'80s: it was like being in Disneyland

The whole of Britain was really jumping in the late ’70s. Punk had provided the impetus, but there was a great diversity of music happening in all the major cities.

It wasn’t on the same scale as, say, Liverpool or Manchester, but if you walked round Sheffield city centre at the time, you were guaranteed to meet a member of another band. I went to school with Stephen Singleton of ABC, knew a couple of the Cabaret Voltaire boys and used to stand side-by-side with Phil Oakey in the Record Collector in Broomhill. He’d be pulling out Kraftwerk and Klaus Naomi and I’d be pulling out Mick Ronson and Bowie, which surprised him because he thought all the likes of me were into was heavy metal.

There were two scenes at the time in Sheffield – The Human League, Cabaret Voltaire, 2.3 and Stunt Kites playing to the 50 people who were into that minimalist electronic stuff at The Limit Club, and the hard rock one which saw Sheffield City Hall stuffed two nights in a row for the likes of Alex Harvey, Judas Priest, AC/DC, Budgie, Sabbath, Sparks even. It changed when Sounds, which was an influential music paper at the time, saw the drum machines and asymmetric haircuts and thought “how clever” – but up until ’79, ’80, long hair and guitars ruled supreme. Punk never really established deep roots in my part of the world.

Sheffield was a grim enough place in those days without wearing long dark macs. I’d spent four and a half years – a quarter of my adult life – working in the stores at Osborne Mushet Tools and couldn’t wait to get the fuck out. It was two hours a day working, and six dreaming of how I could escape, which is where songs like ‘Hello America’ came from. “I’m taking me a trip/I’m going down to California.” That was me, bored out of my mind in a storeroom, surrounded by oil rags and Swarfega.

It’s funny. When, two or three years later, that song made it onto vinyl we were accused of being cynical and selling-out, but it’d actually have been far easier to remain at home and be part of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, which started to come through in the early ’80s. We got an awful going over for not attaching ourselves to that scene, but we didn’t want anything to do with Witchfynde and Saxon. David Bowie Mick Ronson were my role models.

Of course, when we eventually made it over to America, it was like being in Disneyland. The first gig we played was at the Santa Monica Civic, which I’d read about for years, opening for Pat Travers. We walked on stage to a ripple of polite applause and came off to a standing ovation. I felt, ‘Fucking hell, that’s alright!”

Then there were the chicks. Who cared that they were going for us ’cause they couldn’t get to the headliners? This was what I’d dreamed about in the basement of Osborne Mushet Tools.

Never having been further away from Sheffield than Bridlington, I lapped it all up. Y’know that bloke with the eyepatch from Dr. Hook, Ray Sawyer? I beat him at pool one night and, even though it was four in the morning back home, phoned me mates to tell ’em, “I’ve just stuffed the guy who sang ‘Sylvia’s Mother’!”

While it was hardly overnight success – our first hit in America was seven years after we formed – the momentum, once it started, was incredible. We put Pyromania out in the States in January ’83, flew over in May to open for Billy Squier and by Christmas were headlining in front of 55,000 people at the Jack Murphy Stadium in San Diego. We’d arrive in town, stick on the radio and every single station was playing ‘Photograph’ or ‘Rock Of Ages’ or ‘Foolin’ – or sometimes the lot of them! We had to use the laundry exit wherever we were staying ’cause thousands of kids were laying siege to the hotel lobby. We’d barely heard of herpes, yet alone AIDS, so we were particularly pleased to see the female ones!

It was a fantastic time for me, and for the band. David Lee Roth was the first out-and-out rock star I met, a real larger than life figure. We weren’t like that. While him, Mötley Crüe and W.A.S.P. did their drinking and drugging very publicly, we preferred to do ours behind closed doors. We weren’t choirboys – one of us drank himself to death, another drank himself out of the band – but we didn’t want our recreational habits overshadowing the music.

Along with our willingness and ability to play 245 shows in a row, the thing that broke Def Leppard in the States was MTV, which was beginning to have a real influence as the ’80s wore on. You had loads of kids watching this new programme and phoning up their local radio station in, say, Des Moines insisting that they play ‘Photograph’. Multiply that by 300 or 400 cities and you’re talking household name. Which we became very, very quickly.

By 1984 or 1985 it wasn’t metal outfits like Ratt or Warrant we were competing with but Prince, Madonna and Michael Jackson, who was the biggest star of them all in the ’80s. Pyromania was number two behind Thriller in the States for six months. We just couldn’t shift him off the top spot.

A big thing for me was, in April ’84, buying a flat in Dublin. I’d lived in London for five years and knew all of four people. Within a month of coming here, I had a circle of 10 ringing up to see if I wanted to go for a drink, catch a band or play five-a-side. I was at the SFX watching Simple Minds when Bono came over, wrote down his telephone number and said, “Anything you need, anything you want to know, call”. By 1989, I’d taken root and had to move here full-time.

Something else I’m grateful to Bono for is that he ensured that I wasn’t the only one during the ’80s who had a mullet – a hairstyle which, I hasten to add, has made an appearance on the catwalks this season. Those were not good hair days for a lot of people!

But they were good times, and there was a lot of great music going down. While it was great to be up there slugging it out with the best of ’em, I’m not nostalgic for it. You gotta move on. And so we have.

We’re never going to sell 15 million copies of an album again, but we recently visited South Africa, Guatemala, Panama and Ecuador for the first time and sold out stadiums there. We’ve a new album, X, that’s as good as any we’ve produced. And we’re ready to take it to the people. This is the best fucking job in the universe and I’m not going to quit!