def leppard adrenalize tour

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ADRENALIZE: The Ultimate Def Leppard Experience Promo Video

Adrenalize is exclusively represented by:.

Kathy Wagner 

Panzyler Entertainment

[email protected]

609-634-5998 

www.panzyler.com  

Testimonial

"Adrenalize brings a high energy, professional and totally fun show that people really loved.  The audience sang along all night to all their favorite Def Leppard hits."

-Peter Moshay, Multi-platinum, Grammy Award winning engineer/mixer, whose list of credits includes Hall & Oates, Barbra Streisand, and B.B.King.

STEP INSIDE, WALK THIS WAY

...and behold the multi media spectacle of sight and sound that is

  ADRENALIZE – The Ultimate Def Leppard Experience ! 

Come witness ADRENALIZE as they recreate the chart topping, chest thumping anthems that made Def Leppard the iconic and dominant force in arena rock of the 80s and beyond....

See the road tested and accomplished stage performers of ADRENALIZE embody the swaggering, electrifying stage personae of the Lads from Sheffield, and their undeniable intensity will captivate you and leave you singing, fist pumping and screaming for more!

You'll hear the hook laden radio and MTV mega-hits like “Foolin'”, “Rock of Ages” “Love Bites” and “Pour Some Sugar On Me”, and the Die Hard Def Lep true believers will be thrilled by deep cuts like “Wasted”, “High 'n' Dry” and “Switch 625”!

C'mon out and see for yourself what the latest buzz is all about. ADRENALIZE You won't believe your eyes.

ADRENALIZE members are:

George Tsalikis: Lead Vocals

Damiano Christian: Guitar & Vocals

Jef Scarfi: Guitar & Vocals

Lenny Lee: Bass & Vocals

Lee Nelson: Drums & Vocals/ 

LOVE AND AFFECTION

Read what people are saying about ADRENALIZE: The Ultimate Def Leppard Experience:  

“Loving it fellas! You are rocking it!” – David C., Def Leppard super fan  

***************

“Excellent Show! You Guys sound spot on and I am a Diehard Def Leppard Fan. Thanks for making us smile and Rock the Night away!” – Tina Marie S.  

“This is the best time I’ve had in so long. I absolutely love Def Leppard and I felt like I was really up there with dancing with Joe Elliott and Rick Savage and the guys, oh my god it was awesome!” – Sarah M  

“All Amazing Musicians Killing It!” – Annette M. 

*************** 

“It was a great show!” – Robert M.  

“A plus guys!” – Kimberly T.  

“Awesome show!! Brings me right back to how much I love that music!!” – Debbie S.  

“U guys rocked I def had fun singing w u guys for sure!” – Melinda B.  

“I saw some videos … I think this lineup sounds awesome, I saw them very good!” – Vincent B. A. 

 “Had such a great time last night! It was a great show and the band more than delivered making it well worth the long drive.” – Chelle M.  

“Thanks for the awesome show last night.” – Brandi E. 

“Show was Amazing, You all Rocked the house last night. Had a great time, thanks! – Karen P.  

“You guys were amazing! Please come back soon!!” – Kimberly T.  

“They truly are INCREDIBLE.” – Laurie C. 

THE ROCK BRIGADE

ADRENALIZE’s show setlist includes, but is not limited to:  

ANIMAL 

ARMAGEDDON IT 

BRINGIN’ ON HEARTBREAK 

FOOLIN’ 

HIGH ‘N’ DRY 

HYSTERIA 

LADY STRANGE 

LET’S GET ROCKED 

LET IT GO 

LOVE BITES 

PHOTOGRAPH 

POUR SOME SUGAR ON ME 

ROCK OF AGES 

ROCKET 

ROCK ROCK ‘TIL YOU DROP 

STAGEFRIGHT 

SWITCH 625 

TOO LATE FOR LOVE 

TWO STEPS BEHIND 

WASTED 

WOMEN 

Photo Gallery

Endorsments, marshall amplification.

https://marshall.com

Ernie Ball Strings

https://www.ernieball.com/guitar-strings

Bolt Guitars

https://www.facebook.com/BoltGuitars/

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2 Loud 2 Old Music

Def Leppard – ‘Adrenalize: The 7-Day Weekend Tour’ (1992/1993) – Tour Book

Def Leppard released their album ‘Adrenalize’ on March 31, 1992 to massive success. The album sold 4 million copies and went to #1 in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and in Swtitzerland. It spawned 6 singles and in a time when 80’s Rock was dying out, somehow, Def Leppard still succeeded.

