by Phil Collen
The tour rolled on, and as we hit the West Coast in mid-September, we surprised our families and flew all of our parents out to travel with us down the coast from San Francisco for two big gigs at the Forum in Los Angeles. We were all homesick and decided, “Why not bring home to us?” This was the first time any of our parents had ever been to America. (My mum came but my dad couldn’t make it.) We had a great time traveling with them on our bus and letting them see exactly what we did for a living. They got to watch us perform in a couple of magnificent venues and had a chance to see the insane crowds. This was the first time they got to see all of their “little boys” as full-blown rock stars, and they all had a blast.
By the time we got to the Forum, there was another treat in store for us. Queen guitarist Brian May had always been a source of inspiration for us. He had been sort of tracking our success. So on the second night we played at the Forum, on September 11, Brian agreed to come join us on the encore “Travelin’ Band.”
Having Brian May come out meant the world to us. I’d seen Queen go from an opening act in England to becoming this megaforce in music. Def Leppard always based its sound on a hybrid of Queen-meets-AC/DC. I was amazed at how humble and nice Brian was, being that he was also this monster talent. It wasn’t just his guitar playing—it was the melodies, the vocals, the songwriting. I’ve always thought Brian was underrated. He was the ultimate team player, always putting the band and the song before his own ego. None of that takes away from his guitar playing, but in fact you focus in on the music as opposed to the individual. People ask, “What’s important about being in a band?” Brian May sums it right up.
Much like the night I jammed with Ritchie Blackmore, the night Brian May stepped out on stage with us was a revelation. To hear those incredible sounds coming out of his guitar while we played right next to him was a thrill, especially for Sav. To this day, Queen is Rick Savage’s favorite band. I still hear their influence in his songwriting and his approach to music. To say Sav freaked out is putting it mildly.
It was hard to believe that a tour that had begun at the tiny Marquee Club in London was about to come to a close in a sold-out baseball stadium with more than 60,000 rabid fans. It was Saturday, September 17. We’d come through San Diego earlier that year, in April, opening up for Billy Squier. But it was hard to fathom what had happened since then. The concert, put on by local radio station KGB, was billed as “Sky Show VIII,” and the end would feature one of the biggest fireworks shows in history. And Mötley Crüe, Uriah Heep, and Eddie Money would be opening for us.
When our bus pulled up early that morning and we first walked into Jack Murphy Stadium, I’ll have to admit we were a bit awestruck. We were just wearing cutoff shorts and flip-flops, wandering around this massive venue, trying to make sense of it all. It almost didn’t matter that our album was burning up the airwaves or that the tour was selling out faster than shows by Michael Jackson. This truly felt like the big time, like we had really arrived.
We would never have to explain to our parents again exactly what we did and why we did it. They were right there to experience it with us onstage and under the lights, and they went home with a million and one stories to tell their friends.
This extraordinary tour of America ended with two shows in Honolulu. It was a great chance for us to catch our breath, spend some time on the beach, and think about what the last couple of months had been like.
As we wound down, Pyromania was still No. 2 on the album charts, right behind Michael Jackson’s Thriller, where it would remain for months, on its way to selling ten million copies. “Photograph” had reached No. 1 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Chart and “Rock of Ages” hit No. 1 on the Billboard Top Tracks Chart. There were radio stations that would play the entire album beginning to end. We heard about fans burning through multiple copies. And it seemed you couldn’t turn dials without hitting one rock station that was cranking one of our songs. Def Leppard went from being basically a hard-rock radio filler band to Top 40 superstars.
Def Leppard’s first two albums, High ’n’ Dry and On Through the Night, had barely cracked the Top 40 and just missed the Top 50, respectively. We had experienced something monumental and unforgettable on this tour of the States, and Pyromania became a defining moment in the band’s history.
