goal was a hard rock version of Thriller, an album where every track could be a hit. Guitars were built up in thin layers, and on the title track the chords were recorded one note at a time. Every drum sound was a sample, programmed on a Fairlight computer. The delays piled up. Lange was hurt in a car accident of his own, and Joe caught mumps in late 1986. A Phonogram executive said it may have been the most expensive record ever made in Britain, and Phil Collen reckoned it had to sell five million copies just to break even.[1] [2] [3]

Hysteria finally came out on the third of August 1987. The title was Rick Allen's idea, a nod to the media frenzy around his accident. In Britain it went straight to number one, and Animal became the band's first top ten hit at home, reaching number six. America was slower. Manager Cliff Burnstein chose the heavier song Women as the first American single to reconnect with rock fans, and it stalled at number eighty on the pop chart. The title track then gave them their first American top ten single. The band had even apologised in the liner notes for the long wait, and promised never to make fans wait that long again.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The song that changed everything was written last. During a tea break near the end of the sessions, Joe was strumming a riff on an acoustic guitar, and Lange told him to turn it into a song. Joe had been struck by Run DMC and Aerosmith's Walk This Way and liked the idea of mixing rap rhythms with rock. For the lyrics, he and Lange sat at opposite ends of the control room and mumbled words into two dictaphones, then swapped tapes. The song was Pour Some Sugar on Me. When it came out as the fourth American single, with a live video filmed in Denver, it reached number two, and on the twenty third of July 1988, almost a year after release, Hysteria hit number one.[1] [2] [3]

Love Bites had begun as a country ballad that Mutt Lange wrote and brought to the band. They added layers of guitars and backing vocals borrowed from the rhythm and blues ballads of the day. Joe called it possibly the hardest vocal he ever sang, too high for his low voice and too low for his high one. In October 1988 it went to number one on the Billboard Hot 100, and in one week that month Def Leppard held the top single and the top album in America at the same time. Armageddon It followed at number three and Rocket made the top fifteen. Seven singles from the album reached the Hot 100.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The tour lasted sixteen months, and the band played in the round, on a stage in the middle of the arena, so fans surrounded them on every side. At the American Music Awards in 1989 they won favourite heavy metal and hard rock artist and album. Hysteria spent ninety six weeks in the American top forty, tying the record for the decade held by Bruce Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A., and it was later certified diamond. Worldwide sales are put at somewhere between fifteen and twenty million. Joe admitted there may have been a wave of sympathy after Rick's accident, but he insisted none of it would have mattered if the songs had not been there.[1] [2]

Losing Steve Clark

On the road, Steve Clark and Phil Collen were known as the Terror Twins, for their guitar partnership and their drinking. In 1988 Collen stopped. He had started having blackouts, and he gave up alcohol and meat for good. Clark could not. He suffered badly from nerves before shows, and his drinking grew worse. In the winter of 1989 he was found unconscious in a bar in Minneapolis and taken to the Hazelden treatment centre. His bandmates and Mutt Lange flew out and, guided by a doctor, each read him a letter. Collen remembered telling him he was scaring them. The doctor said his blood alcohol level was higher than the level that killed Led Zeppelin's John Bonham.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Clark went into rehab in Tucson, Arizona, and the band promised to hold his place while he took six months of leave. There he met Janie Dean, a patient recovering from heroin addiction. They agreed to help each other, but both left the programme early and the drinking resumed. Collen said it became almost impossible to keep track of him. On the eighth of January 1991, Steve Clark was found dead at his home in Chelsea, London. He was thirty. The post mortem found a fatal mix of alcohol and prescription painkillers, taken while nursing a cracked rib, and the cause was given as respiratory failure. He was buried at Wisewood Cemetery in Sheffield, near his family's home.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The band went back into the studio the day after he died. Collen was ready to quit. One morning in the kitchen he told Joe he would rather be a plumber, and Joe talked him round by saying they owed it to Steve to finish the songs they had written together. So Collen learned Clark's guitar parts from the demos and played them himself, alone in the studio with the tapes. He said it was like playing along to a ghost. The band finished the album as a four piece. The song White Lightning was about Steve's addiction, and to lighten the mood they wrote Let's Get Rocked, a comic song about a teenager inspired by Bart Simpson, in two and a half days.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Adrenalize came out at the end of March 1992, co produced by the band and engineer Mike Shipley, with Lange advising from a distance. It went to number one in Britain and America and held the American top spot for five weeks, keeping Bruce Springsteen's Human Touch off it. Clark shares writing credits on six of its ten songs. The band needed a new guitarist for the road, and after auditions that included Adrian Smith and John Sykes, they chose Vivian Campbell from Belfast, formerly of Dio and Whitesnake. His first big show came on the twentieth of April 1992 at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert at Wembley, where they played Queen's Now I'm Here with Brian May.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Grunge, Slang and hard times