It was the first album without Steve Clark on guitar and would be the first tour without him as well. The tour kicked off with a club show in Dublin, Ireland on April 15, 1992 and was the first with Vivian Campbell on guitar. It was also a warm-up for the massive Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert on April 20, 1992 which would see Def Leppard perform to over 70,000 people and technically introduce the world to Vivian Campbell. It was a rip roaring success. The tour then officially started on May 19, 1992 in Madrid, Spain and would last the rest of 1992 and not end until September 1993.

Some of the opening acts were Ugly Kid Joe, Thunder and Terrorvision (who I know nothing about). It was a massive success as usual as the performed In the Round again and as you’d expect, I did catch the show on November 24, 1992 at the Omni in Atlanta, Ga.

As a tribute to the show, we will go through the Tour Book from that Tour, but I just bought this so it is not from the actual show I attended. Someone else bought and decided to sell and I happily obliged.

The program starts out the 1992 tour dates which leads me to believe this was from one of those shows from 1992…

We then get an essay on the band and this time around we get a write-up on each member of the band as well which the Hysteria Tour did not do…

Some great stage and band pictures…

Unlike the Hysteria book as well, we actually get individual pages for each band member and of course, Joe Elliott is up first…

Then we get Phil Collen…

A little break with more live shots and band shots…

Back to the band with Rick Savage…

Then Rick Allen…

And finally, let’s welcome to the world…Vivian Campbell…

And more band shots…

And to wrap it up we get the Merch page and the thank you mention to all the road crew which they have a lot of those people…

And one last shot of the back cover…

And that is another one down and one left to go. Come back next week as we jump about 10 years in to the future (from this point) for the final one in the collection (final one at this point in time)…

Here is a list of all the Tour Books we have reviewed over the years. Links are provided so you can go see some history.

Alice Cooper:

• Welcome To My Nightmare Tour (1975)
• Guilty Tour (1977)

Kiss Tour Book Series:

• Animalize Tour (1984)
• Asylum Tour (1985)
• Alive / Worldwide Tour (1996-1997)
• Alive / Worldwide Tour Special Edition (1997)
• World Domination Tour (2003-2004
• 40th Anniversary Tour – Decades of Decibels (2014)
• End of the Road Tour (2019) – Coming Soon
• Bon Jovi – New Jersey Tour / Brotherhood Tour (1988)
• Bon Jovi – Bon Jovi Tour (2011)
• Rush – Power Windows Tour (1985)
• Rush – Roll The Bones Tour (1991)
• Rush – Counterparts Tour (1994)
• Rush – Test For Echos Tour (1996)

Def Leppard:

• Def Leppard – Hysteria U.S. Tour (1988)
• Def Leppard – Adrenalize: The 7-Day Weekend Tour (1992-1993)

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60 thoughts on “ Def Leppard – ‘Adrenalize: The 7-Day Weekend Tour’ (1992/1993) – Tour Book ”

Joe’s hair is a new level of ridiculous in those photos.

I just saw Harrison. He was outside my house dressed up like a bear. I went out to get the mail and he tackled me then growled. After that he ran away on all fours in the costume. I’m not sure what to think of it.

Like Liked by 1 person

Yeah, it was crazy. And I’m not sure what to think of Harrison dressed as a Bear when he is half a world a way from you either.

He must have some how broke out of his police state… I mean Australia, and journeyed to America!

I caught this tour twice in the span of about 4 weeks. Winnipeg Oct 92 and Duluth in early Nov. 92. This was one of the last big arena tours as this show was spectacular. Glad I caught them doing the whole In The Round deal. Both shows I saw had no opening act. Cool tour book. Recall seeing it at the show but went with a T shirt instead. lol

Cool you got to see it twice!! Yeah, I didn’t buy the Shirt or the Book back then.

End of era at the time as all these bands scaled back

That’s a nice book. Interesting to see these books, they aren’t something I ever thought of collecting and now I’m like “damn, be nice to have those.”

That was how I was then I came across a handful at one time and thought, why not. Now I have about 10-15 books from various artists and I love it. If I see them now out at the record stores, I grab them.

It’s so cool with all the pics !

That is a cool trip down memory lane. I love Adrenalize. I find it odd to see Phil wearing a shirt. Perhaps he was told to share the camera with the others lol. Ugly kid Joe and Thunder would have been decent support acts back in the day.

I was never one to buy tour books or programs when I went to shows. Perhaps I made the wrong decision here.

A live DVD from this tour would be nice.

