None of the High ‘N’ Dry singles charted in the US, but Def Lep were figuring things out. That LP made a pretty good dent in America. Shortly thereafter, masterful crunch-rock producer Mutt Lange, coming off of the monster success of AC/DC’s Back In Black, signed on to produce Leppard’s 1981 album High ‘N’ Dry. It did well in the UK, and it got Leppard onto some big tours, opening for bands like AC/DC. Leppard signed with Mercury, and they released their debut album On Through The Night in 1980. An indie EP, released in 1979, caught on in part because tastemaking BBC DJ John Peel played their song “ Getcha Rocks Off,” which doesn’t sound too terribly different from the punk and pub-rock that he was advocating for at the time.
(Drummer Rick Allen was 15 when he joined up.) The Def Lep guys had been fans of glam rock as kids, and when they became a part of the UK’s surging early-’80s metal movement - the storied New Wave Of British Heavy Metal - they kept the stomping simplicity of early-’70s glitter-rock. They’d formed in 1977 in Sheffield, when all the members of the group were teenagers. When they landed that one #1 hit, Def Leppard had been a band for more than a decade.
DEF LEPPARD LOVE BITES HOW TO
When “Love Bites” reached its chart apex, the band, on tour at the time, rented a studio so that they could figure out how to do their own biggest hit in front of vast crowds.
DEF LEPPARD LOVE BITES FULL
Def Leppard had a set full of hits, so they never had to play “Love Bites” live until after the song hit #1. (Lange did the album’s backup vocals himself.) The album’s drum sounds were an entire tragic and triumphant saga unto themselves we’ll get into that below. Mutt Lange surrounded the band with samples and screeches and whooshes and his own aaah-aaahs. This was not a case of a bunch of guys getting into a room together and hitting record. Hysteria was a mutant beast of an album, painstakingly assembled in the studio over years. The funny thing about “Love Bites” is that the band never played it all together in one room until after it reached #1 in the US. (Its tally is now past diamond.) At the end of 1988, Billboard named Hysteria the #3 highest-selling album of the year, behind only Faith and the Dirty Dancing soundtrack. When Def Leppard’s “Love Bites” finally had its week atop the Hot 100 in America, Hysteria had already been out for more than a year, and it had sold seven million copies. For the hard rock bands of the late ’80s, it was almost always the ballad that pushed them over the top. It was the ballad that did it, of course. That’s not Thriller, but it’s about as close as hard rock ever got. One of them - the only one in Def Leppard’s decades-long history - got to #1. Four of those singles made it into the top 10. Hysteria has 12 songs, and it spun off seven singles. Def Lep had never had a top-10 single in the US before their 1987 album Hysteria. Lange and Def Leppard basically succeeded.
He intended to make something that would just smother them. In a Guitar World interview a few years ago, Def Leppard’s Phil Collen laid that vision out in plain language: Lange wanted “a hard rock version of Thriller.” Lange planned for Def Leppard’s next album to be something that wouldn’t just cross over to the pop charts. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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