Def Leppard were riding high in 1984 from the massive success of the album Pyromania. The album sold in the millions and took the band to new heights on the heels of the hit songs "Photograph" and "Rock of Ages." The band had been re-energized by the presence of guitar player Phil Collen who replaced founding member Pete Willis. Willis’ alcoholism had run rampant and led to him being axed during the production of Pyromania. It was the first time that Def Lep faced internal struggles and tragedy but it would not be the last. As the band gathered together after the end of the tour to record the follow up to Pyromania they had no idea that it would three years before the album was completed. Now, twenty years later, Phil Collen recounts the making of the band’s best selling album, Hysteria.

"We started writing the songs when we got off tour. We finished the Pyromania tour and literally moved into this house and started writing songs with Mutt Lange." The band could have chosen the most modern, expensive studio or retreated the most luxurious location to begin recording but instead they moved to Ireland. "One of the reasons we went to Ireland to record the album was due to taxes. At the time if you were an artist then you only paid something like four percent taxes. Back then, in England it was horrible. One year Elton John paid 98% in taxes if you can imagine that. People were doing anything they could to avoid that. When it becomes ridiculous you have to take action. For us, it was going to be something like 65% in taxes we were going to have to pay."

The five young men, proving they were savvy to the ways of business, got down to business by asking Mutt Lange to return to produce the album. However, time was not on their side and soon they were faced with finding someone other than the man dubbed "Def Leppard’s Sixth Band Member." "Mutt had to do Heartbeat City by the Cars. He had already committed to that. We had only six months together. We all lived in the same house together which was kind of cool. We wrote all of the songs together but it took so long that Mutt had to go do the Cars album and we had to find someone to record it. We had a very short list of producers. We had Phil Collins on the list but he had something else to do so we ended up with Jim Steinman."

In retrospect, pairing a group of five hard rocking, young Englishmen with the artsy-farsty Steinman seems like a mistake. Most famous for writing and producing the Meat Loaf classic Bat Out of Hell, Steinman once described the production sound he was looking for as a chocolate milkshake. When it came to Hysteria, however, he was out of euphemisms. "If he had done anything then it wouldn’t have been a bad thing but there were no real suggestions. There was nothing coming out of it at all. When you have someone producing a record, you want them to come in with a lot of ideas. Steinman didn’t work out at all."

The band then figured the next best thing was to take the tutelage they had learned from recording the last two albums with Lange and produce the album themselves. "We spent an extra year just trying to record with different engineers and that didn’t work either. We tried Mike Shipley and Nigel Green and a bunch of different guys and that was all fine and dandy but we started it with Mutt. He had an idea of what it would sound like and everyone was just second guessing him and it wasn’t working at all. It was very frustrating. It wasn’t even a lack of experience on our part. When Mutt explained the concept he had for the album – it is hard to explain. Not many people can actually explain how the songs should have a certain feel and verve to them. The songs just didn’t have any fire to them. We kept going back and doing it over and over again and we kept losing the vibe.

As Lep wasted time mentally masturbating over what they thought Lange would make the album sound like, enough time passed that their mentor was free and looking for a new project. "We had been fucking off for two years and when he came back he said it was time to go to work. As soon as he came back into the fold everything fell into place. He had a vision of what Hysteria was supposed to be like and he was the only one who could do that album. When Mutt came back, he raised everything to a whole new level."

Things began falling into place. The band found their groove and began laying down the tracks that would catapult Def Leppard to new heights of fame. Lange understood Def Leppard and he instinctively knew how to prime both the musicians and the music and get the most out of the recording process. "Mutt Lange is great. He can just listen to a song and say, ‘That chord is too weak and the vocal won’t work. You really need something else here. He really breaks it down and analyzes it. He has a constant flow and he is very inspiring."

Hysteria is an album that caused a paradigm shift in the industry. Def Leppard appeared as a much more mature unit on the album. The songwriting and the recording technique were much more futuristic and complex. In addition to this, Lange also saw the future of the market place. "One of the big things that a lot of people don’t realize Mutt was doing with Hysteria was that he was making the album for CD buyers. He knew the CD thing was going to take off. We had 10 tracks and Mutt said we needed more. All of us, including the record company said, "What are you talking about? Quality will suffer from too many songs and no one will buy the record." In the end, it worked great as CDs obviously took off."

