Singer Joe Elliott said that there will be a 40th-anniversary of ”Hysteria” and a re-release of this album, including bonus material.
Talking to “The Jeremy White Podcast” , Elliot said:
“We did put our foot down and say we’re not doing any more 35th- or 37th-anniversary releases. When the old regime [at the record label], for example, were in charge, they put the double deluxe version of ‘Hysteria’ out on the 19th anniversary. And I’m sorry, but we all just went, ‘Can’t you just wait one year?’ Those are the things that were pissing us off as a band. It’s all gone away now.
“We don’t want anything out till the 40th [anniversary]. There’s no value in doing it,” he continued.
“It’s not fair on the fans until we really go through the archives and find stuff [that is worth releasing]. I will say this out loud. Nothing survived from the Jim Steinman sessions,” referencing the early “Hysteria” recordings Def Leppard did with the Meat Loaf songwriter, who wanted to make a raw-sounding record that conflicted with the band’s interest in creating a bigger, more pristine pop production. “They’ll never see the light of day, ’cause there isn’t anything. It all got wiped at the time as we recorded the record. But there are rough mixes, there’s maybe instrumental versions of certain things.
“The sad thing about ‘Hysteria’ is most of the tapes got lost, so you can’t even do a remix, ’cause it was all digital. So a lot of the stuff was never even on tape; it was just on hard drives and run concurrently with tape. Then the things, they got shoved into a corner, eaten by spiders, and then when you plug ’em in, they don’t work, or you can’t plug ’em in ’cause the machine you plug ’em into doesn’t exist anymore. ‘Cause the technology was in its very infancy at the time; nowadays, it’s easy. All our old stuff, like analog tapes, we’ve had ’em transferred into Pro Tools and we can do everything with them. But there’s a mid-period where we kind of scuppered. But there’s definitely stuff there.
“So, yeah, we may save most of the ‘Hysteria’ stuff for a 40th-anniversary box set. But it’s like that Bond film ‘Never Say Never Again’. We don’t say absolutely not because we get talked into things and then we sometimes go, ‘Actually, I don’t know what we were thinking when we said we wouldn’t do it, ’cause we really should.’ Things become more valuable the older they get.”