The 1980s were a good time to be in Def Leppard. Having signed a major label record deal, supported AC/DC, and acquired an A-list manager in Peter Mensch in 1979, the young Sheffield band entered the decade in high spirits, and hit the ground running in 1980 with their top 20 UK chart success of their debut album, On Through The Night, and US shows with Judas Priest, AC/DC and Ted Nugent. And things would only get better.
The band's third album, 1983's Pyromania, sold six million copies in the US alone, and its follow-up, 1987's Hysteria, went on to sell a phenomenal 20 million copies worldwide, making it one of the biggest records of the decade in any genre.
But the tragic death in 1991 of guitarist Steve Clarke, aged 30, ushered in a much more troubled decade for the high-flying Sheffield group. The rise of alternative rock changed the musical landscape, and on personal level, the band members faced upheaval, turmoil and grief. By the mid'90s, frontman Joe Elliott and guitarist Phil Collen were going through painful divorces, bassist Rick Savage was dealing with Bell's Palsy, and drummer Rick Allen, who was lucky to be alive following the horrific 1984 car crash in which he lost his left arm, was fortunate to escape jail time after pleading guilty to spousal abuse. Having lived in "arrested development" for much of their career, as 'new' guitarist Vivian Campbell acknowledged in a Classic Rock interview, it was time for the group to grow up. They did so with Slang, a record that Joe Elliott looks back on as "without a shadow of a doubt" the band's riskiest and darkest album.
"We were at a strange time," Vivian Campbell reflected. "We didn't really know what we were going to do or what we could do. The only clear point that we had when we were starting to make Slang was that we could not make a record that sounded like Def Leppard. We knew that we would be totally crucified."
"We were never going to go in to making that record and write a song like Let's Get Rocked," he continued. "That was definitely not going to happen. It actually did put us in that frame of mind where we could be more reflective. We were going to make a darker record."
In the summer of 1994, the band retired to a villa in Marbella, Spain, to work on new songs. For the first time since their debut album, they were without the services of super-producer Robert 'Mutt' Lange, who had songwriting credits on every song on Pyromania, Hysteria and 1992's Adrenalize.
"We'd done three massively over-produced albums - in a good way, that's how we wanted them to be - and we, after 11 years of doing that, were bored," Joe Elliott admitted candidly. "We wanted to go somewhere else.
"I turned up with a cassette I'd made of 90 minutes of songs that we should listen to, to either embrace or avoid, but be aware of. I remember [Soundgarden's] Black Hole Sun being part of that, and Alice In Chains, and some of the Nirvana stuff. We didn't try to make a grunge album, we just tried to hone it back a bit."
if you played Work It Out to someone without telling them who it was they'd never guess, because I'm singing like Iggy Pop.
Joe Elliott
"We were listening to Nirvana and Pearl Jam just like everybody else," recalled Vivian Campbell, "and especially to Soundgarden – the Superunknown record. That was the record that we referenced in terms of the sonics and the mood of it... it gave us the chance to grow up a little."
"It was so exciting," Joe Elliott told Kerrang! in 1996. "We felt like a garage band again.
The influence of alternative rock on Slang is obvious from the moment grungy opening track Truth? kicks in. While the title track is pure Def Leppard, songs such as Pearl of Euphoria, the Eastern-tingedTurn To Dust and Work It Out sounded like nothing the band had done before.
"If you played Work It Out to someone without telling them who it was they'd never guess, because I'm singing like Iggy Pop," Elliott told Kerrang! "Some of the reports on Slang I saw said that it was a great record, but we should consider changing our name. In other words, there's a stigma around the name Def Leppard, even though the music is good. Even on Radio One in Britain, which has gone all 'alternative' now, our single sat nicely between Ash and Stone Temple Pilots."
Slang was released on May 13, 1996. It charted at number 5 in the UK, and number 14 in the US, where it has yet to be certified platinum (for one million sales). Reviews of the record were mixed. "Slang rarely rocks," reckoned Rolling Stone. "Def Leppard seem too consumed with sounding hip to let loose any real dynamic guitar squalor. The band has lost its drive and focus." Britain's Q magazine was kinder. "Slang is the sound of a band doing something fast and interesting, at the exact point in their lives when most bands are taking up golf and inhaling the contents of aquariums in country manors," wrote David Quantick. Kerrang!, meanwhile, awarded the album 4 out of 5, and advised "Listen without prejudice."
"We jokingly called the album Commercial Suicide while we were making it," Joe Elliott admitted to Vulture, in2022, "because we knew what we were doing was probably not going to be as accepted as easily as our previous work... We had the great party song with Slang, but the rest of the album is pretty dark and very different."
"We learned along the way that if you’re a solo artist, like David Bowie or Billy Idol or Seal - well, specifically Bowie - you can be Ziggy Stardust one minute and then Soul Boy the next. You really can’t do that if you’re a band."
Looking back on Slang, however, Elliott professed to have zero regrets.
"It’s exactly what we wanted," he reflected. "We needed to go back to ground zero so we could build ourselves back up again."
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