MASTER CLASSICS WITH STEVE CLARK

STEVE CLARK TALKS ABOUT SOME OF THE CLASSIC SONGS OF DEF LEPPARD. | METALSHOP MAGAZINE 1989

Metalshop caught up with Leppard’s axeman while on the Hysteria world tour in ’88 where he reflects on a handful of the classic tracks he wrote:

Bringin’ On The Heartbreak

CLARK: I like playing it now, but it went through a phase where it was a bit of a chore to play, so we decided to change it. It was really nice when I came up with that riff. It was something I had never done before and I really shocked myself. I was sort of in wonderland, really wasted [at the time], and we thought we’d never use it ‘cause it wasn’t heavy enough. Save it for my solo album (laughs). We thought it’d just get shelved. It’s great how it turned out. The original version is not even close. We developed it until it was what it is now, and even then we changed it some more [on this tour].

Rock! Rock! ‘Til You Drop

CLARK: The original lick was going to be on High ‘n’ Dry but Mutt [Lange – producer] wouldn’t let us use it because he thought it was too happy so we changed the riff around and it finally resurfaced on Pyromania. After we finished On Through The Night, we went back into the studio to write High ‘n’ Dry and I think the original title of this was When The Rain Falls which never got used. And when we recorded Pyromania we rewrote the riff around it and it turned into Rock! Rock! ‘Til You Drop, so that had been hanging around for quite a while.

[NB: Rock! Rock! ‘Til You Drop was actually known as Medicine Man originally. When The Rain Falls  became Let It Go on High ‘n’ Dry]

Photograph

CLARK: You should’ve heard the first version! There were a lot if different versions of that. The original riff wasn’t even close to the way it turned out. That song took a long time at the Pyromania sessions. It almost never got used because we couldn’t come up with… we had the bridge and the chorus… but we couldn’t get a verse. We kept working at it and eventually we came up with the verse part. We did take a hell of a long time to get that one straightened out. For whatever ends up on record, there’s 90% more on tapes that never gets used. On Photograph I did the original solo and it just wasn’t right and then Phil [Collen] came in to have a crack at it. When we’re in the studio there’s a lot of experimenting that goes down.