The third to the last picture in the write-up includes a picture in the book with the band in front of a red background, and for some reason Phil Collen looks like he’s yawning, so I don’t know what’s up with that. However, I’ve always loved that shot of the band at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert with the crowd in the background, absolutely breath-taking. Great write-up and I agree with Mike about how Def Leppard needs to release a DVD version of this tour! By the way, are those signatures real?

No, signatures are not real. They are part of the book. And yes, it does look like Phil is yawning, I thought the same thing.

Ok that’s what I thought. I was thinking, “there’s no way those signatures are legit!” Haha we both think alike!

That’s so cool! A great memento for the fans, and probably the band too!

Oh, I love them. I will keep buying them when I find them.

Right on. There was a Queen & Adam Lambert one that went through my work this week. Think it’s gone already. It was huge.

That would be a cool one. I saw them a few years ago and it was fantastic. Adam is very good.

He’d have to be to take that spot!

Your books are great mementos. When I went to shoes I tried to grab one if they weren’t sold out.

I wish I would’ve bought them at every show, but when I was younger, money was an issue.

Money is still an issue.

Ha! Yes, I guess so.

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30 Years Ago: Def Leppard’s ‘Adrenalize’ Marks the End of an Era

" Do you wanna get rocked? "

That's the surprising question that kicks off  Def Leppard 's 1992 album Adrenalize .

It's surprising because the band's belabored, five-year gap since  Hysteria  (which was not unusual  for them) included the death of guitarist Steve Clark in 1991, following a long struggle with drugs and alcohol. Because rock music was getting darker and heavier, with grunge stars like Nirvana and metal titans like Metallica taking center stage. And because longtime producer Robert John "Mutt" Lange took a step back — and after defining the Def Leppard sound of the '80s, no one knew what that would mean for the band.

It all meant that a little rock was not out of the question. Adrenalize 's opening track and first single, " Let's Get Rocked ," was also the last one the band wrote for the LP. Sensing the album lacked a song with the same sense of whimsy as "Pour Some Sugar on Me," Def Leppard cooked this one up to get the crowds roaring. Its inspiration came from someone they were spending a lot of time with in the studio: Bart Simpson. When production got bogged down or things felt too heavy, the band would put on  The Simpsons  and laugh.

Watch Def Leppard's 'Let's Get Rocked' Video

"Heaven Is" and "Make Love Like a Man" follow "Let's Get Rocked," establishing a theme for  Adrenalize : hetero relationship drama with a heavy dose of strict gender roles. "Personal Property," later in the album, also slides into this category. The writing on Adrenalize  is frequently accused of being formulaic and stale, and these songs may demonstrate why. There's not much exploration of the emotional dynamics of relationships or even hookups, but a lot of objectification of women and descriptions of the kind of women that men want.

Naturally, euphemisms for sex also appear as talk of rhythms. These songs should bring Van Halen to mind — the David Lee Roth era specifically — with "Heaven Is" telegraphing Eddie Van Halen 's famous guitar stylings and "Make Love Like a Man" making a passing reference to " Just a Gigolo ."

Singer Joe Elliott has said  the lyrics to "Make Love Like a Man" are "a nod too stupid" — and they are — but something is interesting about this era of rock music turning the tables. Female fans were encouraged to objectify the pretty boys of Poison , Bon Jovi , Motley Crue ,  Warrant  and their ilk. Def Leppard in 1992 were still squarely in their objectifiable era, with sharp features and the long, curly, manicured locks of ancient Grecian magistrates. But as they entered their early thirties, maybe they weren't as comfortable playing that role anymore. Still, that didn't stop Mercury Records from issuing "Make Love Like a Man" as the album's second single.

Watch Def Leppard's 'Make Love Like a Man' Video

"Tonight" stays in the " here's how a woman can please me " vein, but the following track, "White Lightning," is a stark departure from everything else on  Adrenalize . Clark and co-guitarist Phil Collen  started the song, and Collen continued it after Clark's death. The lyrics pay homage to the late guitarist, and the double entendre title is both derived from his nickname and a slang term for addiction. It captures the angst and sadness the band felt over his loss, without sacrificing the pop-metal sound for which they were known.

"Stand Up (Kick Love Into Motion)" and "Have You Ever Needed Someone So Bad" flip the script of the other hetero lust songs on  Adrenalize . Musically, both lean toward adult contemporary, with Collen's guitar playing being about the only thing rooting them in the hard-rock realm. Lyrically, they've got a bit more of the depth that's sorely lacking on several other album tracks. "Stand Up" flips gender roles, asking a woman to do her part to save a relationship. "Have You Ever Needed Someone So Bad" is particularly vulnerable, capturing the moment when you realize you're in love.

