Take a bottle (take a bottle), shake it up (shake it up)īreak the bubble (break it up), break it up 'Cause I'm hot (hot), say what, sticky sweet You gotta squeeze a little, squeeze a little Sweet dream, saccharine, loosen up (loosen up) Listen, red light, yellow light, green-a-light go Little miss innocent sugar me, yeah, yeah Razzle 'n' a dazzle 'n' a flash a little light But as soon as you play it in front of an audience who are into it, it makes all the difference.Love is like a bomb, baby, c'mon get it onĭemolition woman, can I be your man? (your man) Pour Some Sugar On Me is like anything if you’re rehearsing it in the rehearsal room, it’s really fucking boring. “For some bizarre reason, in America women seem to feel compelled to take their shirts off when we play it. “I still get a buzz from it,” Collen adds. It’s really funny how it suddenly became cool because it was a stripping song. Hysteria was all over bar the shouting, and then all of a sudden this song just got popular, and then the album went to Number One. “The song became a hit because strippers in Florida started requesting it on the local radio station,” Collen recalls. The result was nothing short of a phenomenon, with the popularity of Pour Some Sugar… on MTV pushing the single to No.2 in the US and helping Hysteria to the top of the album chart. It wasn’t until the following year, with sales of Hysteria stalling at three million, that the US record company finally released Pour Some Sugar On Me as a last ditch attempt to claw back some of the album’s huge production costs. In the US, meanwhile, Women had been chosen as the lead-off (it ultimately limped to No.80), followed by Animal and Hysteria. “When we first released it in Europe it was ignored,” Collen confirms. The song wasn’t deemed good enough to be released as the first single from Hysteria instead it followed Animal into the UK chart in October 1987, reaching an unspectacular No.18. While it’s tempting to assume that Pour Some Sugar On Me was an instant smash hit, hard evidence shows otherwise. Steve Clark: Def Leppard's lost guitar icon.The 13 Raunchiest, Weirdest and Wrongest Videos Set in Strip Clubs.Def Leppard's Hysteria: Every Song Ranked From Worst To Best.In stark contrast to the other tracks on Hysteria, the basic recording process for Sugar took less than two weeks. According to Elliott, the phrase was a “metaphor for whichever sexual preference you care to enjoy”. With Lange keeping impatient label executives away from the studio, Elliott, Collen, Allen, bassist Rick Savage and guitarist Steve Clark laid down the new track, which now had the working title. So there was plenty of space, like hip-hop or something like that.” And the guitar part was really just to fill the gaps without going all the way through it. Run DMC was really popular back then, and the whole Aerosmith crossover thing was just happening too, so we kinda stole that idea for the vocal. It was really based on rap stuff not your standard rock song. “I can’t actually do that, so Mutt had said: ‘Just make it very gappy.’ So I put this main riff in the gaps. “Mutt Lange saw the intro as this kinda country guitar lick, played with his fingers,” Collen recalls. So although everyone went: ‘Oh, fucking hell, not more studio time,’ it was obvious that we had to do it.”Īs work on the new song began, Elliott’s hook started to evolve. Once Mutt got involved it went pretty quick. “The main problem with Hysteria was us dicking around with people like Jim Steinman.