Pour Some Sugar on Me: The Unlikely Anthem That Saved Def Leppard
There are songs that define an album. There are songs that define a band. And then, every so often, there is a song that defines an entire decade of music. Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me” is all three at once. Released as a single in the autumn of 1987 in the UK and the spring of 1988 in the US, it became the unlikely rescue flare for one of rock history’s most tortured recording projects — and then went on to embed itself so deeply in popular culture that, nearly four decades later, it still makes strangers in bars raise a fist and mouth the chorus. This is the story of how a song almost left off a near-bankrupt album wound up saving a band, defining an era, and becoming permanently attached to the phrase “pour some sugar on me.”
