Hysteria is the fourth
studio album by
British hard rock band
Def Leppard, released in 1987. It is the band's best-selling album to date, selling over 20 million copies worldwide, and spawning seven hit singles. It was produced by
Robert John "Mutt" Lange. The title of the album was thought up by drummer
Rick Allen, relating to his experiences during the time of his auto accident, and the worldwide media coverage that followed. It's also the last album to feature Steve Clark's guitar solos, but on
Adrenalize, it's the last album to feature his writting on songs.
The album was the follow-up to the band's 1983 breakthrough
Pyromania. Its creation process was one of the longest ever for a rock album, taking over three years, and was plagued by many trials, such as the
December 31,
1984 car accident that cost Rick Allen his left arm.
Subsequent to the release of the album, Def Leppard published a book on the tough times the band went through to record the album, including issues with production and Rick Allen's car crash. Ordering information was printed on the last page of the cover booklet inside the CD case.
At the time of the LP's release, this was the longest rock album ever released as a single LP or cassette, clocking in at just over 62 minutes long. This beat out Deep Purple's 1980 compilation
Deepest Purple: The Very Best of Deep Purple, which was 61 1/2 minutes long. The iconic album cover was designed by Andie Airfix of Satori, who has done other covers of Def Leppard albums before and since.
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. Steinman's involvement was a disaster because he was not at all a perfectionist, liking every take the band recorded
[[Source: Classic Albums Hysteria episode]]. Joe Elliott later stated in interview: "
Todd Rundgren produced (Meat Loaf's)
Bat out of Hell. Jim Steinman WROTE it"
. After parting ways with Steinman, the band tried to produce the album themselves with Lange's engineer Nigel Green with no success, as initial recordings sessions were entirely scrapped at this point.
On December 31, 1984, drummer
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 foot pedals that triggered (via
MIDI) the hits he would have played with his left arm. The band slowly soldiered on until Mutt Lange made a surprise return a year later, and Allen mastered his customized 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 during 1986.
The final recording sessions took place in January 1987 for the song "
Armageddon It", but Lange spent another three months mixing the tracks. The album was finally released worldwide on August 3, 1987, with "
Animal" as the lead single in most countries except for the US where "
Women" was the first single.
Interestingly, in the liner notes to this album, the band apologized for the long wait between albums, and promised to never make fans wait that long between albums again. Later events, namely the death of
Steve Clark would prove this untrue.
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 October 8, 1988, Def Leppard held the number one 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. At 16 times
platinum in America alone and another 8 million copies sold outside the US,
Hysteria currently sits as the 51st
best selling album of all time in the US.
The leadoff track, "Women", was selected as the first single for the US, instead of "Animal", in July 1987. Then-manager
Cliff Bernstein reasoned that the band needed to reconnect with their hard rock audience first before issuing more Top 40-friendly singles. The strategy backfired somewhat as "Women" did not make a large impact on the
Billboard Hot 100, peaking at #80. It was a top 10 hit on the rock chart though, peaking at #7. Six more singles were subsequently released in the United States, with "love Bites" reaching #1 three others reaching the top ten. The singles earned similar success in the United Kingdom.
On October 24, 2006, a 2-CD "deluxe edition" of the album was released, including a re-mastering of the original b-sides and bonus tracks from the album's period. Many of these songs 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.
The album has earned critical acclaim from a number of sources. In 1988
Q magazine readers voted
Hysteria as the 98th Greatest Album of All Time, while in 2004, the album was ranked at number 472 on
Rolling Stone's list of the
500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
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 clamored 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 heavy metal,
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.
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, engineer
Mike 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 did become one of the bigger hits from the album.
This was a successful formula that Lange would later repeat with his now estranged wife
Shania Twain in
country music with the albums
The Woman in Me and
Come on Over.
Track listing
All songs written by
Steve Clark,
Phil Collen,
Joe Elliott,
Mutt Lange and
Rick Savage.
Note: Some CD versions of the album include a live version of "Love and Affection" as a bonus track.
Deluxe Edition
Chart positions
Personnel
Additional personnel
Production
- Nigel Green – engineer, assistant engineer, mixing
- Howie Weinberg – mastering
- Laurie Lewis – photography
- Mark Flannery – tape operator
Artwork design
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