32 Songs - Track 4

Pour Some Sugar On Me - Def Leppard

“Love is like a bomb, baby, c'mon get it on”

The 80's. Tight leather pants, big hair, falsetto voices, over produced guitars and thudding drums. Van Halen, Poison, Warrant, Guns n Roses, Motley Crue, Metallica, Iron Maiden, the list goes on. Def Leppard’s Hysteria album opened the door to a whole new world for me after a bloke named Michael on a morning walk to High School thrust a tape into my hand.

The next morning I handed the tape back to him. He asked what I thought. I told him I was amazed, it was like nothing I had ever heard before and I thought the drums were so cool. He then told me that the drummer only had one arm. Which blew my mind even further and started a fascination with drumming that is only eclipsed by my inability to hold a beat for more than two minutes. I did start the long practice sessions and devotion that has turned me into the master air drummer and air guitarist I am today. Needless to say i made a detour on my way home to pick up my own tape copy of Hysteria. I didn't buy the vinyl because how could I listen to that on my way to school? My fascination with flat, black plastic was another four years away.

Pour Some Sugar On Me is pure indulgence music, a saccharine overdose that leaves the head buzzing and the muscles burning. Def Leppard were never ones for high-class lyrics, they were all about the guitar, drums and the incongruous vocal harmonies. The harmonies places them is a different sphere tall the other big hair bands that were going round at the time.

While I’ve singled out Pour Some Sugar on Me, because it was the first song of theirs that got me. The whole of Hysteria is responsible with the tracks Animal, Rocket, Love Bites and Women. In a splendid piece of ignorance it took me another five years before I realized all the name checking in the song Rocket. The tape was long discarded from overuse but the CD still lurked in the collection until vanishing along with many other CDs in the last Adelaide-Canberra move.

Def Leppard brought to my attention early Metallica and Iron Maiden, how good is Run to the Hills?, and the desire for a requisite denim jacket with patch on the back, for those keeping score it was the icescape off the Iron Maiden cover to Seventh Son of a Seventh Son.

Ah, those were the days.