Listen to Def Leppard's 'White Lightning'

Drummer Rick Allen gets his chance to shine on "I Wanna Touch U." That, plus the uplifting guitar riff on the chorus, is about all the track has going for it.  Adrenalize  closes with the AC/DC -style banger "Tear It Down," which necessitates a discussion about the sequencing of the album. These two should be flipped, because the breathless "Tear It Down" doesn't offer the listener a chance to come down from the album experience. "I Wanna Touch U" would have closed things on an upbeat note without revving the engine quite so hard.

It's a shame "Tear It Down" wasn't a single. Perhaps that speaks to the musical landscape in 1993, when Mercury Records finally finished its campaign for  Adrenalize , issuing a whopping seven of the album's 10 tracks as singles, three of which were high performers. With Adrenalize , Def Leppard released the final album classified as "glam metal" that would top the Billboard chart. A change was coming.

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Def Leppard look back on how they made 90s rock classic Adrenalize

In 1992, reeling from the death of their guitarist Steve Clark, Def Leppard were determined to keep the party going. The result was Adrenalize – hard rock’s last great blockbuster album

It began with a question: ‘Do you wanna get rocked?’ The answer came back loud and clear when Def Leppard’s Adrenalize hit No.1 globally in 1992. For one of rock’s biggest bands, it seemed like business as usual. In reality it was anything but.

If ever a band had to dig deep to make an album, it was Def Leppard with Adrenalize . They had done so before, in creating their 1987 album Hysteria after drummer Rick Allen lost his left arm in a car crash on New Year’s Eve 1984, and had to reinvent the way he played, using a specially developed electronic kit. But in the making of Adrenalize the band suffered their darkest day – the death of guitarist Steve Clark on January 8, 1991, following a long struggle with alcoholism.

As Leppard singer Joe Elliott says now, looking back at that difficult time: “It was tough. Emotionally, so draining. But we didn’t want to split up the band like Led Zeppelin did after John Bonham died. We were tying to keep ourselves from drowning.”

Def Leppard made Adrenalize under intense pressure, both internal and external. In the absence of Steve Clark, it was left to Phil Collen, the band’s other guitarist, to replicate their signature two-guitar sound. They also had to find a new producer at a time when their mentor Mutt Lange was busy working with another client, Bryan Adams. In addition, there was the burden of expectation to match an album that had sold fifteen million copies worldwide. “How the hell do you follow Hysteria ?” says Elliott.

What they achieved with Adrenalize was, as with Hysteria , a triumph over adversity. Def Leppard was always, in Elliott’s words, “an escapism band, for us and for everybody else”. And never more so than on Adrenalize . It included a memorial to Steve Clark: a powerful, sombre track titled White Lightning . But as they made this album, one comment from Mutt Lange resonated deeply within the band. While acknowledging the impact of Clark’s death, Lange told them: “People don’t want to hear Def Leppard doing Leonard Cohen.”

Elliott recalls: “A guy’s just died and here we are making this euphoric, celebratory music. It seemed a bit weird. But we made a point of remembering who we are, what we do and what we do well.” And it was the question ‘Do you wanna get rocked?’ – the opening line from would be the album’s opening track, Let’s Get Rocked – which set the tone. For all the sadness that surrounded the making of it, Adrenalize was a celebration of the life-affirming power of rock’n’roll.

In February 1992, one month before the release of Adrenalize , Joe Elliott ended up in tears when he spoke to me about the death of Clark and the band’s efforts to save him. In a room at the St James Club in Hollywood, he said solemnly: “We’d lost Steve a year before he died. We couldn’t do anything more for him.”

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It was in January 1978 that Steve Clark joined Def Leppard, five months after the band formed in Sheffield. At his audition, he played the end solo from Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Free Bird . It was so good that Elliott said, without hesitation: “He’s in.”

In the band’s early days they dreamed of emulating their heroes – Zeppelin, Lizzy, Queen. Those dreams had come true with Hysteria, and predecessor Pyromania , another multimillion seller. On stage, Clark was the classic guitar hero. Off stage, he was an introvert who became heavily dependent on alcohol. During the Hysteria tour, Clark got drunk only after shows or on days off. After that tour ended in 1988, his problem deepened. As Elliott explained: “Once we came off the road, Steve’s routine became just drinking.”

