Def Leppard's Surprising "Pour Some Sugar On Me"
By | February 11, 2022
“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.”
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.”
One Last Song
Despite the album’s endless delays, Lange immediately recognized genius. Elliot remembered, “He (Lange) goes, 'Oh no, we're not. That's the best hook I've heard in over five years. Play it again.' So I played it and he literally stopped the tape and he took the tape off and put a brand new piece of tape on and said, 'Right, we're going to do this,' and between me and him, we just mapped out what turned into 'Pour Some Sugar On Me.'"
Unwelcome Magic
As Elliot guessed, the rest of the band wasn’t thrilled about doing yet another song on the album that would never end.
Guitarist Phil Collen: “We’d finished the record and were just winding down. We’d already spent so long [on the album] that it was a bit like: ‘Oh, fuck. Not another song that’s going to take six months.’ The main problem with Hysteria was us dicking around with people like [original producer] Jim Steinman. That’s what really took the time. Once Mutt got involved it went pretty quick. So although everyone went: ‘Oh, fucking hell, not more studio time,’ it was obvious that we had to do it.”
Stripper Anthem?
Despite the band’s confidence in the song, it appeared few agreed. Their UK label thought “Animal” should lead the album and as Collen said, “When we first released it in Europe it was ignored.” It wasn't until the following year when Leppard's American record company released “Pour Some Sugar On Me,” that women literally started losing their clothes over it.
According to Collen, “The song became a hit because strippers in Florida started requesting it on the local radio station. It had a second lease of life and then the album went to Number One. I still get a buzz from it. For some bizarre reason, in America women seem to feel compelled to take their shirts off when we play it. “Pour Some Sugar On Me” is like anything; if you’re rehearsing it in the rehearsal room, it’s really fucking boring. But as soon as you play it in front of an audience who are into it, it makes all the difference.”