On the sixth of June 1993 Def Leppard played the first ever rock concert at the Don Valley Stadium in Sheffield, in front of more than fifty thousand people. That summer an acoustic song gave them one more big American hit. Two Steps Behind had been cut in a few hours as a B side, after a late night jam with the Irish band Hothouse Flowers. When the makers of Last Action Hero asked for a song, the band sent the tape, and Michael Kamen added strings. It reached number twelve and inspired the collection Retro Active. In 1995 the greatest hits album Vault included a new ballad, When Love and Hate Collide, which reached number two in Britain.[1] [2] [3] [4]

To launch Vault, on the twenty third of October 1995, the band played three shows on three continents in a single day, in Tangier in Morocco, in England, and in Vancouver in Canada, and earned a place in the Guinness Book of Records. Away from the stage, the mid nineties were rough. Rick Savage developed Bell's palsy, which partly paralysed his face, and his father died on the eve of the next album's sessions. Both Joe and Phil were going through divorces. Savage later said that seeing what Rick Allen had come through kept him humble, and that the hardest part was simply not being able to eat or sleep properly.[1] [2] [3] [4]

There were also criminal charges. In May 1996 Los Angeles prosecutors charged Rick Allen with spousal battery over an attack on his wife in a restroom at Los Angeles International Airport the previous June. The city attorney said Allen dragged her in, choked her and slammed her head against a wall. He had been allowed into a counselling programme instead, but the charges were refiled when he stopped attending meetings. He was later sentenced to a work crew and ordered to attend Alcoholics Anonymous. In the same week, Joe Elliott was arrested on a spousal assault charge after a fight with his girlfriend at a West Hollywood hotel. Prosecutors said the timing of the two cases was a coincidence.[1] [2] [3]

The album those years produced was Slang, released in May 1996. With no Mutt Lange for the first time since 1980, the band rented a townhouse in Marbella, Spain, and played together live instead of building songs piece by piece. Rick went back to a partly acoustic kit. Vivian Campbell said grunge made a typical Def Leppard record impossible, and that Soundgarden's Superunknown was their reference. The lyrics were darker, and Turn to Dust even used an Indian sarangi. Q magazine named it one of the albums of the year, and it reached number five in Britain. In America it stopped at number fourteen, the band's first album that failed to go platinum there.[1] [2]

Help came from television. In 1998 VH1 featured Def Leppard in one of the first episodes of Behind the Music, and reruns drew some of the series' best ratings. It was even parodied on Saturday Night Live. The band answered with Euphoria in 1999, a deliberate return to their classic sound. Mutt Lange came back for a few days and co wrote three songs, including Promises, which spent three weeks at number one on the American mainstream rock chart. Formula One champion Damon Hill, a neighbour of Rick Savage, played a guitar solo on Demolition Man. In September 2000 Brian May inducted the band into Hollywood's RockWalk on Sunset Boulevard.[1] [2]

