Def Leppard's Surprising "Pour Some Sugar On Me"

By | February 11, 2022

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One of the quintessential hair bands. hairmetal

“Pour Some Sugar On Me” from Def Leppard’s 1987 album, Hysteria, struck like lucky lightning both creatively and commercially. Ironically, for the band, Hysteria amounted to a bag of black cats, carried by crows on Friday the 13th. The album’s conception began in 1984 but the infamous loss of their drummer's arm, along with a fired producer turned the project into a three-year odyssey. As frontman Joe Elliott said, “You really would start to think that we were cursed.”

However, all that karma flipped when Elliot toyed with the song’s hook after the album’s completion, just as a laugh. A seemingly innocuous decision by an American record company turned the album from a middle-of-the-road hit into a literal women-taking-their-clothes-off phenomenon. Here’s the unlikely story of Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar On Me.”

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"Pour Some Sugar On Me" spurred Hysteria to an unlikely #1. amazon

Gold At The End Of The Rainbow

As we mentioned, “Pour Some Sugar On Me’s” origins began after the band thought their costly Hysteria album was basically in the bag. As Elliot recalled,

"We were working on the vocals for I believe it was 'Armageddon' when (Producer) Mutt (Lange) disappeared to get coffee or whatever, and I just picked up this acoustic guitar in the corner of the control room and started playing these three chords around in a circle and singing this hook over the top, and he came back in unbeknownst to me. And he's like, 'What are you playing?' 'It's just an idea I had, it doesn't matter, we've got 11 songs on this record, two years into it, I know we're done.”