Pour Some Sugar on Me

In 1987, near the end of the sessions for Hysteria, Def Leppard were putting the finishing touches on an album that would eventually cost five million dollars to make. During a tea break from vocal sessions, lead singer Joe Elliott jammed on an acoustic guitar with a riff he had written some time earlier. Producer Robert John "Mutt" Lange liked it and suggested it be developed into a new song, with the riff becoming the chorus. Lange and Elliott sketched the track on tape using a drum machine, bass, guitar and scratch vocals, and once the rest of the band joined in, the song was finished within two weeks.

The lyrics were written in an unusual way. Elliott and Lange stood at opposite ends of the studio control room, delivering stream-of-consciousness words into dictaphones while the backing track played, then swapped machines and tried to decipher each other's words. Elliott believed he heard the phrase "love is like a bomb" on Lange's tape, which he said set the tone for the whole lyric.

Released as the fourth single in North America, the song climbed to number two on the US Billboard Hot 100 on 23 July 1988, and its success pushed Hysteria to number one on the Billboard 200 a year after release. Two videos were made: one directed by Russell Mulcahy at a derelict Dublin stately home being demolished, and an American version directed by Wayne Isham, edited from live footage at McNichols Sports Arena in Denver.