"Pour Some Sugar on Me" is a song by the English rock bandDef Leppard from their 1987 album Hysteria. It reached number 2 on the US Billboard Hot 100 on 23 July 1988, behind "Hold On to the Nights" by Richard Marx. "Pour Some Sugar on Me" is considered the band's signature song, and was ranked #2 on VH1's "100 Greatest Songs of the 80s" in 2006.
Production
Near the end of recording the albumHysteria, during a production break, lead singer Joe Elliott was jamming with a riff he had come up with two weeks earlier on an acoustic guitar. Producer Mutt Lange, expressing great liking of it, suggested that it be developed into another song. Although already behind schedule, Lange felt that the album was still missing a strong crossover hit and that this last song had the potential to be one. Within two weeks the song was completed, smoothed out, and included as the twelfth track on Hysteria. Elliott claims the song was at least partially inspired by the Aerosmith and Run-DMC version of "Walk This Way". “All of a sudden, rock and rap did mix, so we wrote our own." The song's lyrics were written after Elliott and Lange went to opposite ends of the studio control room and delivered stream-of-consciousness words into a pair of dictaphones while the song's backing track played. They then swapped dictaphones and tried to determine what each other's words were. In the Hysteria episode of the Classic Albumsdocumentary series, Elliott said he thought he heard the phrase "love is like a bomb" on Lange's tape "and that set the whole tone for the lyric." By the spring of 1988, Hysteria had sold 3 million copies, not enough to cover the album's $5 million production costs. Thus, the band edited footage from an upcoming concert film to make a new promo clip for "Pour Some Sugar on Me" and finally released it as the fourth single in North America.
Reception
The somewhat delayed success of "Pour Some Sugar on Me" helped send Hysteria to number 1 on the Top Pop Albums chart a year after release, selling four million copies during the single's run. The song reached number 2 on the US Billboard Hot 100, number 18 in the UK Singles Chart and number 26 on the ARIA charts. MTV ranked "Pour Some Sugar on Me" number 1 in its "Top 300 Videos of All Time" countdown in May 1991. In 2006, VH1 ranked the song number 2 on its list of the "100 Greatest Songs of the '80s." In 2012 due to royalty conflicts with their record company regarding profits from online sales, the band re-recorded the song, along with "Rock of Ages", under the title "Pour Some Sugar on Me 2012" and released both digitally in June 2012.
Music video
Two different music videos for the song were produced. The first version shows the band playing inside a derelict Irish stately home while it is being demolished by a wrecking ball and a burly, sledgehammer-wielding, female construction worker. Filmed before the song became a hit in the United States, a second video simply of the band playing the song live was released for American MTV. The American video was edited from the band's full-length 1989 video release, , recorded at McNichols Sports Arena in Denver, CO, in February 1988. The music video for the song had an extended, distortion-laden intro in lieu of the album version's "Step inside, walk this way" intro. Most compilations use the extended music video-style intro.
Intros
There are two intros to the song. The studio version which has "Step inside, walk this way, you and me babe, hey hey!" and then cuts right to the guitar; and the single version which has "love is like a bomb" which has a slightly longer progression to it.
