It's happened to most of us: you wake up to find somebody in bed with you who shouldn't be there. There's the scramble to piece together the whys and wherefores, followed by a rising sense of panic.
But how many of you have woken to find a rock star lying with his back to you, snoring?
While many forward-thinking, open-minded individuals would find such a prospect appealing, as a boringly average hetrosexual male, I was less than thrilled when it happened to me.
In truth, when I woke to find myself in bed next to Def Leppard guitarist Steve Clark during the group's 1988 American tour, my first reaction was one of horror.
What had I done now?
Then it started to come back. We were in Denver? Boston? Portland? It didn't matter. After the show, it had been the same old, same old. When the hotel bar had closed, we had gone back to my room and carried on.
Then Steve blacked out on the bed and I had been unable to wake him. Not knowing what to do, I'd grabbed what I could of the duvet, lay down on the other side of the bed and turned off the light.
Now I was awake and here he was. Shit. I lay on the bed, wondering what the hell to do. Then the phone rang. In the quiet of the still-smoky room, it was as if a bomb had gone off. The phone was on his side, and Steve, until then unconscious, almost jumped off the bed. Before I could say anything, he had grabbed the receiver, grunted into it and hung up, then lay back down again, groaning.
"Who was it?" I asked.
Steve nearly jumped out of bed again. He turned to look at me, aghast, and screamed.
"Steve!" I cried. "It's alright! It's only me!"

He stopped screaming and just sat there, his bloodshot eyes blinking at me, questioning. "You crashed out," I said. "I couldn't wake you." He looked around, taking it all in: the empty bottles, the overflowing ashtrays, the mirror we'd taken from the wall and placed handily on the coffee table.
Then he simply got up and made for the door. "Sorry," he said as he closed it behind him. A moment later he was back again. He'd forgotten his shoes. I went to fetch them. "Um...last night," he began falteringly. "I think it's best if we don't...say anything to...anybody...you know?"
"You mean the rest of the band?" I asked. "Of course not."

His shoulders relaxed. He looked up at me. "Thanks," he smiled wanly. "You know how it is."
I knew exactly how it was. By the end of Def Leppard's ridiculously successful, 15-month Hysteria world tour, Steve was treating everyone as a stranger, including his bandmates. He didn't seem to know them anymore. Or rather, he didn't like the idea of them getting too close to him. Steve had so much he wanted to hide, he couldn't bear the others getting close enough to see it.

As a result, just as Def Leppard were enjoying their greatest success with the 16-million selling Hysteria album, Steve was descending into his own hell. The most outwardly glamorous member of what was then the most successful young rock band in America, he surely should have been riding the crest of the wave. Hysteria, released in August 1987, had given Def Leppard their first No. 1 album in America (it reached No. 2 in the U.K. [correction No. 1 aswell in 1987]) as well as their first U.S. No. 1 single, the ballad, "Love Bites,"

In the process, they became the first band of the Eighties to have two consecutive albums (including 1983's Pyromania) sell more than seven million copies in the U.S. However, the ultraconfident figure Steve projected onstage - the skinny blonde dude with the Les Paul dangling at his knees and the permanently lit cigarette in his mouth - was only half of his story. Offstage, he was very different; paranoid, insecure, psychologically damaged, a bundle of nerves. It didn't make sense, and nobody knew what to do about it, least of all Steve.

Of course, it took a long time to reach such conclusions, and everybody back then put most of whatever troubled him down to that infamous old double-act: booze and drugs. While there's no doubting Steve's over-fondness for both exacerbated his problems, it's clear now that there was something more than addiction eating away at him.
From outside, it seemed to me that much of what ailed Steve was due to a lack of self-esteem. He and I had first met in Amsterdam, in June 1987, where the band was putting the finishing touches on Hysteria. Steve had returned from a secret spell in rehab, ostensibly to deal with his growing drinking problem. He told me all about it one night, as we worked our way through a large bottle of cognac. Even though he was drinking again, he insisted the treatment had had some benefit.

"For instance," he said, "I'm going to drink one or two glasses tonight and leave it at that. Before I wouldn't have been able to stop until the whole bottle was gone."
Part of the problem, he admitted, was that Hysteria had simply taken so long - nearly three years - to make. It was an unprecedented amount of time back then and anathema to a guitarist like Steve, who prided himself on his spontaneity. "We could have done three albums in that time," he said, shaking his head forlornly.