What the singer revealed about the last years of Clark’s life was harrowing. Between 1989 and 1990 he had six separate spells in rehab. For a long period he remained a functioning member of the band. During the early songwriting sessions for Adrenalize , in which Mutt Lange was also involved, Clark co-wrote six of the 10 songs that were included on the album. It was when he was away from the band that Clark went off the rails. While on holiday in Minneapolis, he was found unconscious in a street, with an alcohol level in his blood higher than that which killed Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham in 1980; double the level that can induce coma. Clark was admitted to a psychiatric ward in Minneapolis. Elliott visited him there, and recalled: “It was basically like a nut house. I was looking at Clarkie thinking: ‘What the fuck are you doing in here?’ He looked like a dead man.”

Later, in Dublin, Clark was present as the band began recording basic tracks for the album. He was also attending a rehab facility close by, where Elliott would sit with him during group therapy sessions. What he realised then was that Clark was in complete denial. “He thought he was fine,” he said. “He didn’t believe that he had a problem.”

There was a deeper realisation that for Elliott was heartbreaking: “Steve was the nicest guy in the world. But he was a very complex person. I’d known for years, but I didn’t know him at all. He had everything, yet he had nothing. You do your best to help.

Towards the end it just got impossible. But you don’t think he’s actually going to die.”

In September 1990, the band delivered an ultimatum to Clark. “We gave him a totally unconditional, very informal six months’ leave of absence,” Elliott said. “He absolutely hadn’t been fired, we weren’t gonna look for somebody else.” Clark returned to London, where he had a new home in Chelsea. Elliott told him: “We’re going to carry on working on the album, and come February, come back and see how things are.”

In those last four months, Elliott and the other members of the band would call Clark from time to time. They also had mutual friends checking on him.

It was Cliff Burnstein, the band’s co-manager, who broke the news to Elliott on January 9, 1991.

“I wasn’t surprised,” he admitted to me. “I was upset, the way you’re upset when your ninety-nine-year-old granny dies. Steve’s dad said to me that he wouldn’t make his thirtieth birthday. He made it by six months. I cried my head off when Rick lost his arm. But when Steve died I didn’t.”

The coroner’s report, dated February 27, cited the cause of death as “respiratory failure” due to consumption of “an excess of alcohol mixed with anti-depressants and painkillers”. What haunted Elliott was the call he made to Clark on the day before he died. “I got his answering machine,” he said. “That killed me for weeks. If I’d spoken to him, maybe it would have changed the next twenty-four hours…” Elliott might not have cried when Steve Clark died, but he did as he said that to me.

Clark was laid to rest at Wisewood Cemetery in Sheffield. Phil Collen didn’t attend the funeral. “I loved Steve dearly,” he says, “but I knew that a lot of people would show up at the funeral that weren’t around when he needed help. And to he honest, I actually felt worse when he was alive.” Collen was never asked to explain his decision.

“It’s a very private matter,” Elliott says. One image from the funeral has stuck in his mind ever since: “All I remember is being at the graveside, and watching Steve’s mum Beryl grieving so desperately.”

Def Leppard went back to work the very next day. As Elliott said in 1992: “We had to get on with our lives. We weren’t going to lose those songs, because they were too good, and Steve just wouldn’t have wanted us to quit anyway.” He adds now: “When Steve passed away we’d been working as a four-piece for seven or eight months anyway, in spirit and physically.”

Even so, Collen struggled. “There was a period when I just didn’t want to do it,” he says. “It felt really wrong doing it without Steve. Joe had to talk me off the ledge: ‘Come on, we wrote these songs with Steve…’ In the end I knew he was right.”

Def Leppard stuck together, just as they had after the trauma experienced by Rick Allen. “We had each other to lean on,” Elliott said. “That’s the great thing about a band.” They also had Mutt Lange to guide them, albeit in a more limited role than before.

Lange had done so much to shape the band’s sound that they had called him their “sixth member”. As with Pyromania and Hysteria , Lange had co-written the songs for Adrenalize . But as the band began recording, Lange was still working on Bryan Adams’s album Waking Up The Neighbours . So they turned instead to Lange’s right-hand man, Mike Shipley, who had mixed Hysteria and engineered Pyromania . “We figured that us co-producing with Mike would be the next best thing to Mutt,” Elliott said.

But Lange’s influence continued throughout the making of Adrenalize . “Mutt was on the phone every day, trying to rally the troops,” Elliott recalls. During breaks in Adams’s schedule, Lange wrote with Leppard and contributed backing vocals for Adrenalize – another feature that was integral to the band’s signature sound.

