Bringing On The Heartbreak
Def Leppard
There are better videos than this one, its about as ’80s cheesy as you can get but as I explain in The Story of Rock and Roll, there were other good uses for this song. The fact of the matter is that the only two bands that came out of The New Wave of British Heavy Metal and had worldwide success were Iron Maiden and Def Leppard. The Leps caught on like wildfire in the USA. The albums that followed High and Dry in 1981 were all multi-platinum sellers.
In The Story of Rock and Roll I tell the tale of how we managed to get through watching Madonna’s Justify My Love by playing this track to her video with the sound off, I’m not gonna fuck up my website with a Madonna video but you can try it yourself. Def Leppard really blew up with their Pyromania album and then followed it with an even bigger smash called Hysteria. I heard ‘High ‘n’ Dry’ and ‘On Through the Night’ first and they were a lot heavier and not so highly polished. Listening to those albums today it is quite easy to see how Def Leppard were going to become superstars.
JAMES DAUBENEY