Pyromania

Pyromania is Def Leppard’s third studio album, the first to feature guitarist Phil Collen and second produced by Robert John “Mutt” Lange.

The album was a shift away from the band’s ‘riff metal’ roots towards more radio-friendly glam/hard rock. Lange was ‘a perfectionist’ who insisted on ‘so many takes that the tape is falling apart’ and contributed so much to the songs he was given songwriting credit:

We gave Mutt songwriting credits because this time he actually helped us structure the songs. They weren’t written songs that he changed. He sat down with us as a sixth member of the band and participated in the whole thing.

The band struggled to keep up with Lange’s ambition. Frontman Joe Elliot’s voice ‘was in shreds’ after two songs and founding member Pete Willis was fired for being so drunk he couldn’t play the songs. Plus the band was six figures in debt. The album took a year to write, record and mix.

Released in early 1983, seven of its ten songs got strong US rock radio play that year, with three of them crossing over to pop and reaching the top 30. This helped propel Pyromania to #2 (held from the top spot by Michael Jackson’s Thriller) and achieve 6x platinum certification in less than two years. Pyromania went on to sell over ten million copies in the US, thus being certified diamond by the RIAA.

Its success was also impressive in Canada (#4 album/two top 30 singles) but only modest in their homeland the UK (#18 album/three minor hits).

A final note of trivia, synthesizers on the album are credited to Booker T. Boffin – a nickname Lange was calling keyboardist Thomas ‘She Blinded Me With Science’ Dolby at the time.