Phil Collen decided early on that he would play all the guitars on the album. He explains: “Why bring someone in who doesn’t get what we’re all about? I’d be teaching someone. The weird thing was that I had to learn Steve’s parts from the demos we’d laid down together on four-track. It was like listening to a ghost; he was in the room. I just wanted to do him justice, to make it sound as close as I could to how it was with Steve.”

The first stages of recording were at Wisseloord studios in Holland, where much of Hysteria was made. But, as Collen says, “that was costing a fortune”. So operations were moved to Elliott’s home in Dublin, where a studio had recently been installed. Hysteria had taken the best part of four years to record. But not Adrenalize . “By our standards we blitzed through it,” Elliott said. “And we wanted this one to be a little less polished than Hysteria , with the edge that Pyromania had. We wanted it to rock a bit more.”

Certainly there were echoes of Hysteria on Adrenalize . Make Love Like A Man was an anthem like Pour Some Sugar On Me , its tongue-in-cheek title described by Elliott as “totally taking the piss – not chest-beating macho bullshit”. Tonight and Have You Ever Needed Someone So Bad were two finely crafted ballads in the style of Love Bites . Tear It Down , previously released as the B-side to Animal , was a no-brainer rock song like Run Riot . Best of all was Stand Up (Kick Love Into Motion) , with beautiful vocal harmonies, a song similar in feel to the title track from Hysteria .

The last two songs written for Adrenalize , after Clark’s death, were White Lightning and Let’s Get Rocked . Collen alone created the music for W hite Lightning , with direct reference to Gods Of War , the epic track from Hysteria that Clark wrote in homage to Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir . In the words that Elliott wrote for White Lightning was Clark’s story and those of other rock stars who died young, including Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. One line in the song, depicting the private hell of an addict, was painfully acute: ‘ And no one will ever hear you scream and shout.’ “I think it’s the most personal, moving lyric I’ve ever written,” he said, “because it’s the only one that’s specifically about someone we know.” In that song, he was saying all the things that he couldn’t get through to his friend. “We did say those things,” he said. “He just didn’t hear them.”

So much emotion went into White Lightning . “By the time we put it to bed it was like we’d done group therapy,” Elliott recalls. “After that we needed something completely ridiculous.”

Cue Let’s Get Rocked , its mood and title inspired by Let’s Go Crazy , the explosive funk-rock blowout from Prince’s classic album Purple Rain . “Phil and I were infatuated with Prince then,” Elliott says. “We wanted Let’s Get Rocked to be something he could have done. It was celebratory, written for a stadium.” And if Elliott’s lyrics were dumb and cartoonish, then no wonder – he wrote them after watching an episode of The Simpsons .

With this album there was one last drama, during the end stages of recording, when Mike Shipley contracted hepatitis, a potentially fatal liver disorder. “As usual another major trauma attacked us in the final hour,” Elliott said with gallows humour: It definitely screwed him up for a while.” Fortunately, Shipley recovered.

With the work done, the mood in the band was defiantly upbeat, as illustrated by the album’s title. “There’s no such word as ‘adrenalize’ in the dictionary,” Elliott says, “but it sounded right. We wanted it to be like plugging the power back in, re-energising the band musically.”

Adrenalize was released on March 31, 1992. In Rolling Stone , JD Considine wrote: “There’s no overriding concept to the album, no sense of the group confronting its demons or wrestling with the problems of the world; instead, what we get is an unending string of energetic, hook-heavy, gosh-we-luv-’em songs about girls. A perfect Def Leppard album, in other words.”

It was also an album completely out of step with what was happening in rock music at the time. Just two months earlier, Nirvana’s Nevermind had topped the US chart. A new age of alternative rock had arrived, led by the Seattle grunge bands – Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice In Chains – and Californian outliers Faith No More and Jane’s Addiction. It was the most seismic change in popular music since punk in the late 70s, with Smells Like Teen Spirit , its revolutionary anthem, ringing out like the last bell for the big-haired stars of 80s rock.

Elliott says now that he was largely oblivious to it all: “When we were making Adrenalize it was still the arse end of the eighties, from a mental point of view. The nineties hadn’t kicked in. We weren’t aware of what Kurt Cobain was doing until the album was out.”

Not so Phil Collen: “With grunge, I saw it coming a mile off. There were so many awful hair-metal bands around. Something had to happen. Nirvana and Pearl Jam were a breath of fresh air.”