Our lives had changed, that was true, but another thing was also true. I was drinking more. On the road and playing, there was temptation everywhere. We were surrounded by people who wanted to take us to dinner or throw us parties—both environments that encouraged drinking. Steve and I were drinking so much that there were certain days I could not remember. One time in France our road manager, Robert Allen, came by our hotel room with our shoes after a night of I don’t know what. “You two were out of control last night,” he said as he sat down. Apparently, Steve and I, after pulling our trousers off in a bar, had bought drinks for everyone. Then, Robert told us, “You and Steve had a fight in an elevator. You threw up in someone’s Mercedes. There were these chicks involved. It was a fucking mess.” Steve and I just looked at each other. We both remembered nothing.
And it would only get worse.
In September 1983, Joe and I traveled to Tokyo to do some promotion and set the stage for when Def Leppard would visit there in January. Even though the promoters had us booked wall-to-wall, doing more than a dozen interviews per day, we still managed to have a really good time. John and Roger Taylor from Duran Duran were staying at the same hotel, so we hung with them for a bit while soaking up the Japanese culture. Those guys had been there before and knew all the best clubs. They took Joe and me around, and one night, in our drunken revelry, Joe announced, “We’re going to form a supergroup! Def Leppard and Duran Duran, the four of us!” Sounded like a great idea when we were all bolloxed drunk.
The trip was short, so it seemed like no time at all before we were back on a plane returning to Stockholm to meet up with the band to start our European tour. Now, this may not seem like a big deal to you, but it was on this flight that I made a big decision: it was the last time I ate meat. I remember leaning over to Joe and saying, “I can’t eat this anymore.” I’d been toying with the idea of removing meat from my diet for a while, but this time I was serious about becoming a vegetarian. The reasons were multiple and had been growing for years. My grandmother once left me a steak to grill that was bleeding and full of veins. I was sixteen and disgusted. I don’t think I ate it. After seeing the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the reality of how barbaric the slaughter/torture process is, I just couldn’t justify trying to satisfy my palate with something that had to die when it was just as easy to eat something that didn’t have to suffer. My ego isn’t that big. My decision wasn’t so well received at first. Back in the ’80s, vegetarianism was not as popular (dare I say trendy) as it is today. People made fun of me. It’s a bit like when you’re trying to not drink. But once I made the decision and stuck with it, I felt extremely empowered and relieved. I genuinely didn’t give a fuck about what anyone else thought and entered a different part of my life based on being very secure in a decision I’d made. I’m still very secure in that decision. In fact, at the time of this writing, I’ve transitioned to veganism. For those who don’t know (because I get this question all the time), a vegan is a vegetarian who doesn’t eat any animal products or by-products. This includes dairy, eggs, and honey.
That I stopped eating fish didn’t mean I stopped drinking like one. Once Joe and I arrived at our hotel to meet up with the rest of the band, Steve and I decided to head down to the hotel bar for a few drinks with the road crew. We were all still sporting our tans from the American tour, and Steve and I were wearing shorts and flip-flops. I’ll admit, Steve and I were being a bit obnoxious, flaunting ourselves out on the dance floor and showing off until finally this big Swedish guy at the bar got a little bit pissed-off. Some beer got spilled on the dance floor and all of a sudden everybody started slipping and sliding all around. Before you know it, we’ve got what loo
ks like a Wild West saloon brawl on our hands. It was straight out of a classic Western movie. Chairs, tables, and glasses were flying all over the place, with punches being thrown left and right. I kicked at the Swedish guy after he decked me with a punch, but my flip-flop flew off and I wound up with a huge gash in the sole of my foot from the broken glass all over the floor.
It was absolutely insane. One of our road crew guys, a massive gent, leveled the Swedish guy with a couple of solid punches before getting himself thrown through a plate-glass window. The crew, who were all drunk off their asses, were all pulling shards of broken glass out of the bottom of my foot. They used vodka as an anesthetic.