The recording of Hysteria was interrupted by one of the most sensational and tragic accidents ever to happen to a rock band. On New Years Eve of 1984, drummer Rick Allen was involved in a car accident that would change the course of his life and Def Leppard’s future forever. "Steve [Clark] and I were in Paris that night. We got a message that Rick had been in an accident and had severed his arm. We thought he just cut it badly, like a nasty gash. We had no idea how serious the injury was. He nearly lost both arms. The car flipped over and was just trashed. He flew out the roof and the car seat pulled his arm off. We didn’t hear any of this at the time. Pete Mench, our manager at the time, called us from the hospital and told us that his arm was severed. We asked him exactly what that meant. He explained it and we just said, ‘Fuck.’

We were all fairly young guys. We thought stuff like that only happened in the movies. When it happened to someone we knew it was a bit of a wake up call. It brought reality into focus. It was something that we had never really had to deal with. In our band, we had not really experienced anything like that. We had never even experienced the death of a family member." Overnight the band was forced to grow up and make rational, adult decisions about their future. They were years behind on the release of their fourth album and now they had a drummer with only one arm. Watching dollar figures in the studio spiral beyond control surely would have raised the temptation to simply replace Allen and get back into the studio to finish Hysteria. "The idea of replacing Rick never really came into it. When we went to see Rick in the hospital, we asked him if he was going to still play and he told us that he was going to. Mutt Lange had went to see him and told him that he could do it with one arm if he really put his mind to it. From that point on, it was just a matter of him figuring out how he was going to process it and how he was going to play. His determination was really an amazing thing."

In a rare display of friendship, the band stood by Allen, despite feeling pressures of being behind and over budget. Instead of replacing Allen and supporting him from afar, they waited and watched. "Steve Clark and I shared a house with Rick at the time. He would get up at eight in the morning and practice all day. The only suffering at the time was him waking us up. It was cool. He was very determined. We let him get on with it and it really did work out good. It made the unit stronger but it was a really weird thing to happen." The pressures facing these young men would have torn apart many bands. "We had already had success with Pyromania. I think all of the things that happened in between really brought us together. We had to start the album again from scratch with Mutt and Rick losing his arm really brought us all back to ground zero."

Slowly, Allen made progress. He helped design his futuristic drum kit and then taught himself how to play it. It was only a matter of time before he would join his band mates in the studio. Music, however, was not the only challenge he was facing. "For Rick, the hard things were things like learning to tie his shoelaces. He would try to cut a loaf of bread and we would go, ‘Be careful. You’re going to cut your nose off.’ Things that we think are quite normal were personal triumphs for him. For the band, the triumph was when we played the Donnington Festival. England had never been really into us. They thought we were kind of wussies. We had success in America and they were a bit weird about it. Because we had a disabled person in the band, it forced everyone to listen. Rick was fantastic that night as he had so much to prove. Everyone there went, ‘Fucking hell, these guys are really cool.’ It was a very positive thing."

With the band reunited and now totally focused, they continued recording the album. "We recorded the album individually. We didn’t play as a band. Each of us went in and did our parts separately. It was hard work but it was more like learning. It is not like we had some asshole egomaniac telling us what to do. A lot of people don’t realize that by the time Mutt came in we were banging a lot of the stuff out on the first take. We had to get the ideas right but we really were nailing it in one pass. All of the guitars at the end of "Armageddon It" and "Hysteria" were improvised. Mutt would say, "Try and play something like this" and we would just do it. We would not play it again until we started rehearsals. I had to figure a lot of the guitar parts out again after the album was completed."

Mutt Lange’s vison was to make a hard rock version of Michael Jackson’s Thriller where every song would be a hit single. To accomplish this goal, the band would have to take their vocal skills to the next level. The band worked tirelessly on the fresh, unique harmonies that are all over Hysteria. The result was a sound that is now synonymous with Def Leppard. "Getting the harmonies on the album was rather easy because in the studio you can hear everyone’s different parts really well. Mutt was a big part of that and he even sang with us. He really has a fantastic voice. It was hard because he was pushing us. He turned us into singers. We really didn’t know what we were doing before that. When we properly finished the album, I was amazed. I remember thinking that if no one buys it then I am still happy that it turned out like this. It really turned out as it was supposed to sound."

