Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott On The Legacy Of ‘Pyromania’ 40 Years Later

Following the release of their 1980 debut LP On Through the Night, the British hard rock group Def Leppard was gradually building their following that continued with their sophomore record, 1981’s High ‘n’ Dry, which marked their first and crucial collaboration with producer Robert John “Mutt” Lange. So when it came time to make their third album in 1982, the quintet from Sheffield, England, had a game plan.

“Mutt hasn’t seen us for seven or eight months,” Def Leppard singer Joe Elliott recalled in 2023, “because you make the record, you go out and tour, and he goes off and does his work for other people. And then you see him again and it became like a thing in the first couple of days where we were listening to ideas for songs.

“He may have asked the question [to us]: ‘Do you wanna make High ‘n’ Dry 2 or do you wanna make a record that nobody else has ever made?’” Elliott added about Lange. “He said, ‘We’re not gonna make High ‘n’ Dry 2–we’re gonna make an album that no one else has ever made.’”

Released in 1983, the resulting work, Pyromania, became Def Leppard’s breakthrough record in the States where it peaked at number two on the Billboard album chart (it has since sold 10 million copies in the U.S.). At a time when British synthpop and Michael Jackson’s Thriller were the rages, Pyromania brought hard rock back to the pop chart buoyed by the now-classic tracks “Rock of Ages,” “Foolin’” and “Photograph.” As Rolling Stone’s David Fricke wrote in the liner notes for the 2009 reissue of the album: “…the symphonic dynamics of Lange’s production, his pioneering use of new sampling and electronic-processing technologies and the band’s precocious invention as writers and players made Pyromania a truly rare thing: a heavy-metal album for everybody.”