Def Leppard

Released: October 5, 1993

Songwriter: Joe Elliott Richard Savage Steve Clark

Producer: Def Leppard

Dark and dirty like you have never seen
A mind so twisted with thoughts so unclean
My heart is racing all tattered and torn
I stand here naked as the day I was born
Only the lonely will stand
I'm holding the world in my hand
I got to believe

The sky is falling on this setting sun
Echoes of silence ringing loud and long
This isolation is the king of pain
A lost horizon in an ocean of flames
Only the lonely will stand
I'm holding the world in my hand
I got to believe

I've been here before
But not as I stand here today
I wait for the dawn
Ready to walk into the light

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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