The band had created a slick and polished album that was light years away from their previous releases On Through the Night, High ‘N" Dry and Pyromania. In the process they risked alienating their core fan base. If Def Leppard’s hard rocking, hard core fans rejected the new and improved version of the band then the result could have been disastrous. Coupling the problems they had finding a producer with the time it took for Rick Allen to overcome his accident had put the band in dire straits financially. The group would have to sell triple platinum just to break even. Just the thought of alienating the fan base should have been enough to break them into a cold sweat. Oddly enough, this was not a concern. "One of the things you have got to do as a band is to make records for yourself. You don’t make records for the fans. You have to please yourself with your artistic licence and expression – that is why you do it in the first place. You don’t go, "Well, I think we will make some music to please some other people." I want to please myself more than anything else."

Hysteria continues to be the most successful release in the band’s catalog. Universal Music recently released a 20^th Anniversary Two CD version of the album. "We had demos and remixes that we had forgotten about. Listening to those songs really took me back and made it a fun thing to do. Hysteria was the highlight of our career. It was very personal because of all the shit Rick went through and overcame. It is also very rare to have this sound in your head and actually be able to pull it off in the end. It totally worked and it was huge. If everything else we ever did after Hysteria completely sucked then we would still be happy with it. Fortunately, we are still going strong twenty years later."

Rocket
Joe had heard this African thing with these tribal drums and we kind of based the song on that. We talked about all of our heros growing up – T. Rex, the Stones, David Bowie. It was an ode to the music we loved. We had no guidelines for that song. It could be anything that it wanted to be and that was really cool. It was really experimental.

Animal
We worked on this song for three years. It was ridiculous. I remember that when the song started off it sounded like Frankie Goes to Hollywood. We ended up keeping the lead vocal and then changed the backing track around it. We scrapped the entire backing track and redid it. It was very weird to do that but all of a sudden it really came to life.

Love Bites
"Love Bites" was a Mutt Lange song. He played it to Steve and me on an acoustic guitar and it really sounded like the Eagles. Mutt has a voice that sounds a lot like Don Henley. We took the song and put some electric guitars on it and it ended up sounding like Def Leppard.

Pour Some Sugar on Me
We had sold three million albums and we were still in debt from this album. When "Pour Some Sugar on Me" came out then the album went back in the charts and ended up going to # 1 twice. I think the album ended up selling 13 times platinum after that. You hear this song all the time; it is on everything. It was the last song we recorded for the record. We pretty much had everything done. Joe was goofing around on the guitar and played the main riff. We went, "What was that?" He said it was a new idea he had. Mutt said we had to record it. We did the whole song in two weeks. It was really funny because we took three years to do the album and then that song only took two weeks and was the biggest hit.

Armageddon It
This was an ode to T. Rex. It was very much in the "Bang a Gong" style. You could really see our influences coming out on this song.

Gods of War
There were a lot of things going on in the world at that time. We were still dealing with the Cold War and it was still really scary. We had Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Regan quotes in the background of that song. We tried to make the song sound like the Stones but we could never really get it to work out. We listened to the album recently when we were at Joe’s house and we admitted that we really didn’t get this one right. It was really going good but we fucked up on the chorus.

Don't Shoot Shotgun
I like this one.  It was more in the classic Def Leppard style. 

Run Riot
Listening to this song now I really think we should have tried something different. Maybe some different chording or something. This really is the weakest song on the album.

Hysteria
The groove of this song is nice. The song was written really quickly. I remember singing the first thing that came to mind and it actually became the first verse. Rick Savage had this guitar thing floating around and we put it together with Steve’s chorus. We went to town on it in the studio with all the overdubs. People used to ask us if we always recorded one guitar string at a time, which of course we didn’t. On that particular song, there is a part where Mutt and I were recording the song one string at a time so it didn’t sound like an arpeggio. My friend came in the studio to sing on it and looked at us and said, "What are you doing?" It came out sounding a lot like a keyboard would sound.

Excitable
It was a great mid 80's song that never really got the justice it deserved. It could have been cooler. It didn’t get enough profile, otherwise it would have been a bigger hit.