Def Leppard

In their early days in the late 1970s, Def Leppard were a definitive part of a new wave of British heavy metal bands. In the 1980s and early 1990s, their ability to infuse pop into hard rock and glam metal distinguished them from the dozens of hair bands of the time. They have become one of the top-selling bands in rock music, and have released more than 40 singles to date.

In 1977, Rick Savage, Tony Kenning, and Pete Willis were students at a secondary school in Sheffield, England; they had a band called Atomic Mass. Joe Elliott became their lead singer later that year, and proposed a new band name: Deaf Leopard. Kenning thought that made them sound too punk, so they changed the spelling.

Their recording debut was a three-track EP that the band produced themselves. When Radio 1 DJ John Peel did a show in Sheffield in 1979, Joe Elliott leapt onstage to hand him a copy of the record. Peel played it on Radio 1 soon after, and Def Leppard started getting a following. By the time they released their first album, On Through the Night, a year later, they already had an audience.

They built on that momentum for two more albums, each one bigger than the last. Then, on New Year’s Eve 1984, drummer Rick Allen lost his arm in a car accident. The band stuck by him through his recovery and retraining. Their most recent producer, Mutt Lange, had decided not to work on the band’s next album, but the news of Allen’s accident changed his mind.

Both the band and Lange wanted the new album to be more pop, while keeping the edge of hard rock and metal. They succeeded. Seven of the twelve songs on their fourth album, 1987’s Hysteria, were released as singles. Def Leppard had been music video darlings since the earliest days of MTV, but now their videos were getting more play than ever. The album was an extraordinary success in Europe, North America, and Australia. It remains one of the highest-selling albums in the history of recorded music.

In January 1991, the band suffered a second major loss: Guitarist Steve Clark died after a bout of heavy drinking combined with prescription drugs. He died nearly 13 years to the day after joining the band, and nearly six years to the day after Rick Allen’s accident. The band survived Clark’s death, but decided not to try to replace him. With the help of guitar tracks Clark recorded before his death, they finished their fifth album, Adrenalize, and released it in 1992. Although hard rock and metal had slipped from the mainstream, Adrenalize was both a critical and commercial success.

Def Leppard is a band that adapts. In the early 1990s, they responded to the rise of alternative rock by looking for ways to differentiate themselves, and by introducing more pop-like melodies into their songwriting. They continued to record throughout the 1990s and 2000s, but it wasn’t until the 2010s that they released their first official live albums (which were also accompanied by a new studio album: 2015’s Def Leppard). None of their music was officially sold or streamed digitally until 2018, when a change in management at Universal Records finally enabled the band to resolve a long-standing dispute over royalties. That same year, Def Leppard embarked on a major tour of North America, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.