This section looks at the 'Pour Some Sugar On Me' single chart peak. The second single from the 'Hysteria' album in the UK and second major hit single for the band in their homeland following on from the Top Ten smash hit 'Animal'.
do you take sugar, one lump or two
Def Leppard's classic Pour Some Sugar On Me single hit Number 18 in the UK singles chart 32 years ago on this day in 1987.
The second single to be released from the Hysteria album in the UK.
The follow up to 'Animal' which had reached Number Six in August giving the band their first ever Top Ten single and the first UK chart success.
It was released on 7th September 1987 reaching Number 18 and spent six weeks on the UK chart.
Four weeks inside the Top 40.
It entered at Number 31 and rose to 20 in week two before reaching its peak position in week 3.
The second Top 20 hit from the album.
Its success was helped by a second appearance on Top Of The Pops on 17th September.
Read quotes from Joe below where he recounts how the song was written and recorded.
M/A/R/R/S were at Number One on this day with their single 'Pump Up The Volume'.
Other notable rock acts on the chart included recent Lep tour mates Heart with 'Who Will You Run To' (30) and KISS with Crazy Crazy Nights' a new entry at 32.
Read more about this song.
UK Singles Chart - 3rd October 1987
- 01 - M/A/R/R/S - Pump Up The Volume
- 02 - Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up
- 03 - Michael Jackson - Bad
- 04 - Cliff Richard - Some People
- 05 - Madonna - Causing A Commotion
- 18 - Def Leppard - Pour Some Sugar On Me
Pour Some Sugar On Me - Joe Elliott Interview Quotes
"Well PSSOM was probably the most important song we’ve ever done because it was totally responsible for kicking Hysteria from big album to extremely big album. I mean it was a so-so hit in England, I think it kinda got to like number 18, it just broke the top twenty. In America it was huge!, I mean it was really, really huge. I remember the record company people telling me like months afterwards when they were checking back over things that song was pretty much responsible for selling 4 million albums in three months which is a phenomenal amount of records."
"I was working on another song and Mutt, I think it was only me and him in Holland at the time, everybody else was on a break cause I was doing vocals so no point in anyone else being around so they’d go home for a couple of weeks."
"Mutt had gone for a pee and I picked up the acoustic and started messing around with this thing and he came back in and just asked me what it was probably thinking it was a Stones song or something. And I remember him saying like, ‘This is the best hook I’ve heard for about 5 years’, he said ‘Can we stop doing this’. Cause nobody wanted to do anymore, everybody was exhausted they would never have gone for another song."
"So basically me and him put a really rough backing track together really quickly in like a few hours and then played it over the phone or a few people came back a few days later and said OK we’ll do it and we did it real quick. It became like one of the most important things we’ve ever done."
1995 Vault Liner Notes - Joe Elliott Quote
"Kind of got written by accident at the end of the "Hysteria" sessions. Turned out to be one of the most important songs we ever did. Pure sex."
Pour Some Sugar On Me - Phil Collen Interview Quotes
"That song was the most representative of the band, and was exactly what we were trying to do. It's easy to get ballads played on the radio, but it's very hard to turn a rock song into a hit. We had to sell five million copies of Hysteria just to break even because we'd spent four years in the studio working on it."
"We changed producers, did a lot of re-recording, Rick lost his arm. We had so many delays. When the album was finally released, it stopped selling at three million. That might sound blase, but we hadn't made the money back, so we were in debt. Then suddenly, "Pour Some Sugar on Me" was getting played in the Florida strip bars and soon became a strip-joint anthem, and was getting requests on the radio. Before we knew it, Hysteria had jumped back up the charts."
Pour Some Sugar On Me - Rick Savage Interview Quotes
"The Hysteria album was nearly finished. We'd spent almost four years recording it, and were sick of it - we just wanted to get on stage and rock. But then Joe comes up with a rhythm and an image of a song. Mutt knew he had something, and that it could be the biggest song of the Eighties if we did it right. We wanted the song to be a variation of "Rock of Ages." We incorporated some of the rap stuff that was new and popular at the time, but took it a step further and kept it rock and roll."
2004 Best Of Liner Notes - Joe Elliott Quote
"It was the best accident ever to happen to me. I’d had the chorus in my head for a while. Towards the end of the ‘Hysteria’ sessions. I began playing around with it on an acoustic guitar in the control room. When Mutt Lange heard what I was doing. His eyes burned a hole in the back of my head. We stopped the song we were working on and put ‘Pour Some Sugar On Me’ together instead. And it more than paid off. Shifting four and a half million albums for us in about three months."
2004 Best Of Liner Notes - Phil Collen Quote
"It was the fourth single to be released from ‘Hysteria’. And at that point we hadn’t even recouped the recording costs. Kinda pathetic. If you think about it. But it had an international feel and we believed that it’d be a hit. Even so, the way it surged up the charts was shocking. It actually took off at first as a consequence of being requested in the strip clubs, believe it or not."
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