Def Leppard got lucky - not once, but twice - during the making of one of their greatest hits.
The song is Rock Of Ages, from the band’s multi-million selling 1983 album Pyromania.
While working on the track with producer Mutt Lange at Battery Studios in London, they knew they had something special.
Lange co-wrote the songs with the band, and always put a heavy emphasis on the lead vocal.
As Leppard singer Joe Elliott said of Lange: “Being the brilliant songwriter and arranger that he is, Mutt knew where you should leave space for the vocal.
“He’d tell us, ‘We don’t need frills - these songs will sound a lot more powerful if you leave spaces in them.’”
Elliott explained how Lange directed guitarists Steve Clark and Phil Collen in Rock Of Ages.
“Mutt said, ‘Don’t be just chugging through it. Drop out here and there, so that when the guitars do come in, they’re like explosions.’”
The element of luck to this song came with two happy accidents, the first of which was something close to divine intervention.
“Most times, if you can get a chorus down first, the rest of it's easy,” Elliott said. “With this one, we had the basic track, but I didn’t have any lyrics written - just ‘da da da, doo doo doo’ melodies.
“Then we had a request from the studio guys: ‘Is it okay if this local church choir comes in to record for a day?’”
The band agreed. The choir had their time in the studio. And when the band returned to to work the following day, karma paid off.
“I was sitting on a couch near the mixing desk,” Elliott said, “and there was a hymn book that one of the choir had left behind.
“I don’t remember whether it was open on this exact page, or if I flicked through the book and found it - but I saw the name of this hymn: Rock Of Ages.
“It was a complete fluke. I called out to Mutt and said, ‘How about this?’ I started singing, ‘Rock of ages! Rock of ages!’ - and the look on his face was euphoric.
“So yeah - thank God we let that church choir in!”
The other stroke of luck came with the song’s intro, four Germanic-sounding nonsensical words, delivered in a silly voice by Mutt Lange: “Gunter gleiben glauchen globen!”
As Elliott recalled: “When you’re stuck inside a studio day after day, you get cabin fever. And when that creeps in, funny stuff happens - like that intro.
“It wasn’t manufactured. It started out as a cue for when the guitars come in, because we didn’t have a vocal line.
“Mutt would count in with whatever words came into his head, and there were various versions that ended up on tape.
“One of them was about poppadoms, because Mutt loved Indian food.
“So we thought it would be funny to have one of these things as the count in for the song - and “Gunter gleiben glauchen globen” won the toss!
“I loved the humour in it. We knew people would hear it and go, ‘What the hell is that?’”
Joe Elliott compared it to the Led Zeppelin song The Crunge, a funk-inspired number that ends with singer Robert Plant parodying James Brown with the question: “Where’s that confounded bridge?’”
As Elliott put it: “A lot of rock bands would never do something like that because it wasn’t serious, but so what? It’s a bit of fun.”
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