Survivors

In 2001 VH1 dramatised the band's early years in a television film, Hysteria: The Def Leppard Story, with Anthony Michael Hall playing Mutt Lange. The next album, X, arrived in 2002 and leaned towards pure pop, with outside writers for the first time. It peaked at number eleven in America and became their least successful release. In 2005 the band left Q Prime, their managers of more than twenty years, played Live 8 in Philadelphia, and toured with Bryan Adams. Then in 2006 came Yeah!, an album of covers of the glam and rock songs they grew up on, by Sweet, T. Rex, the Kinks, Badfinger and David Bowie. Several critics called it their liveliest record in years.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Songs from the Sparkle Lounge followed in 2008, named after a backstage tuning room decorated with fairy lights where the band tried out new ideas on tour. It entered the American chart at number five, and its first single, Nine Lives, featured country star Tim McGraw. That October they taped an episode of CMT Crossroads in Nashville with a young Taylor Swift, who has named Def Leppard as an influence, and their duet on Photograph was nominated at the CMT Music Awards. In 2009 they headlined the Download Festival at Donington in front of eighty three thousand people. When they cancelled a run of shows that autumn, they had to deny rumours of a split.[1] [2] [3]

By 2012 the band were fighting their record label, Universal, over what it paid them for downloads. Because the label could not release their songs digitally without permission, the band recorded exact copies of their own hits and sold those instead. Joe called them forgeries. Pour Some Sugar on Me and Rock of Ages were remade that June, and Hysteria in 2013. The dispute was not settled until 2018, when their catalogue finally arrived on streaming services. In 2013 they played a residency in Las Vegas, performing Hysteria from start to finish for the first time, after opening each night for themselves as a fake covers band called Ded Flatbird.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In June 2013 Vivian Campbell announced he had Hodgkin's lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system. He kept touring through chemotherapy, then had a stem cell transplant and years of immunotherapy, and he talked openly about living with the disease rather than hiding it. In January 2016, on a Def Leppard fan cruise, Joe lost his voice to laryngitis and the band played without him for the first time ever, with guest singers and Campbell and Collen taking turns. The same night, Campbell's friend Jimmy Bain, the former Dio bassist who played with him in the band Last in Line, died of lung cancer aboard the ship. The self titled album Def Leppard had come out in October 2015.[1] [2] [3]

In 2018 Def Leppard toured North America with Journey and played to more than a million people in three months. That December they were named in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame class of 2019, on their first time on the ballot. They also won the public fan vote with five hundred and forty seven thousand votes, well ahead of Stevie Nicks. Joe had once said they would politely refuse the honour, but he changed his mind. On the twenty ninth of March 2019, at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, Brian May of Queen inducted them, calling them magnificent human beings. Steve Clark was inducted posthumously. Pete Willis was inducted too, but he did not attend.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Later years and legacy

A giant stadium tour with Mötley Crüe, Poison and Joan Jett was announced for 2020, then pushed back twice by the pandemic. It finally opened in Atlanta in June 2022. By then Def Leppard had a new album to play. Diamond Star Halos, released in May 2022, takes its title from a line in T. Rex's Get It On, and it leans on the glam rock of Bowie, Mott the Hoople and Marc Bolan that the band grew up with. Two songs feature the bluegrass singer Alison Krauss. It reached number five in Britain and number ten in America, and the tour took them to headline Wembley Stadium for the first time.[1] [2] [3]

In 2023 the band released Drastic Symphonies, sixteen of their songs reworked with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, recorded at Abbey Road. It reached number four in Britain. That March, Rick Allen was attacked outside the Four Seasons hotel in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where he was staying before a show. Police said a nineteen year old spring breaker from Ohio, Max Edward Hartley, hid behind a pillar, then ran at the drummer and knocked him to the ground, and Allen hit his head on the concrete. Hartley was also accused of attacking a woman who came to help. He was arrested and charged with battery and with abusing an elderly or disabled adult, among other counts.[1] [2] [3]

New music has kept trickling out. In June 2024 the band released Just Like 73, with a guest guitar solo by Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine. In January 2025 they covered Stand By Me, giving the proceeds to FireAid for victims of the Los Angeles wildfires. In January 2026 came Rejoice, built on a tribal drum loop by Phil Collen and a lyric from Joe about someone at rock bottom trying to rise. It launched a residency at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas in February 2026. As of 2026 a thirteenth studio album is in the works, though Collen joked that since this is Def Leppard, it might not arrive until 2028.[1] [2] [3]