In this turbulent time, some stars from the 80s were big enough to ride out the storm. Guns N’ Roses were riding high with Use Your Illusion I and II . Bon Jovi, with their 1992 album Keep The Faith , had what Manic Street Preachers bassist Nicky Wire called “a brilliant reinvention”. And there was still a place for Def Leppard. “People were glad we were still around,” Elliott says. “ Adrenalize was number one in America for six weeks. It was number one in around thirty counties. It was massive.”

Just a few days after the album’s release, the new guitarist in Def Leppard was announced: Vivian Campbell, formerly of Dio and Whitesnake. Behind the scenes, the band had already tried out other guitarists, including John Sykes, also ex-Whitesnake, and Adrian Smith, at that time between tenures in Iron Maiden. As Collen explains: “There was no formal audition with John and Adrian, they just came and played with us for a while. It was more about us getting a sense of what they were like as people.” Sykes ended up singing backing vocals on Adrenalize .

“John could sing his ass off,” Elliott says. “And he wrote Still Of The Night for Whitesnake. Adrian I adore, and in the end it worked out well for him because he’s back in Maiden where he belongs. We also tried out a young unknown kid from Birmingham, Huey Lucas. Great player, but his voice wasn’t that strong. Vivian was always the number-one candidate. For us it wasn’t about how well you could play, it was more about how well you can sing. And more importantly, we’ve got to get on with this person.”

On April 20, the new-look Def Leppard performed at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert For Aids Awareness at Wembley Stadium, at which the surviving members of Queen, joined by a stellar supporting cast including David Bowie, Robert Plant, Elton John, Guns N’ Roses and Metallica, paid tribute to their late singer. With an audience of 80,000 in the stadium and more than a billion people watching on live TV, it was the perfect set-up for Leppard’s forthcoming world tour.

“The tour was huge,” Elliott says. “It was bigger than Hysteria .” It included a victorious homecoming show at the newly built Don Valley Stadium, where the band played to 50,000 people. The final leg was in North America at the end of that year. “I remember being on our private plane,” the singer says, “flying over Manhattan at two in the morning, having just finished a bunch of sell-out shows, and going: ‘Yeah, about this grunge thing…’”

Adrenalize sold seven million copies worldwide. In the US the singles were not as successful as those from Hysteria , with only Let’s Get Rocked and Have You Ever Needed Someone So Bad making the Top 20. But in the UK they had four big hits.

It was after Adrenaliz e that Def Leppard struggled. “Everything changed after that,” Collen says. “In the late nineties it went tits-up for a while, but we soldiered on.” Their 1996 album Slang was an alt.rock-influenced volte-face, but their last album of that decade, Euphoria , was a return to Leppard’s classic sound.

For Elliott and Collen, looking back on Adrenalize from a distance of 26 years there are mixed feelings. Elliott thinks of it as the end of an era, “the last in a trilogy” after Pyromania and Hysteria . What he hears now in Adrenalize is the early roots of Leppard. “Other than White Lightning the music is very mid-seventies glam,” he says. Collen is more critical: “With Hysteria we felt that we’d created a slightly new rock genre. It was so creative and so left-field. With Adrenalize we were copying that formula.”

What Adrenalize lacked was the shock of the new that Hysteria had: the blockbuster production that Collen describes as “ Star Wars for the ears”; the spirit of adventure in songs such as Pour Some Sugar On Me , Rocket and Animal . With Hysteria Def Leppard were breaking new ground; with Adrenalize they were holding ground. In the circumstances, it was more than enough.

They had dug deep to make this album. And the last two songs they wrote for Adrenalize would remain powerfully symbolic: White Lightning the epitaph for the friend they lost, Let’s Get Rocked the anthem with which they moved on.

Def Leppard are the cover stars of the latest issue of Classic Rock magazine, which is on sale now .

Freelance writer for Classic Rock since 2005, Paul Elliott has worked for leading music titles since 1985, including Sounds, Kerrang!, MOJO and Q . He is the author of several books including the first biography of Guns N’ Roses and the autobiography of bodyguard-to-the-stars Danny Francis. He has written liner notes for classic album reissues by artists such as Def Leppard, Thin Lizzy and Kiss, and currently works as content editor for Total Guitar . He lives in Bath - of which David Coverdale recently said: “How very Roman of you!”

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Released at the height of grunge, ‘Adrenalize,’ Def Leppard’s much-anticipated follow-up to ‘Hysteria,’ saw the group reclaim the rock mantle.

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Def Leppard ’s landmark fourth album, Hysteria , was a case study in turning tragedy into triumph, but circumstances forced the band to respond to adversity for a second time when they came to record its much-anticipated follow-up, Adrenalize .

Listen to Adrenalize on Apple Music and Spotify .

