STEVE CLARK ON THE LENGTHY HYSTERIA SESSIONS:

INTERVIEW SEGMENT WITH DEF LEPPARD’S STEVE CLARK
Metal Hammer magazine | 16-page Fan Mag pullout, 15th Aug 1988.

Steve Clark talked just after the [Hysteria] albums eventual release about how relieved he and the band were to be out of the studio at last, they were even really enjoying the interminable round of interviews that goes with an album release.

Six months in Eire writing new tunes, they came up with ten for inclusion on what was to be ‘Hysteria’. Two years down the line Steve reckons some of them “did sound a bit dated… we decided to keep about six of the songs for the album. We totally rewrote them and updated them, but we also kept writing new songs throughout the period we were recording. We eventually ended up with 19 songs altogether and picked the best 12 for the album.”

Steve remembers one of the most frustrating things about that time (the three years from the release of Me and My Wine in 1984 to Hysteria’s release in 1987) was simply not being able to play live. “That was what we desperately wanted to do. We went to see other groups play and I must admit that it did get a bit painful at one point because we all badly wanted to be up there playing ourselves.”

“It’s great to be working again because we had been in the studio for that long. It had the feeling of a little dungeon with no daylight and we’d been there for quite a long time. This album was recorded twice remember!”

Recorded twice but not to the point of obsession. “After two years and so many false starts we were so deep into it that the only was to go about it was even deeper, just to get it finished and to make the best possible album.”

So what did they do after the first two years? Scrapped the whole thing and started again, that’s what. Steve said “we literally wiped the tapes. We were in two minds about what we had done wrong, so we were very glad when Mutt [Lange, producer] came back on the project. We knew then it would be right and we just said ‘it takes as long as it takes!’”

Steve: “We just said ‘Nothing could hurt us anymore now, the trivial things that happen to everyone every day and ones that probably make people cry are just like water off a duck’s back to us now.’ We decided not to worry about it because you can’t change anything. We just had to make the best of it. So it made us become a lot closer to one another than ever before and there was a newly found strength in all of us. I think that is the positive thing that came out of all of the crisis we had been through. It definitely made us closer than we would have ever been because we had to depend on each other to get us through that period.”