WE HAVE JUST SEEN A SIGNIFICANT
ANNIVERSARY OF ONE OF BRITISH
MUSIC’S LANDMARK ALBUMS.
A COMPLICATED, BOUNDARY-PUSHING
STUDIO PROJECT WHICH SOLD
TENS OF MILLIONS OF COPIES,
TRANSFORMED THE BAND’S
SOUND, AND EMBEDDED A SLEW
OF NEW SONGS IN THE POPULAR
CONSCIOUSNESS.
It was an album created by working-class,
northern men with a profound grasp of pop
history, and it changed the sound and feel of
everything that came after it. It pushed the
idea of what a guitar band could do and be to
its limit, the ambition on display propelling
the group to a position that they could not
sustain and would never again reach.
That album was Def Leppard’s Hysteria.
Yet in a year when endless column inches
have been devoted to exhuming – again – the
remains of Sgt. Pepper, Lep’s hairspray-misted
masterpiece has seen its 30th birthday come
and go almost unremarked. This is, in the
opinion of at least one writer, a travesty. The
Beatles never posed for press shots in matching
Union Jack vest and short combos. They never
delivered a crushing sonic wall of bubblegum
idiocy that united listeners from the Eastern
Bloc to the Deep South and soundtracked
events from NFL games to pole-dancing
marathons. They never delivered enormodome
tours that were both ‘in the round’ and ‘in your
face.’ They never succeeded in creating (in the
vision of producer Mutt Lange) hard rock’s
answer to Thriller.
The exclusion of Hysteria from the canon
is symptomatic of a wider judgment cast
on its genre. If hair metal is remembered
at all nowadays, it’s as the punchline to a
joke, the basis for a fancy-dress costume, or
a hilariously naff relic. In a culture that is
constantly reassessing its juvenilia, hair metal
is the one musical form apparently beyond
serious reappraisal.
According to the official history, hair metal
arrived around 1983 – Mötley Crüe’s Shout
at the Devil was the first album which not
only sounded like hair metal, but also looked
like it – and enjoyed a decade of increasingly
preposterous, stadium-sized, spandex-clad
excess, courtesy of the likes of Poison, Warrant,
Ratt, Cinderella and Slaughter, before grunge
arrived and metal was obliterated by a younger,
faster version of itself.
If 1987 was the era’s peak – the releases
of Hysteria, Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for
Destruction and classics from Whitesnake,
Helloween, Dokken and Aerosmith make
the case – by 1992 it was largely all over. The
disillusioning, bloated decadence of Guns N’
Roses’ Use Your Illusion I and II was the era’s
last post, and nobody seems in any hurry to
reappraise it. “The two things that stand in
its way,” hypothesises Alexis Petridis, lead
music critic at The Guardian and GQ, “are
that the inbuilt sexism of the videos doesn’t
look very charming 30 years on. That and the
sonic quality of the records themselves. I don’t
think we’ve yet reached a point where the
actual sound of hair metal – those booming
stadium drums, the trebly, coke-y production- is looked on with nostalgic fondness, as
something you might aspire to sound like,
or choose to revive.”
It doesn’t help that those who do exalt the
genre often seem stuck in time themselves.
In Darren Aronofsky’s 2008 film The Wrestler,
Mickey Rourke’s protagonist Randy props up
a bar bemoaning the demise of the ’80s sound
with his girlfriend, Cassidy:Randy: Then that Cobain pussy had to come
around and ruin it all.
Cassidy: Like there’s something wrong with
wanting to have a good time?
Randy: I’ ll tell you something – I hated the
fuckin’ ’90s...........................................
“I used to love Def Leppard when I was a
teenager,” remembers Luke Turner, editor
of influential music site The Quietus. “Then,
when I started getting into indie, I sold
all my albums.” He’s describing a familiar
trajectory of metal fandom: hormonal
adoration, swiftly followed by a putting
away of childish things.The case against hair metal is easy enough
to build. Viewed now, it looks sartorially
risible, wilfully moronic, representative of
a worldview filtered through the hormone-
crazed synapses of a 15-year-old boy. But
taken individually, these judgments seem less
like bugs and more like features. Plenty of
‘dumb’ music – from garage punk to Chicago
house – has proved itself transcendent; in
its glorification of ugly men in makeup and
provocative outfits, hair metal was heir to
the same impulse that drove the entire glam
movement of the 1970s. And if you peel
back the multi-tracked power chords and
dive-bombing guitar solos, you are left with
rock-solid conventional pop songs: Leppard’s
‘Pour Some Sugar on Me’ and ‘Bringin’ On
the Heartbreak’ have been covered by Taylor
Swift and Mariah Carey respectively; Bon
Jovi’s ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’ is a masterpiece ofPage 040-041
For their Hysteria World
Tour, Def Leppard often
performed ‘in the round’, with
one-armed drummer Rick
Allen taking centre stage.
Photographer Mick Hutson
Opposite
Mötley Crüe frontman Vince
Neil during the band’s 1985
Theatre of Pain Tour.
MediaPunch Inc / Alamy
Stock Photo