Def Leppard have sold more than a hundred million records. With two diamond albums, they are one of only five rock bands with two original studio albums that each sold ten million copies in America, alongside the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Van Halen. Joe has long felt the British press never gave them their due, and once complained that the BBC's Later with Jools Holland thought them not cool enough. Their influence runs wide. Mariah Carey covered Bringin' On the Heartbreak, Taylor Swift shared a stage with them, and Matt Nathanson made a whole album of their songs. The line up has stayed the same since 1992, and Rick Allen is still the youngest member.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The people around Def Leppard

Steve Clark and Phil Collen. They were opposites who fitted perfectly. Clark was classically trained and knew the rules of music, while Collen was self taught and fast. They swapped lead and rhythm parts freely and became the Terror Twins, famous for drinking together. Collen quit alcohol in 1988 and led the intervention that tried to save Clark. After Clark died, Collen called him his best friend and still dreams about him.[1] [2] [3]

Def Leppard and Mutt Lange. The South African producer shaped High 'n' Dry, Pyromania and Hysteria and co wrote most of their hits, and Rick Savage called him the sixth member. He was a demanding perfectionist who pushed Joe's voice to breaking point. He bowed out after Hysteria, advised on Adrenalize and returned briefly for Euphoria. Lange later married Shania Twain and has avoided interviews for decades.[1] [2] [3]

Peter Mensch and Cliff Burnstein. Burnstein signed Def Leppard to Mercury in America and urged his friend Mensch to take them on, reportedly telling him to steal them from their managers if necessary. In 1982 the pair founded Q Prime with Def Leppard as their only client, then added Metallica. Mensch even appears as a monk in the Rock of Ages video. The band left Q Prime in 2005.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Joe Elliott and Phil Collen. When they met, they found they owned the same records, from Bowie and T. Rex to Roxy Music and the Sex Pistols. They became the band's main songwriting pair and side project partners in the Cybernauts, a tribute to Bowie's Spiders from Mars. When Collen wanted to quit after Steve Clark's death, it was Joe who talked him into staying.[1] [2] [3]

Rick Allen and Joe Elliott. After the crash, Joe said Rick was like a brother and that nobody would ever fire him. At Donington in 1986 the two of them shared most of a bottle of whiskey in a backstage trailer, and it was Joe's introduction that brought the crowd's roar and Rick's tears. Rick still names that day among the best of his life.[1] [2]

Pete Willis and Def Leppard. Willis co founded the band and recruited both Joe Elliott and Steve Clark, but his drinking got him fired in 1982. Joe made the call, and Willis said he was nice about it. Willis later said that if he had stayed he might have gone the same way as Clark. He left music for property management in Sheffield and skipped the band's Hall of Fame induction.[1] [2]

Vivian Campbell and Ronnie James Dio. Campbell made his name on Dio's Holy Diver and left in 1986 on bitter terms. In 2003 he called Dio one of the vilest people in the industry, a remark he later regretted, and Dio said he wished him the best. After Dio's death, Campbell reunited with the original band members as Last in Line and spoke far more warmly of those years.[1]

Vivian Campbell and David Coverdale. Campbell joined Whitesnake in 1987 and was fired at the end of 1988, after friction that began when his wife was barred from travelling with the band. He resented how Coverdale handled it for twenty years. When Def Leppard and Whitesnake toured together in 2008, Coverdale apologised, and in 2015 Campbell joined Whitesnake onstage in Sheffield.[1]

Def Leppard and Jim Steinman. Steinman was hired in 1984 when Mutt Lange was too worn out to produce Hysteria. It was a clash from day one. He loved raw first takes and theatrical ideas like a Yes style synthesiser run, while the band wanted polish. After about eight weeks they paid him off. Collen said they thought they had bought a Ferrari and got a second hand Cortina.[1] [2]

Def Leppard and Brian May. The Queen guitarist has been a friend for decades. He played Now I'm Here with them at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert in 1992, which was Vivian Campbell's first big gig with the band. He inducted them into Hollywood's RockWalk in 2000 and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2019, calling them a bunch of magnificent human beings.[1] [2]

Joe Elliott and John Peel. The BBC DJ was famous for championing punk, so a teenage Joe took a chance and handed him the band's homemade EP at a Sheffield student event in 1979. Peel asked for his phone number, then rang Joe's house to say he was playing it that night. He played a track every night that week, and the record companies came calling soon after.[1] [2]

