Bassist Rick Savage discussed Def Leppard‘s staple 1987 record “Hysteria” – their top-selling effort to date with 25+ million copies sold – telling Music Radar about the “Pour Some Sugar on Me” mega-hit:
“It’s a strange one. You sometimes have to ask yourself, ‘Why did this song become so popular?’ It defied a lot of logic.
“I’ve got to be honest, it’s one of the songs I had the least amount of input in. In fact, I wasn’t even in the country!
“As far as I was concerned, the album was finished, recorded and ready for mixing. So I’d left – I had mentally checked out and was back at my home in Dublin.
“Then all of a sudden, Joe [Elliot] was finishing off some random vocals and came up with the rhythm and vibe of the verse.
“Mutt [Lange, the producer] walked into the room and was like, ‘Stop what you’re doing – we need to make a song out of this!’ So my phone rang and they were like, ‘Dude you need to come back, we’ve written another song!’
“We reconvened back in the studio and finished the song in about four days. Which is interesting, considering the album took four or five years to make! It happened because Mutt heard something that the album didn’t have.
“When it was first released, it wasn’t a hit at all… this song was a slow-burner. It wasn’t until the live version had aired on MTV a year later that it all took off and became the anthem we’re most known for.”