Def Leppard - Hysteria

On New Year's Eve 1984, Rick Allen lost his left arm in a car accident. Most bands would have replaced the drummer. Def Leppard waited, redesigned a kit he could play with one arm and two feet, and spent three years and a reported fortune finishing the album they had started. Rick Allen came up with the title, referring to the media circus around his accident. Hysteria arrived in August 1987 and went to number one on both the Billboard 200 and the UK Albums Chart.

Robert John "Mutt" Lange produced, and the result is one of the most obsessively constructed rock records ever made. Every guitar is stacked, every vocal is layered, every drum sound is engineered rather than recorded. It should feel airless. Instead it produced seven hit singles, more than any hard rock album before it, including "Pour Some Sugar On Me," "Love Bites," "Armageddon It," "Animal" and the title track. "Pour Some Sugar On Me" in particular was a late addition and became the song that took the album from successful to inescapable.

It has sold over 25 million copies worldwide, 12 million of those in the US alone, where it is certified 12x platinum. It is also the last studio album Steve Clark completed before his death in 1991, which gives the whole thing a weight it did not carry at the time.

An essential pressing of the album that defined what a rock record could sound like in the late eighties.