Hysteria (Def Leppard album)

History

Initially, Hysteria was to be named Animal Instinct and produced by Lange, but he dropped out after pre-production sessions, citing exhaustion from a gruelling schedule from the past few years. Meat Loaf songwriter Jim Steinman was brought in, but Steinman's intention to make a raw-sounding record that captured the moment conflicted with the band's interest in creating a bigger, more pristine pop production. Joe Elliott later stated in an interview: "Todd Rundgren produced (Meat Loaf's) Bat Out of Hell. Jim Steinman wrote it". After parting ways with Steinman following an unsatisfactory recording of "Don't Shoot Shotgun", the band tried to produce the album themselves with Lange's engineer Nigel Green with no success, and initial recording sessions were entirely scrapped.

On 31 December 1984, Rick Allen lost his left arm when his Corvette flipped off a country road. Following the accident, the band stood by Allen's decision to return to the drum kit despite his disability, using a combination electronic/acoustic kit with a set of Def pedals that triggered (via MIDI) the hits he would have played with his left arm. The band slowly continued production until Mutt Lange unexpectedly returned a year later, and Allen mastered his customised drum kit. However, the sessions were further delayed by Lange's own auto accident (sustaining leg injuries from which he quickly recovered) and a bout of the mumps suffered by singer Joe Elliott in 1986.

The final recording sessions took place in January 1987 for the song "Armageddon It" and a last-minute composition "Pour Some Sugar on Me", but Lange spent another three months mixing the tracks. The album was finally released worldwide on 3 August 1987, with "Animal" as the lead single in most countries except for the US and Canada where "Women" was the first single.

In the liner notes to the album, the band apologised for the long wait between albums, and promised to never make fans wait that long between albums again. However, later events, namely the death of Steve Clark, delayed the next album, Adrenalize, by almost five years.

According to David Simone, the managing director of Phonogram Records at the time, the album might have been the most expensive record made in the UK. According to Phil Collen the album had to sell 5 million copies to break even.

Fortunately for the band, their popularity in their homeland had significantly grown over the past four years, and Hysteria topped the charts in Britain in its first week of release. The album was also a major success in other parts of Europe. In the United States, however, the band at first struggled to regain the momentum of Pyromania that was lost from such a prolonged absence. The success of the album's fourth single, "Pour Some Sugar on Me" would propel the album to the top of the US Billboard 200 albums chart nearly a year after its release. In the Billboard issue dated 8 October 1988, Def Leppard held the #1 spot on both the singles and album charts with "Love Bites" and Hysteria, respectively.

Hysteria went on to dominate album charts around the world for three years. It was certified 12x platinum by the RIAA in 2009. The album currently sits as the 51st best selling album of all time in the US. It spent 96 weeks in the US top 40, a record for the 1980s it ties with Born in the U.S.A. The album has sold more than 25 million copies worldwide.

The leadoff track, "Women", was selected as the first single for the US and Canada, instead of "Animal", in July 1987. Then-manager Cliff Burnstein reasoned that the band needed to reconnect with their hard rock audience first before issuing more Top 40-friendly singles. "Women" became a top 10 hit on the rock chart, peaking at #7, but as predicted, did not make a large impact on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at #80. Six more singles were subsequently released in the United States, with "Love Bites" reaching #1, and three others reaching the top ten. The singles earned similar success in the United Kingdom.

Speaking to Kerrang! in May 2008 about the album's success, Joe Elliot remembered:

For us the first album showed promise, the second showed the true reality of where we were going, the third album worked better in America than it did in England simply because there was no exposure radio-wise over here but by the time we did Hysteria, everything had fallen into place. Airplay and hit singles were one aspect of it but there was also all the hard work we put into the album – we literally did slave over it to get every sound on it right. There was also Rick's accident, of course, and to be honest, I'm sure there was the initial wave of sympathy but I'm equally sure the album would have still worked anyway. None of the other stuff – the touring, the promotion, the videos – none of that would have meant anything if the songs hadn't been there and I'm still really proud of all the songs on Hysteria.

On 24 October 2006, a 2 CD "deluxe edition" of the album was released, including a remastering of the original b-sides and bonus tracks from the album's period. Many of these songs, alongside two other Hysteria compositions "Desert Song" and "Fractured Love", had been featured on Retro Active, albeit with remixes, revamps, and new parts added. The deluxe edition Hysteria deluxe CD included the original b-side versions of these recordings without alterations.

During their 22 March to 10 April 2013 residency at The Joint, Def Leppard performed the album in its entirety, from start to finish. This was followed up with a live album Viva! Hysteria, recorded during the residency and released on 22 October 2013, which includes all of Hysteria being played live.

Concept

The album's goal, set out by Lange, was to be a hard rock version of Michael Jackson's Thriller, in that every track was a potential hit single. Songs were therefore written with this concept in mind, disappointing heavy metal fans who clamoured for a straight sequel to Pyromania. One song, "Love Bites", was already mostly written in the vein of a country ballad by Mutt Lange when he brought it to the band's attention.

While Pyromania contained traces of Def Leppard's original traditional heavy metal sound found on their first two albums, Hysteria removed them in favour of the latest sonic technology available at the time (best displayed on "Rocket", "Love Bites", "Excitable", and "Gods of War"). As with Pyromania, every song was recorded by every member in the studio separately instead of the whole band. The multiple vocal harmonies were enhanced by Lange's techniques, even pitching background vocals on all tracks. Guitar parts were now focused more on emphasising melody than hard rock's more basic and cliched riffs. The band used the Rockman amplifier, developed by guitarist Tom Scholz from the rock band Boston, to record the album, which engineer Mike Shipley described as "a shitty little box" with "a godawful sound" that "had no real balls to it" but was used because the other amplifiers used had an excessively "crunchy" sound ill-suited to layering guitars and which Lange didn't think was "commercial" enough.

In addition, all of the album's drum sounds were samples recorded by Lange and the engineers, then played from the Fairlight CMI. In a 1999 interview with Mix Magazine, Shipley noted, "'Pyromania' was done the same way, on cheesy 8-bit Fairlight technology where we had to figure out how to record everything at half speed into the Fairlight to make it sound like it had some tone to it, and we'd be stacking up a bunch of snares and bass drums." Shipley also noted that the drum sounds were dealt with last because each song's structure could change so radically, and because of technical difficulties.

This unique approach sometimes led to painstaking lengths of time in the recording studio. The smash single, "Pour Some Sugar on Me", was the last song written but was quickly finished within two weeks. In sharp contrast, the final version of "Animal" took almost a full three years to be developed but was not as successful as other singles despite reaching #19 on the Billboard 100.

This was a successful formula that Lange would later repeat with his now ex-wife Shania Twain in country music with the albums The Woman in Me and Come on Over.

Critical reception

Hysteria has received critical acclaim. AllMusic reviewer Steve Huey gave the album a rating of five stars and stated that "Pyromania's slick, layered Mutt Lange production turned into a painstaking obsession with dense sonic detail on Hysteria, with the result that some critics dismissed the record as a stiff, mechanized pop sell-out (perhaps due in part to Rick Allen's new, partially electronic drum kit)." Huey said that album was not heavy metal and was instead a standout example of pop metal.

In 2005, Hysteria was ranked number 464 in Rock Hard magazine's book of The 500 Greatest Rock & Metal Albums of All Time. Hysteria got the same placement on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 best albums of all time, and the magazine also ranked the album atop its list of the 50 greatest hair metal albums. Hysteria was also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.

Track listing

All tracks written by Joe Elliott, Rick Savage, Phil Collen, Steve Clark and Mutt Lange.

Personnel

Additional personnel

Production

Artwork design