Interview/Article -- Guitar World Magazine Jan 2005 Page 2

Me & My Wine

Steve "brought a new energy to the group," Joe Elliott said later, with the guitarist going so far as to threaten to quit if "we didn't get off our arses and start doing gigs." The rest is now the stuff of Biography Channel and Hollywood movie legend. Within months of its first gig at Sheffield's Wakefield (Westfield) School, in July 1978, the band was signed to Phonogram Records; Allen was so young his parents had to countersign the contracts.

Def Leppard's exuberant debut, On Through The Night, was released in March 1980. Caught up in the short-lived but influential New Wave of British Heavy Metal scene, it went straight into the U.K. Top 20. Surprisingly, and impressively, it also reached No. 51 in America. They followed the record a year later with the Platinum-selling High 'n' Dry. Their third album, Pyromania, in 1983, was where they hit pay dirt, though. It included their first U.S. Top 20 single, "Photograph," and at its peak was kept out of the chart's top spot only by Michael Jackson's Thriller. Pyromania sold more than five million copies that year, making Def Leppard officially the biggest-selling rock band in America.

Steve was just 21 when High 'n' Dry took off in America. A child of the freewheeling Seventies, he had been thrust early into the new Eighties millieu of MTV-driven materialism. Steve thought he was there to, as he dreamily puit it, "hang out and make music." Instead, he found himself part of a relentless, hit-making machine.

It didn't sit comfortably with him. Indeed, it was Steve, in his own frazzled, permanently freaked-out way, who seemed to embody whatever the real cost of the whole enterprise had been. As John Lennon once pointed out, "You don't get to the top without stepping on people." By 1988, Steve had become a walking reminder of what could go wrong. Different nights, same jive. The pinnacle for Steve had been the Pyroamnia tour five years before, memorably encapsulated for him on the final night in Los Angeles, in December 1983 (September), when Brian May had stood next to him onstage at the Forum for a full-on stomp through Led Zeppelin's "Rock and Roll," (Travellin' Band) "I never felt so high in my life!" Steve said of the performance.

Back then, he said, everybody was at it - the drinking, the drugging, the partying till dawn. Back then such things were "more normal." But Pyromania had turned the band into a zillion-dollar industry. To sustain that level of success, they had been forced to grow up quickly, to make tough choices. Leppard had already demonstrated how hard-nosed they could be as teenagers when they dumped the small-town managers who had steered them to a record deal in favour of AC/DC's high-powered American team. Then, in 1982, they fired Pete Willis. Like everyone back then, Pete was "a party animal," said Steve. "Only it didn't agree with him and he would...turn nasty. A real ego monster. None of us was perfect, though," he added, shrugging.

But if Steve's feelings were understandably mixed about the manner of Pete's departure, what really troubled him was the impact his replacement, Phil Collen, was having on the band - specifically, Steve's place in it. Formerly of the London glam-rock band Girl, Collen was an adept player whose technique far outshone Steve's. Nevertheless, they had been "big mates" to begin with, "riding round on bikes together, getting pissed." On the Pyromania tour, the duo had been dubbed the terror Twins.
All that changed, though, when Collen woke up one morning in 1984 to find a $10,000 watch strapped to his wrist and no recollection of having bought it. "I'd already decided I had to do something about keeping myself in shape anyway," Phil said. "And then the watch thing hapened, and that was it for me."

By the time the Hystouria jaunt began in the summer of 1987, Collen had been sober for three years. He had also become a vegetarian and devotee of the gym. He had, in short, become everything Steve was not. When Joe Elliott announced he would also forego alcohol for the duration of the tour to preserve his notoriously unpredictable vocal chords, Steve felt even more isolated. "It's like they're on one side and i'm on the other," he said.

It was a feeling that had grown during the recording of Hysteria, when all the important guitar work seemed to be offered to the newly sober Collen. It was a purely professional decision by producer Mutt Lange, a renowned perfectionist who inevitably relied more on the technically precise half of Leppard's guitar playing partnership than he did on the half whose speciality was one-take wonders; Mutt never did one take of anything.
Steve took it personally. Worst of all, it left him with "nothing to do..for months, years. I felt like I was playing a game every time somebody asked how the album was going. I'd pretend it was all okay, but really, I didn't know. I wasn't reaslly there for a lot of it." As he said. it wasn't that he didn't play on the album - that's him grinding out the scratchy, Stonesy riff to "Armageddon It." But as the man who'd come up with the riff's behind early crowd pleasers such as "Photograph," Steve was devastated to find his position as Leppard's star player usurped so easily.