The next day, when we checked out, Steve and I had to pay for everything (rightly so). For about two weeks I could hardly walk on that foot, and my ankle was numb for at least six months. It really cramped my stage performances. It was a lesson learned. But the irony of my new healthy diet alongside my unhealthy drinking hadn’t quite hit home yet. Not that my abandonment of flesh-eating had anything to do with health.
Pyromania was still selling 100,000 copies a week in the United States, but you wouldn’t have known it in Europe. The album had not caught fire in other parts of the world as it had in America, so there we were, back to slogging it out just as we’d been doing several months before. It was weird and, I gotta admit, slightly depressing to go within just a few weeks from playing to crowds that numbered between 20,000 and 50,000 per night to playing half-empty clubs. And the local press derided us, as they had when the record started to take off in America. Again, they implied that we had somehow “sold out.” It was the strangest thing. It brought us down a bit, but we were starting to understand the drill. Things were just different in America. Thankfully, though, the three English shows all sold out and we played a fantastic gig on December 5 at the Hammersmith Odeon. We had a big end-of-tour party afterward, with Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top joining us along with some friends from Motörhead and Iron Maiden, and our families.
Being back home was kind of weird, too. I was living back at my mum’s and things were sort of like the old days. There was a lot going on in our lives during this time. We had left home, been on tour for a year, and, without realizing it, had cut our mothers’ apron strings. This was a big deal considering we were all pretty much mummy’s boys. We went from living in working-class, family-oriented English neighborhoods to spinning around the world and settling into expensive, exotic cities. And now it was time to start shaping our own lives away from home.
Everyone’s life in the neighborhood was basically the same. I had a new Porsche, but that was really the only thing I splurged on. When I was younger, I’d driven an old beat-up Ford Cortina. When Pyromania blew up, I replaced my old Ford Cortina with a black Porsche, and within a week of my owning this car, a beautiful South African model knocked on my window as I was sitting in traffic on Blackfriars Bridge in London and gave me her number. Funny, that never happened in my Ford Cortina.
That’s how it was for all of us. We had been treated like rock stars while on tour, but now we were all just home, where we had started. But we did have money. I was now making more in one week than I had in the previous year. And with that came some new realities.
One day during a band meeting, one of our managers said to us, “Boys, the good news is you’re making a lot of money. The bad news, at least in the UK, is you’re making a lot of money.” We all knew what he was talking about.
Being British citizens who for the first time in our lives actually made some money, we were now subject to the British tax system. Back then, Britain demanded a very high tax rate to be paid by people earning money in the top percentage bracket. We’d heard horror stories about celebrities being taxed 90 percent on the pound. That means that for every pound they made, 90 percent went to the British government. By the time we arrived back home, the tax rate was about 60 percent. However, many top earners took advantage of a tax loophole: they became tax exiles. They moved out of the country. The law stated that if you spent fewer than sixty-two days in England you weren’t liable to pay those taxes. In the ’70s, Rod Stewart famously released an album called Atlantic Crossing, and that’s exactly what he did to escape this taxation. The Rolling Stones all moved out in the early 1970s for the same reason after playing a famous “farewell” tour of their homeland.
We were advised to become tax exiles. It made sense, as we were spending more and more time out of the country anyway: none of us came from money, and who knew how long our success would last? So we did. We all chose different countries to live in. Joe and Sav up and left for Dublin, Ireland, since they really wanted to be somewhere that was similar to a British culture (Heinz Baked Beans, live football on TV, etc.) and Rick Allen went to Amsterdam. Steve and I went off to Paris. Unbeknownst to us, it was the start of a spiritual and intellectual quest.
At the end of 1983, I went to a Christmas party in London with Peter Mensch and Sue, his fiancée at the time, at pop singer and Visage front man Steve Strange’s house. We had a lovely Christmas dinner. Among the guests were Ronnie Wood, Boy George, and Lorelei Shellist, who was a friend of Peter’s. Lorelei was an American model who lived in Paris with her friend, another model, Valerie Mazzonelli. When I mentioned to Lorelei that Steve and I would be spending some time in Paris, she suggested that when we got there we give her a call and they’d show us around.