The Sheffield quintet showed true Yorkshire grit en route to realizing Hysteria , with drummer Rick Allen overcoming a near-fatal car crash that left him without his left arm. Yet, after Allen courageously mastered a customized kit, Leppard played on, with Hysteria living up to its name, selling a whopping 25 million copies worldwide and spawning no less than seven hit singles.

However, the band was hit harder still as they worked up the Adrenalize songs, when guitarist and songwriter Steve Clark died as a result of alcohol-related issues in January 1991, aged just 30. Naturally, his bandmates were devastated, but thanks to their close-knit friendship, the group continued, in some cases working on multi-track demos Clark and fellow guitarist Phil Collen had prepared for Leppard’s next album.

Since Collen was recruited during the making of 1981’s High’n’Dry , he had developed an almost telepathic understanding with Clark. The two guitarists’ dextrous, inter-linking lead and rhythm parts were a crucial element of the hit albums Pyromania and Hysteria , and their trademark dueling fretboards were woven into the very fabric of Def Leppard’s sound.

Accordingly, Collen felt Clark’s loss especially deeply when he shouldered the burden of playing all the guitars on Adrenalize . “I was sitting there with him [Clark] when he played along to the original parts,” he later told Classic Rock ’s Geoff Barton. “I could relay that, but it was like playing along to a ghost.”

Nonetheless, Def Leppard dug in, rallied, and returned to the studio. On this occasion, long-time producer Mutt Lange was absent, though the group was still in safe hands as Hysteria engineer Mike Shipley (later a Grammy-winner for his work on Alison Krauss & Union Station’s Paper Plane album) manned the console.

Fans would have been forgiven for worrying whether Def Leppard could survive Steve Clark’s loss, yet when Adrenalize was released, on March 31, 1992, they could breathe a collective sigh of relief. With the album’s lead cut, the ridiculously infectious “Let’s Get Rocked,” setting the tone, Adrenalize again delivered in spades.

The album featured its fair shares of lascivious rockers (“Make Love Like A Man,” “Personal Property,” “Tear It Down”), but they were tempered with soaring, radio-friendly anthems such as “Heaven Is” and the glorious widescreen ballad “Have You Ever Needed Someone So Bad.” Perhaps inevitably, however, Leppard were at their most ambitious on “White Lightning”: an epic, seven-minute salute to their fallen comrade, on which Phil Collen summoned up some astounding lead playing.

Rolling Stone astutely described Adrenalize as “a seemingly unending string of energetic, hook-heavy songs about girls”, and after “Let’s Get Rocked” powered up to No.2 in the UK and cracked the Billboard Top 20, the album planted its flag at the summit of the UK and US album charts. No mean feat for a hard rock/metal album released while grunge superstars such as Nirvana and Pearl Jam were at the height of their fame.

Keen to reassure fans they were back for good, Def Leppard recruited versatile former Dio / Whitesnake guitarist Vivian Campbell to partner Phil Collen, and set out on an 18-month world tour, kicking off in the wake of the band’s much-acclaimed appearance at the star-studded Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert at London’s Wembley Stadium, in April ’92. Cumulatively, all this activity led to Adrenalize yielding further multi-platinum rewards for this seemingly invincible quintet blessed with an inherent knack for facing down the odds and coming up triumphant.

Adrenalize can be bought here .

Darwin Gushard

April 1, 2024 at 1:50 pm

Nice article and great videos! But I think Phil Collen was brought in during the making of Pyromania, not High ‘N’ Dry.

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ADRENALIZE: The Ultimate Def Leppard Experience

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About Adrenalize

Website | Facebook | Video STEP INSIDE, WALK THIS WAY ...and behold the multi media spectacle of sight and sound that is ADRENALIZE – The Ultimate Def Leppard Experience!  Come witness ADRENALIZE as they recreate the chart topping, chest thumping anthems that made Def Leppard the iconic and dominant force in arena rock of the 80s and beyond.... See the road tested and accomplished stage performers of ADRENALIZE embody the swaggering, electrifying stage personae of the Lads from Sheffield, and their undeniable intensity will captivate you and leave you singing, fist pumping and screaming for more! You'll hear the hook laden radio and MTV mega-hits like “Foolin'”, “Rock of Ages” “Love Bites” and “Pour Some Sugar On Me”, and the Die Hard Def Lep true believers will be thrilled by deep cuts like “Wasted”, “High 'n' Dry” and “Switch 625”! C'mon out and see for yourself what the latest buzz is all about. ADRENALIZE You won't believe your eyes.

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