As 1983 rolled on, the lads in Def Leppard were ready to release their third album Pyromania on an unsuspecting world. It arrived on 20 January.
Their first two albums had done well and saw the band gaining appeal in the hard rock and metal world, especially after touring with both Blackfoot and Rainbow in 1981.
The band didn’t particularly want to limit themselves to being “metal” though. In fact they had started detesting that particular label. They were looking to widen their appeal.
Photograph was selected as the first single from the new album and released on 3 February. It seemed to have what was needed to take the band to the next level. The production was slick yet groovy, it had catchy ‘gang’ backing vocals, a huge-sounding chorus, and passionate, lovesick lyrics. This was exactly what the 1980s ordered.
The song would be the band’s first hit, and was the beginning of the band setting themselves apart from contemporaries like Iron Maiden and Judas Priest by appealing to a wide swath of female fans. It helped that everyone in the band were extremely photogenic and very young. They were all in their early 20s when the song was released, except for drummer Rick Allen who was 19.
The Pyromania album was produced by Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange, who had also produced their previous album High ‘n’ Dry. He was so integral to the band’s sound and creative process that he ended up getting a songwriter credit on every Pyromania track. Along with Lange, the songwriter credits on Photograph go to guitarists Steve Clark and Pete Willis, bass player Rick Savage, and lead singer Joe Elliott.
Another person who worked with Lange and the band on the song/album was Thomas Dolby, pretty much immediately after recording his hit She Blinded Me With Science. The band ended up giving Dolby an unusual credit.
Said Dolby: “By that time my name was known as a solo artist and I felt it might be a bit confusing to people to see my name on a rock record like that. And so it was actually Mutt that picked up a new moniker for me, which was Booker T. Boffin.” Look for it in the album credits!
The song would be one of Pete Willis’ last contributions to the group. He was a founding member and had been important in getting the band off the ground, but after finishing his work on the backing tracks for the album he was asked to leave.
Willis had been drinking way too much for a while, and in particular during the recent album-making process. An incident where he was barely able to play on a recording session for Stagefright was the final straw. There had already been several ‘last chances,’ and it was becoming clear that this just did not work for a band that was otherwise very focused and serious about making it.
These days, Willis is relatively OK with being asked to step down. “Things were going too fast for me.” he readily admits. “I was still enjoying it, but I was using drink as a crutch. It wasn’t nice to go out in that way, but it was something that needed to happen for them and the best thing to happen health-wise for me. If I’d stayed, there was a good chance that I’d have ended up going the same way as Steve Clark [who died of alcohol-related complications in January 1991].”
Willis was replaced by Phil Collen, and they are both credited as guitarists on the album along with the still ever-present Clark. With the backing tracks already done, Collen focused on adding guitar solos here and there, including the one on Photograph.
Whenever Collen is called up to play solos, he usually plays them quickly to get a spontaneous feel. This time, however, Lange made him take his sweet time until he felt it was exactly right. It might have taken longer than normal, but it still clicked relatively easy.
Collen later said: “With that one, I actually worked out the melodic thing and right at the end Mutt Lange said, ‘Just vibe out on the end. Play solos and licks and go around the vocal.’ Because it was such a melodic, amazing, beautiful melody it was so easy to weave in and out of Joe’s vocals at the end. Then the chorus is so melodic that it was so easy just to play all those licks. It kind of played itself.”
The big ‘whoa’ that is sung as a gang vocal several times in this song was inspired by the 1973 Mott the Hoople song The Golden Age of Rock ‘n’ Roll where there is also a bit of that going on. Joe Elliott in particular is a huge fan of Mott, and formed the band Down ‘n’ Outz in 2009, which mostly plays Mott covers.
It has often been said that Photograph is about Marilyn Monroe. This is an understandable assumption. The music video features a Monroe look-a-like, and the band would later on even introduce the song live as being about her. That is however an after-the-fact fabrication, as the song wasn’t written with the famous actress-model in mind.
Lange was the guy who provided the initial inspiration, when he one day uttered the line “All I’ve got is a photograph.” Joe Elliot picked up on this and the idea was born to write a song about a guy who’s crazy about a girl, but – just like the quote – all he has is a photograph of her. There was no specific inspiration for the lyrics, beyond wanting to express their young lust in an anthemic song. Yet again.
In fact, the band had no idea that director David Mallet even planned to use a Monroe look-alike in the music video – or any other detail about that shoot, for that matter – until they showed up.
The shooting of the epic video is chronicled in the book “MTV Ruled the World – The Early Years of Music Video” where Joe Elliot said: “We’d turned up at this soundstage someplace in Battersea, in London, and there was David Mallet. Now, I didn’t know who he was really, but I knew he had worked with Queen. That was good enough for me. We walked into this pre-built stage. We had nothing to do with it. We can take absolutely no credit for it. But Mallet had put this thing together – mesh flooring with lights coming up through it and these cages with all these girls in it with torn stockings and ripped tops and stuff. Hilarious now, but back in the time, it was like ‘Wow, this is cool!'”
It has been claimed that Joe Elliott performed the first flying spread-eagle jump on MTV when he does the leap about 1:40 into the video. I am sure I am not alone in associating David Lee Roth with those kind of jumps, and he would later do the same slow-motion move in the Van Halen video for Jump, released at the very end of the year. Sure, Roth did those jumps years before that, but were they shown on MTV? I can’t say. Still, well done of Joe Elliot, who didn’t exactly have those kind of jumps as his trademark!
A shot near the end of the video shows a sharp heel going through a Polaroid of Joe Elliot, to which the lead singer adds: “I remember where there’s this one bit where the ‘Marilyn character’ stabs her heel through a Polaroid of me screaming. The first thing I had to do when I walked in at 8:00 in the morning – before I even had a chance to have a cup of coffee – David comes in, and he calls everybody ‘dear boy’ or ‘darling.’ ‘Dear boy, I need you to scream into my Polaroid.’ So I did this kind of scream thing, and he goes ‘OK, done.’ You got pulled along. You got directed, because we didn’t know what we were doing. He just said, ‘Be yourselves. Leave it all to me.'”
Pyromania went on to sell over 10 million copies in the US, much helped by its several hit singles. Photograph did best of them all, reaching #12 on the US Billboard Hot 100, as well as #1 on the Billboard Top Tracks chart where it stayed for six weeks. The video was put in hot rotation on MTV as well, creating a feedback loop between the network and local radio stations.
Joe Elliott said, “The song went through the roof because of MTV. We got fantastic bounce-back from people watching it on MTV and then asking the radio stations to play it. The two started bouncing back from each other request-wise, and the song just went crazy.”
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