Before I actually called Lorelei, an incident happened one night in January 1984 after going out with Steve, Monique—a girl I was seeing—and my mum, who’d come over for the weekend. While we were out in Paris, a car zoomed around the corner, hitting Monique and sending her flying. The car then went to drive off. So I kicked it as it drove away. It stopped. Five guys jumped out. A brawl ensued. My mum was freaking out. Monique came into the fight and one of the guys punched her in the face. So we all just got into it. I think Steve and I came out the worst, with chipped teeth and black eyes. When we met up with Peter Mensch and the rest of the guys at Heathrow airport a few days later to embark on our first tour of Australia, we didn’t want them to know how much we had been tearing it up, so we got stewardesses on the flight over to put makeup on us. But as soon as we saw everyone, they inquired, “Have you guys been fighting?”
We left to perform at the Narara Festival, a three-day event in New South Wales, on the east coast of Australia, in January 1984. This was the band’s very first time down under, and we loved every minute of it. And I got to see my cousin Georgie, who’d emigrated to Oz from Wales years earlier.
The show that we had gone down for took place in late January and also featured Simple Minds, the Pretenders, Talking Heads, and the Eurythmics—the quintessential ’80s pop lineup. The weather was foreboding all day, with off-and-on bursts of rain. But our set occurred during the most torrential, biblical rainstorm I’d ever seen. Nearly all of the 35,000 audience members left. There were 3,000 die-hards waiting. We certainly hadn’t come all the way down to Australia to not play due to the weather, even though it was extreme, plus those who were left in the mud deserved our best and wettest performance. Since most of the other bands had bailed due to the weather, the fans really seemed to appreciate us hanging in there and playing for them. We were not really that well-known in Australia, and so it was our first big impression. To this day we meet fans who were there on that very wet day in 1984 and still thank us profusely for not leaving the show. Our legend had begun to take root in Oz.
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Although by now we’d traveled around the world and had even played in France, Steve and I had never really been exposed to a place like Paris for any length of time. The city is one of the most gorgeous and romantic in the world, rich with architecture, culture, and history. When you live there, it’s a whole different ball game. So much so I began noticing architectural and structural beauty when I’d go back to England—something I had never noticed the whole time I was growing up.
The museums, galleries, cafés, and clubs we went to affected our view
on so many things, especially coming from such humble working-class surroundings. Steve and I took to having very deep philosophical discussions. We literally stumbled upon awareness. Apart from becoming avid book readers, we started comparing notes on life based on our childhoods, parents, the psychology of past, present, and future girlfriends, and humans in general. There’s a term known as “the dumbing-down of America,” which refers to the steps taken to make it easier to control the herd. This refers to keeping the masses docile via reality TV, sports, and entertainment. To put it bluntly, there’s a quest to impair logical thought process, comprehensive reasoning, and responsible decision making by taking people’s eyes off the ball. This happens everywhere, not just in America. Once Steve and I realized this, it changed everything, as if we were stepping into a third dimension. We could never look at life the same again.
During this time we even applied our newfound logic to our musical selves. Steve and I would sometimes speak for hours nonstop about everything. We were like sponges. We took everything in. This even made us think “outside the box” about the role of guitars in a rock band. We approached music differently. We didn’t want to be just standard. Instead of being these guitars that were just thundering along, we wanted to create orchestral sounds while retaining the groove and melody of a credible rock band.
Some of my friends and family members couldn’t understand the cultural growth I experienced in Paris. Being raised in a very structured working-class environment, we didn’t really grow up talking about art and architecture; my new interests were received as pretension. Steve was also having the same issues. Since he was from Sheffield, it was even more of an extreme contrast. But we didn’t care. We were ready to break away a bit and explore the opportunities that were presenting themselves as a result of our success.