By the time Hystouria was in full swing, the contrast between the two guitarists could not have been more stark, razor-sharp Collen; on the other, Clarky, the permanent fuck-up. But then, as Joe Elliott said countless times, "Steve is his own worst enemy. How can you help someone who won't help themselves?"
Sometimes even I found his self-pitying suffocating. Once, he offered to "lend" me £50,000. "No big deal," he shrugged. "Just like if you ever...you know...need...you know? Like 50 grand...you know?"
I didn't like the sound of that. It smelled of something.
"Whaddya think I am?" I yelled. "Some sort of groupie?"
"No!" he cried. "No...it's just...you know..."
I looked at him, still fuming. "I don't care about your fucking money, man."
He stood up, the tears welling in his eyes. "I know, I know!"
He put his arms around me, his face sobbing into my shoulder. I realised then that it wasn't merely money Steve wanted to give me, to share. He was looking for a friend. Now it was my turn to feel a fake.
After the final show of the tour at Memorial Arena, the band threw a party backstage. It was a strangely dismal occassion. I sat at a table chatting to Steve. He confided that he'd just been handed a tour bonus cheque for around a million dollars. I asked him what he was going to do with it. "I dunno," he said, staring at the floor glumly. "Buy a new pair of shoes..."

Tours are like summer holidays. You meet new people, have adventures and promise to stay in touch once it's all over - but rarely do. Sure enough, Steve and I saw each other only fleetingly after that. The last occassion was at a Queensrÿche show in London, about 14 months before he died. He seemed unchanged. If anything he appeared more forlorn. Much as touring drove him crazy, sitting around with nothing to do was even worse, he said. We skipped the show and stayed in the bar all night, drinking. But, at the end, when he invited me back to his pad for "a nightcap," I found myself making some excuse. "Some of us have homes to go to," I said jokingkly. He just stared at me.

Steve Clark died in his sleep, at home in his Chelsea flat, sometime during the early hours of January 8, 1991, three months short of his 31st birthday. Westminster Coroner's Court later recorded the official cause of death as "respiratory failiure due to a compression of the brain stem, resulting from excess quantities of alcohol mixed with antidepressants and painkillers," In other words, I thought idly, any other boring night for Steve. As Joe Elliott says now, "I saw it coming. It was like being told your granny's dead. It was upsetting, but it wasn't a shock. Steve's was a death waiting to happen." (Brian May was the first to ring Elliott and offer his sympathies.) Elliott rejects the idea that Steve simply gave up on life. "Steve didn't want to die. He was on prescription drugs for a couple of cracked ribs and washing the pills down with vodka 'cause that's what he was like. The press reports said he had morphine in his system. Of course he did - that's what the doctor prescribed!"

One wonders if the band felt jinxed in some way at that point: first Pete Willis' fall from grace, then Rick Allen's car crash, now Steve's death. But again, Elliott is loath to give credence to such ideas, though he does concede; "Rick's accident was on New Year's Eve, and Steve died around New Year. After that, there were a few New Year's Eves when I had my fingers crossed."

Of course, Def Leppard's story didn't end there. Hysteria would prove to be their commercial peak, with the four albums they've released in the years since paling in comparison, if still maintaining a remarkbly rich success rate. Which is not to suggest the sudden loss of Steve Clark was responsible for their declining appeal.
The real blame for Leppard's failure to scale again such giddy heights falls to Mutt Lange, the musical Éminence Grise of the band who cowrote as well as produced High 'n' Dry, Pyromania and Hysteria for them. Lange decided he'd gone as far as he could with the group and concentrated instead on turning his bride-to-be, Shania Twain, into a magestar. With their muscial Svengali gone, Leppard struggled throughout the Nineties to match the quality they had achieved a decade before. But the history had already been made.
These days, sadly, little is made of the fact that Def Leppard once possessed one of British hard rock's most exciting guitarists.

Indeed, the 10th anniversay of Steve's death, in January 2001, barely rated a mention in the music press. But then, maybe that's as it should be, in the sense that Steve himself would have only shied away from such attention. A glittering star concealed by dark clouds, far from fake, he took his very real pain - and whatever it was that really caused it - with him to the grave. It wasn't just the band that was never the same again.
Mick Wall © Guitar World 2005 -- Thanks to Don.