Def Leppard

Released: March 14, 1980

Songwriter: Joe Elliott Pete Willis Richard Savage Steve Clark

Producer: Tom Allom

[Verse]
Well, we were getting ready just the other night
When a knock on the dressing room door
Gave way to a leather jacket little girl
Who we'd never ever seen before
In her red satin dress and her high heeled shoes
She took us all by surprise
And when she asked us what we wanted to do
Well, she said it with her eyes
Just get your rocks off
When we finally took the stage there she was
But she wasn't on her own
Because she'd brought some friends maybe 5 or 6
Yeah, she must have been on the phone
And when they started dancing and jumping around
Well we couldn't believe our eyes
Because they'd got the whole damn audience rocking
And they'd got us paralyzed
Just get your rocks off

In 1977, Rick Savage, Tony Kenning, and Pete Willis were students at a secondary school in Sheffield, England. They had a band called Atomic Mass. Lead singer Joe Elliott joined later that year, and suggested a new band name. Within 10 years, that name, Def Leppard, became one of the most recognised in English rock music. To date, they have released more than 40 singles.

Def Leppard was a definitive part of the new wave of British heavy metal bands in the late 1970s. Their first three albums had tremendous momentum, each outselling the one before. Then, after the release of Pyromania in 1983, drummer Rick Allen lost his arm in a car accident. The band stuck by him through his recovery and retraining.

When Def Leppard came back, they came back hard. Their fourth album, 1987’s Hysteria, was a hard rock masterpiece that took the world by storm. By then the music video had matured as a film style, and Hysteria’s singles and videos had enough pop, sex, colour, and glam to put it over the top. Hysteria was one of the biggest-selling albums of the 1980s.

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On Through the Night

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On Through the Night (1980)

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On Through the Night