10 Things We Learned From Phil Collen’s Wild Def Leppard Memoir
Phil Collen, who has played guitar for Def Leppard since 1982, has written an autobiography with Chris Epting — Adrenalized: Life, Def Leppard, and Beyond — that’s packed with juicy tales of his time with the band. The book has its frustrating elements: Collen spends time with both Diana Ross and Taylor Swift but doesn’t have anything in particular to say about either of them. But the memoir also gives some inside dirt on Def Leppard, everyone’s favorite nine-armed pop-metal superband. Here are 10 things we learned.
1. Collen is color-blind.
The condition isn’t an occupational hazard in his current life as a rock star, but it was a disadvantage in his first job working at a burglar-alarm factory, where he would solder wires incorrectly because he couldn’t tell the colors apart.
2. The guitarist has always taken the glam aesthetic literally.
When Def Leppard started, Collen was in a glam-rock band called Girl. The two groups were friendly, and at one Girl gig, Def Lep guitarist Steve Clark and Joe Elliott joined them onstage — that night, everyone ended up crashing at Elliott’s mother’s house. She was irate the next day, because she thought the lads had snuck some ladies into the bedroom: “Ohhhh! There was makeup in the bed this morning when I changed the sheets!” Elliott had to explain to her that it was just because of the excessive amounts of cosmetics worn by the members of Girl.
3. Hysteria producer Mutt Lange’s aesthetic was anti-harmony, pro-scream.
The Def Leppard mission statement, from genius producer Robert John “Mutt” Lange: “Def Leppard will be all about great pop songs that resonate with the punk ethos. We won’t have lovely harmonies like Styx or Foreigner. Our vocals will be more like a screaming chant, which will set them apart.”
4. MTV helped the Leps conquer Middle America.
The band’s early success was hugely dependent on geography: specifically, on whether your town had been wired for cable television. “Places that had cable TV had MTV, and places that had MTV had us all the time,” Collen says. “By the time we came to town, we’d already become rock gods to these kids in places like Norman, Oklahoma, and Monroe, Louisiana, that didn’t always have big bands rolling through.”
5. Def Leppard had a lewdly named backstage pass reserved especially for eager groupies.
Def Leppard were astonished to discover that American girls wanted to sleep with them, and would even fellate crew members to gain access. Collen says, “I was waiting for an elevator in a hotel. A really hot girl whom I had never seen in my life came up to me, pulled my pants down, and went down on me and didn’t say a word. This type of stuff didn’t happen before with total strangers.” The band ultimately created a special backstage “boiler pass” for sexually eager fans: In the same style as the band’s angular “Def Leppard” logo were the words “Dik Likker.”