Tuesday, 5th November 2013
Def Leppard singer Joe Elliott introduced Planet Rock's Play It In Full special last night where they aired the Hysteria album in sequence.
All 12 tracks were played after Joe's brief intro where he answered a few questions about the recording of the album and what it meant for the band.
Unfortunately it wasn't quite the "full" album as the station cut out the intro to 'Gods Of War'. Read Joe's comments below.
In other Planet Rock related news Joe has narrated the current advert for the Mott The Hoople UK tour.
Planet Rock Play's It In Full - Joe Elliott Interview Quotes
Impact of the album
"Well the impact that Hysteria had on Def Leppard's career is pretty substantial. It's amazing really. You know we'd had major success with the previous album Pyromania but only in North America like the whole of the American continent including Canada. It sold enormous amounts of copies and really put us on the map over there. We started our tour in 1983 at The Marquee in front of 600 people in February and we were headlining 55,000 people in San Diego in September. But then we were away for four and a half years making this record and it was an absolute labour of love. We were so determined to not just make Pyromania II. We wanted to make something that was gonna take us to the next level and it really did because 22 million records later and it's always gonna be the biggest record that we ever made. And arguably the most important one."
Why it took so long/Why it was worth it
"Well in February 1984 we relocated to Dublin, Ireland to write for six months. We then went to Holland in August of '84 to start working with Jim Steinman. That didn't work out so after about six to eight weeks that was all kicked into touch and we started working with a guy called Nigel Green who'd worked on the Pyromania and the High 'n' Dry album with us. So he knew the band and we thought that would be a good way of going forward considering we couldn't get Mutt at the time. We trod water for a while, Rick had his accident and we were treading water continuously pretty much until Mutt came back on board. I'd say about mid to late '85 and we started working with Mutt on what became Hysteria. The album that you hear took about 14 to 18 months to record. Not the three years that's of legend that was - a lot of that was just scrapped. And the album finally saw the light of day in August of 1987. It was an absolute labour of love as I mentioned earlier on but considering what it's achieved and what it's become it was worth every heartbreak that we went through. No pain, no gain."
- News Source - planetrock.com
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