Rare facts about Def Leppard

• Def Leppard's first record cost one hundred and forty eight pounds fifty, and the change bought fish and chips. They budgeted one hundred and fifty pounds for The Def Leppard E.P. at a studio in Hull. Joe Elliott says they used three fewer cassettes than expected, and spent the one pound fifty left over on fish and chips, shared in the back of the car.[1] [2]
• Rick Allen spent his sixteenth birthday on stage at the Hammersmith Odeon, opening for AC/DC. Allen joined the band at fifteen and dropped out of school in 1979 to concentrate on music. On his sixteenth birthday Def Leppard were supporting AC/DC in London.[1]
• Steve Clark was three years into a four year engineering apprenticeship when the band got their record deal. Clark worked as a lathe operator at the engineering firm GEC Traction after leaving school. He was three years into his four year apprenticeship when Def Leppard signed with Phonogram.[1]
• Thomas Dolby played keyboards on Pyromania under the joke name Booker T. Boffin. The synth pop star of She Blinded Me with Science is credited on Pyromania as Booker T. Boffin. He also played keyboards on Photograph.[1] [2]
• The strange count in on Rock of Ages is made up German sounding nonsense from Mutt Lange. Instead of one, two, three, four, Lange said a string of gibberish that sounds vaguely German, a nod to his German parents. The band joke it means running through the forest silently. The Offspring later sampled it on Pretty Fly for a White Guy.[1] [2]
• Joe found the title Rock of Ages in a hymn book left behind by a children's choir. According to the band's own liner notes, a children's choir had just used the studio, and Joe spotted the words Rock of Ages in a hymn book one of them left behind. It sparked the lyric.[1]
• Band manager Peter Mensch appears as one of the monks in the Rock of Ages video. The video was shot in Battersea, London, on the eighth of December 1982, which was Phil Collen's twenty fifth birthday. Co manager Peter Mensch put on a robe and played one of the monks.[1]
• The Photograph video was filmed on Rick Savage's twenty second birthday. David Mallet shot it in Battersea on the second of December 1982. It was also Phil Collen's first appearance in a Def Leppard video.[1]
• A young Phil Collen is in the crowd on the back cover of Deep Purple's live album Made in Japan. The photo on the back of Made in Japan was not actually taken in Japan. It was shot at the Rainbow Theatre in London, at a concert the teenage Collen attended.[1]
• Phil Collen says Iron Maiden's Steve Harris once approached him about joining Iron Maiden. Before Def Leppard, Collen says Harris sounded him out about replacing guitarist Dennis Stratton. By coincidence, Collen had been at school with Maiden's first singer, Paul Di'Anno.[1] [2]
• Phil Collen played on a Donny Osmond song in 1990 under a fake name. Because his bandmates disapproved, Collen was credited as Rory James Collen on Osmond's Just Between You and Me.[1]
• Phil Collen, famous for his colourful guitars, is colourblind. The guitarist has also been vegetarian since the late eighties, is now vegan, and has trained in martial arts for more than twenty years, earning a black belt in Kenpo karate.[1]
• When Phil Collen first met the band as a new member, he and Joe nearly reversed his car through the manager's window. Collen's car broke down outside Peter Mensch's London house. Joe went out to help fix it, and the pair accidentally started it in reverse, almost sending it through Mensch's window.[1]
• Two members of Spandau Ballet sang uncredited backing vocals on Animal. Gary Kemp and Steve Norman of Spandau Ballet are listed as uncredited backing singers on Animal, alongside a backing choir of the band and Mutt Lange credited as the Bankrupt Brothers.[1]
• Animal took almost three years to finish and was the only Hysteria song Rick Allen demoed with two arms. Allen recorded a beat for Animal on a four track tape before his crash. The song only came together when Joe sang a vocal in Paris in 1985 that Lange loved, and the band rebuilt the track around it.[1] [2]
• Rocket samples the countdown commentary from the Apollo 11 launch. The voice is Jack King of NASA announcing the Apollo 11 launch. On the same album, Gods of War samples speeches by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.[1] [2]
