This section looks at the 'Bringin' On The Heartbreak' UK single release. The second single taken from the 'High 'n' Dry' album.
"It nearly didn't make the 'High 'n' Dry' album because it was a ballad."
Def Leppard released their classic Bringin' On The Heartbreak single on this day in 1981 in the UK.
The second single to be released from the 'High 'n' Dry' album in the UK.
The follow up to 'Let It Go' which had been released after the album in August 1981.
The song would not reach the UK Top 100 singles chart.
A remix version was released in May 1984 in the USA and reach Number 61 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
The video would receive massive airplay on MTV in the USA during the end of 1982 and help pave the way for the success of the 'Pyromania' album in 1983 despite it not being released there as a single.
Rolling Stone March 2016 - Joe Elliott Interview Quotes
"We treat every song the same - we couldn't distinguish the ugly from the beautiful. But Mutt [producer Robert John "Mutt" Lange] being more of a passive observer, if you like, he was the one who realized if we had a shot at radio it was with this song."
"So when we were recording the album [High 'n' Dry], it was the one that got the most attention. I'd say for every hour we spent working on another song, we spent three or four on this one."
And Mutt put me through the fucking mill singing the thing, because he wanted me to be accepted in the same league as a Paul Rodgers or a Lou Gramm or whoever. Meanwhile, I was just a young kid who was happy enough to be Ian Hunter!"
"The funny thing is, Mutt kept saying to us, "This is the one." And as it happens, it wasn't the one! Not at radio, at least."
But we had the foresight to shoot a kind of a video for it, which was just a live performance. And the fledging MTV, having nothing to play, liked the idea of this young U.K. rock band, so they picked it up."
"So six months, maybe a year after High 'n' Dry came out, we were making Pyromania and we started getting these telexes from the States saying, "Your album is selling 6,000, 7,000, 8,000 copies a week." Then it was 10, 15, 20,000 copies a week. It was heading toward platinum by the time we had Pyromania in the bag. Because of MTV, by 1982 the whole country was playing "Heartbreak."
Def Leppard 1991
Def Leppard Bringin' On The Heartbreak - Band Quotes
Rick Savage - "Where it all began - and to think it nearly didn't make the 'High 'n' Dry' album because it was a ballad."
Joe Elliott - "We were waiting around to work with Mutt. I was working on a building site when it was written. Having had a top 20 album in England and done a tour of American Arenas."
"It was very humbling. At first it was called 'A Certain Heartache'. But Mutt changed it around and it was transformed. Mariah Carey has also covered it - and about bloody time!."
"It took 21 years for someone to do a proper cover of one of our songs. Apparently she was listening to 'Vault' when she decided to go back into the studio and add it to her own already finished album. That makes it hard not to say. 'God bless ya, Girl'."
Def Leppard 1991
Def Leppard Bringin' On The Heartbreak - Band Quotes
Joe Elliott
"That song was originally called “A Certain Heartache,” and it was Mutt who said, “That’s a bit of a wishy-washy title, isn’t it?” Steve wrote most of the music for that song."
We had been inside a paper factory just outside Sheffield in the middle of winter, sitting on crates, freezing our butts off, just trying to come up with songs that were just, you know, stage two of our career. More of the same, if you like."
"The dynamics that got put into it during pre-production when we were working with Mutt lifted it to a different level. We rewrote the lyrics—we sat down with Mutt and rewrote the verses, stripped it apart and rebuilt it."
"That was the learning curve that we went through with Mutt, but we were just trying to write great songs. It wasn’t like we had this vision of, “Well, this is going to end up on the radio,” because when it came out, it didn’t end up on the radio."
"What happened is that we shot some promo videos—they weren’t like videos that you saw in the ’80s, they were like, 8 mm hand-cam shoots done at a venue in Liverpool in England that made it look like we were playing live, and full of fan club people bobbing their heads around for four hours."
"When we toured that record, that song did get a little bit of airplay on the radio, there’s no doubt about it, but not like what is has become now. But in 1982, while we were making Pyromania, MTV started kicking in, and they didn’t have many promo videos to show."
"They started playing it and it started to get requested, and then it started to get requested on the radio. It was like tennis between the radio and MTV—the requests were just going over the fence, and then back again and over the net again, and more requests keep it on TV, and more requests keep it on radio."
"We’d be getting telexes—because that’s what you had back in 1982, it was a machine that would be spewing out paper—and it was someone from the label going, “High ’N’ Dry sold 20,000 copies this week,” and we had never sold 20,000 copies in any week when it was originally released."
"People started picking up on this song, and by the time Pyromania was released, we’d sold 800,000 copies of High ’N’ Dry. “Bringin’ On The Heartbreak,” by the time we had played it again, which was on the Pyromania tour a year later, that song was going down the way “Stairway To Heaven” must’ve gone down, the tour after it came out for Zeppelin, because it had established itself. It was, “Wow! We’ve got a hit record on our hands.”
What did you think of that Mariah Carey cover?<
Joe Elliott
I hate being critical about anyone who covers one our songs, because there aren’t enough people to cover them for me to get blasé about it. I’m not Paul McCartney, where 5,000 versions of “Yesterday” exist. Very few covers of our song exist, and the fact that someone of her stature covered one of our songs is extremely flattering."
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