On This Day in 1987, Def Leppard Released the Signature Song They Accidentally Wrote During a Tea Break

One could feasibly say that, when Joe Elliott and Robert John “Mutt” Lange were writing the song that would become a Def Leppard signature, they were making a clever lyric out of a tea joke. But of course, that would mean Elliot and Lange knew what the lyrics were actually talking about. And in the case of this best-selling accident, neither the Def Leppard frontman nor his producer knew what, exactly, they were scatting into their micro-cassette players.

Whatever it was, it obviously worked.

Def Leppard Wrote This Signature Song by Accident

When Def Leppard frontman Joe Elliot was noodling on the acoustic guitar during a tea break at the recording studio, he had no intention of sharing what he was singing with the rest of the crew. In fact, he didn’t even know that Robert John “Mutt” Lange, his producer, was nearby, listening. “He said, ‘What is that?’” Elliot recalled to Radio One, per John Pidgeon’s Classic Albums: Interviews from the Radio One Series. “I think he was fully expecting it to be a Stones song or something because I’m forever picking a guitar up and playing ‘Angie’ or something like that. I said, ‘It’s just an idea I’ve had for a while.’”

Lange replied that the idea was “the biggest hook I’ve heard for six years.” The producer insisted that they write the rest of the song immediately, even though the band’s management insisted that they not try to add any more songs to the album they were recording, Hysteria. Elliot and Lange recorded a demo with a simple drum machine beat and Lange on bass and guitar, and the rest of the band polished the track into the version we know today in two weeks. The band added their new song, “Pour Some Sugar On Me”, as the penultimate track to Side A of Hysteria.

The last-minute addition proved to be a fortuitous detour, garnering the band a massive hit in the U.S. Hysteria hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and Cashbox Albums chart as well as the U.K., Finnish, Australian, Norwegian, and New Zealand charts. “The album only went to No. 1 because of the success of ‘Pour Some Sugar On Me’, and it was a complete accident that it even got on the record,” Elliot said.

A Gibberish Song Turned Into an International Chart-Topper

The idea of Def Leppard writing “Pour Some Sugar On Me” during a tea break seems ripe for a joke about how the alternatives—milk, honey, etcetera—didn’t roll off the tongue quite right. But a joke like that would mean that Joe Elliot and Mutt Lange were purposefully writing their lyrics around a specific idea, which wasn’t the case for the two men standing on opposite ends of the studio with micro-cassette players “skitting noises” over their demo backing track.

“I’d take his tape, and sometimes when people make noises, you think they sound like certain words,” Elliot explained to Radio One. “So, I’d write down my interpretation of what I thought he was trying to say. And he would do the same with one of mine, and we ended up with this totally ridiculous lyric. But it’s probably one of my favorites, actually.”

Photo by Ebet Roberts/Redferns