• A Hysteria era B side was sung by a roadie billed as Stumpus Maximus. Their tongue in cheek cover of Release Me was credited to Stumpus Maximus and the Good Ol' Boys. Stumpus was crew member Malvin Mortimer, later their tour manager, with the band as his backing singers.[1]
• The first Pour Some Sugar on Me video was shot in a Dublin mansion as it was being demolished. Russell Mulcahy filmed the band inside Mount Merrion House near Dublin while a wrecking ball knocked it down. The band disliked the result, so America got a live video from Denver instead.[1] [2]
• In 1991 MTV named Pour Some Sugar on Me the number one video of all time. In May 1991 MTV put it at the top of its Top 300 Videos of All Time countdown. In 2006 VH1 ranked it the second greatest song of the eighties.[1]
• In the hospital after his crash, Rick Allen had daily visits from Hare Krishnas bringing healthy food. Allen was told he would be in hospital for six months but left within one. Among his visitors were Mutt Lange, who he says lit a fire under him, and Hare Krishnas who brought food every day.[1]
• Rick Allen's left foot plays four electronic pedals to cover what his left arm used to do. From left to right the pedals trigger a closing hi hat, bass drum, snare and a tom. He has since gone back to partly acoustic kits depending on the setting.[1]
• Two Steps Behind came out of a late night jam with the Irish band Hothouse Flowers. Joe had demoed the song on electric guitar in 1989 and shelved it. After an acoustic jam session in March 1992, Collen suggested an unplugged version, recorded in a few hours as a B side.[1] [2]
• The Retro Active cover hides a giant skull. Up close it shows a woman at a dressing table. From a distance the mirror and her two reflections form a skull, borrowed from Charles Allan Gilbert's 1892 illusion All Is Vanity.[1]
• The demo of When Love and Hate Collide holds the final guitar solo Steve Clark ever recorded. Clark worked on the demo days before he died in 1991. The finished song came out in 1995 on Vault and reached number two in Britain.[1] [2]
• The band Tesla wrote a song for Steve Clark after touring with Def Leppard. Tesla opened for Def Leppard on the Hysteria tour. After Clark died, they recorded Song and Emotion, dedicated to their friend Steve Steamin' Clark, for their album Psychotic Supper.[1]
• Slang is the only Def Leppard album without the famous band logo on its cover. The 1996 album dropped the logo from its artwork, though its singles still carried it. It was also the first album recorded by the band playing live together in the studio.[1]
• Formula One world champion Damon Hill plays a guitar solo on the Euphoria track Demolition Man. Hill, the 1996 world champion, was a neighbour of Rick Savage at the time and contributed the solo to the 1999 album.[1]
• Rick Savage was once on the books of Sheffield United, even though he supports rivals Sheffield Wednesday. Before music won, Savage pursued a football career with Sheffield United and was a keen runner. He has a bass painted in Sheffield Wednesday's colours.[1]
• Rick Savage has never played bass with his fingers. He always uses a pick, saying that with his fingers some notes jump out while others are muted, which he called a nightmare for the sound engineer.[1]
• In Las Vegas in 2013, Def Leppard opened for themselves as a band called Ded Flatbird. During the Viva Hysteria residency they first played rarities as Ded Flatbird, billed as the best Def Leppard covers band in the world, then came back as themselves to play all of Hysteria.[1] [2]
• Their first Top of the Pops performance never aired, and Rick Allen's drums were placed at the front. They filmed Hello America for Top of the Pops on condition the single kept climbing. It slipped off the chart instead. The clip, with the drums in front of the band, later surfaced on video.[1]
• Dave Cousins of the Strawbs recorded the spoken intro on the first album, imitating Laurence Olivier. Joe spoke the opening of When the Walls Came Tumbling Down on stage and on demos, but for On Through the Night Cousins voiced it, doing his best Olivier.[1]
• On the original vinyl of High 'n' Dry, the last word of the final song repeats forever. The closing no in No No No was cut into a locked groove, so it looped endlessly. The cassette screamed it forty six times and then stopped dead.[1]
• Vivian Campbell's teenage band wrote a song that Metallica later covered. Campbell's first serious band, Sweet Savage, recorded Killing Time in 1981. Metallica covered it as a B side and later put it on Garage Inc.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.