Leppard was fueled by adolescent angst and raw guitar power. They played with sheer emotion and fire. When it came time to record the follow up to On Through The Night, the band was introduced to a young producer who was determined to harness their energy and create music that not even the band members knew they were capable of making.
Drummer Rick Allen recalls meeting Mutt Lange for the first time. “We met at John Henry’s which was a rehearsal place in London. He seemed like a really normal guy until we got him into the studio and we realized that he was a slave driver.” Allen makes the ’slave driver’ comment with a smile on his face but he is not kidding. Lange picked the band’s songs apart note by note. The process of recording one song --start to finish -- took longer than it did to record the entire first album. Allen recalls, “There were a lot of expletives and swear words flying around the place when you couldn’t quite do what Mutt expected you to do. In hindsight, he really pulled out the best of the band.”
Mutt pushed the boys harder then they had ever been pushed in their lives --often times stretching their mental, emotional and physical limits. One example of physical collapse came when Allen was attempting to record the drum tracks to the albums first single “Let It Go”. “It was exhausting to play. I was hitting on things that I had never hit on before and Mutt was making suggestions about stuff that I needed to play. It was pretty intense.”
Lange’s vision for the band centered on how the individual members played, sang and wrote songs. No one part was greater than the whole -- including his. He took on responsibilities above and beyond a mere producer. He became the six member of the band. A perfect example of Lange’s influence can be heard on the classic track “Bringin’ On The Heartbreak”. Rick Allen discloses how the song came to be, “That was actually a combination of all of us. Pete Willis was in the band at the time. It was mainly Joe, Steve, Sav and Pete. It just started out as a really simple guitar jangle. When Mutt got to hear it we build the song around it.”
In the end, High n' Dry took Def Leppard to platinum sales status for the first time. It is regarded as the hardest rocking album in their back catalog and die-hard fans swear it is the best thing they have ever done. Critics might argue that that point came with the release of Hysteria or even Pyromania. However, High n' Dry definitely opened the door for Def Leppard to take hard rock music to new heights. It marked the beginning of a new era for the band. Under Lange‘s tutelage Def Leppard grew up and would be forever changed. “High n' Dry was the first record where we were really introduced to hard work. We discovered just how good and bad we were. I think it was a great project to work with Mutt on. I think that is when he really started to define the sound of the band. He helped us really tap into parts of ourselves that we had never really visited before in terms of our sound and how far we could push ourselves as musicians. It was really a challenge. It was a long time ago. There are a couple of dead brain cells between High n' Dry and me.”