Yes, I said, but would they have been as good? Whatever traumas Def Leppard had been through - from the horrifying car crash in December 1984 that cost drummer Rick Allen his left arm to the demons with which Steve had wrestled - surely they could find some validation in the fact that they had made an album as brilliant as this? Bear in mind, this was before Hysteria became the biggest-selling album of Def Leppard's career, selling 12 million in the U.S. alone and yielding a previously unheard-of seven hit singles.
"I suppose," Steve sniffed. "If you put it like that." We left it there, and I went away with the impression of a tender-hearted but clearly sorry-for-himself young guy with too much time and money and no idea what to do with it except fill the yawning gaps with cocaine, vodka and anything else he could get his restless hands on. Maybe things would improve for him once the band started touring again and he had something to do each day. Maybe.

As chance would have it, various assignments I accepted from Kerrang! magazine made me a frequent visitor to the Hystouria world tour, from a brace of warm-up gigs in Holland in June 1987 to the tour's last night at Tacoma, Washington's Memorial Arena (Tacoma Dome), in October 1988. Although I came to know them all, it was Steve I always ended the night chatting to. His room or mine, they all looked the same at that hour.
He would bring out the vodka and cranberry juice (his favourite tipple), then the "marching powder," and off we would go for another ride together down the slippery white slope. Mostly, of course, we talked bollocks, but occassionally something would slip out like a waft of stale air - something he said that I would actually remember the next day.
"I'm no saying I didn't...you know...play on the album. It's just..."
"Did you just say you didn't play on the album?"
"No, I didn't say that, I just meant...you know,"
"What?"
But his thoughts were elsewhere again, skittering around on the ice. Mainly, he complained of "feeling a fake," of feeling "guilty." Nonsense, I told him, or words to that effect. In retrospect, I realize he had solid grounds for those fears. How could he really be at his best for the band when he admitted that he was on a round-the-clock regimen of vodka, schnapps, beer, cocaine, painkillers and tranquillizers, a habit he tried, but too often failed, to keep hidden. He was so used to lying, he even tried to tell me one night how he never drank or "anything" before he played. Even if it was true, so what? I remember him showing me where he stashed vodka under the table in the dressing room before the show each night so it would "be waiting for me when I get back."

In hindsight, then, he was an accident waiting to happen. Steve's handful of attempts to get it together at various rehab clinics around the world (many paid for by the band) proved fruitless. One doctor, he announced almost proudly, had proclaimed him "incurable." And so it proved. As Def Leppard singer Joe Elliott says now, "He was our Steve, but there was fuck all we could do to help him, short of tying his hands behind his back. Steve had survived one of his sessions with double the alcohol John Bonham had in his bloodstream when he died."
Steve hated being recognised and would flinch visibly when asked for an autograph. It wasn't due to the fame that goes with being a rock star, he said; he just didn't think he deserved the attention. It made him feel like even more of a fake. "That video, those...records," I remember him stuttering once. "That's not really...me."
What did he mean? Steve had a sideways manner of talking, skipping words, leaving you to fill in the blanks. You would only ever get the story in bits and pieces.
Stephen Maynard Clark was born on April 23, 1960. Growing up the son of a taxi driver in the dilapidated Hillsborough district of Sheffield, England, he knew he'd "found something" at the age of 11 when his parents bought him his first acoustic guitar on the understanding that he would take classical lessons. He spent the next year diligently switching between the sheet music of the old masters and throwing shapes in the mirror to Thin Lizzy.

Leaving school at 16, he became an apprentice lathe operator and met another apprentice named Pete Willis. His new friend also played guitar but had his own band, Def Leppard, the name a clunky imitation of Led Zeppelin. The lineup consisted of Willis, Joe Elliott, bassist Rick Savage and drummer Tony Kenning, later to be replaced by Frank Noon and, eventually, 15-year-old Rick Allen. The band wasn't looking for another guitarist, but after Steve dazzled the group with a neck-wringing rendition of the solo from Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird," they inivted him to join, giving birth to the twin-guitar sound that became Leppard's signature over the next decade.

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