Armageddon It

"Armageddon It" by Def Leppard

Sheffield Steel at Full Volume

Picture the winter of 1988 going into 1989: MTV is broadcasting almost continuously from a dimension that seems to exist somewhere between a stadium and a dream sequence, hair is bigger than it has been in any previous century, and the band from Sheffield that lost their drummer's arm and kept going has become the biggest rock act on the planet. Def Leppard in 1988 were operating at a level that almost no British band had reached in America, and Armageddon It was the record that kept that momentum going through the holiday season and into the new year.

The band's journey to that position was genuinely extraordinary. Their drummer Rick Allen had lost his left arm in a car accident on New Year's Eve 1984, an event that might reasonably have ended the group's career. Instead they rebuilt their drum setup with a customized kit that Allen could operate with a single arm and extensive use of his feet, and they returned with Hysteria, an album that had required three years of work and whose commercial performance, once it arrived in 1987, vindicated every moment of that patience. Hysteria ultimately generated seven singles in the United States, a figure that remains remarkable by any standard.

The Production Machine

Armageddon It was the fifth single released from Hysteria in the American market, and the fact that it charted as high as it did, this far into an already-exhaustive singles campaign, speaks to both the album's depth and the appetite of the radio audience for the sound producer Robert John "Mutt" Lange had created with the band. Lange's work on Hysteria was among the most ambitious and painstaking production projects of the decade: every element was layered, filtered, and polished to an almost implausible degree of clarity and sheen. The guitars gleamed. The drums, processed and stacked, hit with a precision that live drums rarely achieve.

The song itself was built around a riff that had the requisite crunch for rock radio while incorporating the melodic hooks that made Def Leppard crossover-capable. The call-and-response between the verses and the chorus, the stop-start drama of the arrangement, and the band's signature vocal harmonies (piled high and wide enough to fill any arena) made it immediately recognizable as product of the Hysteria production approach.

The Chart Climb

The single debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on November 19, 1988, at number 65, entering at a position that reflected the sustained but not hysterical level of initial airplay. The climb from there was steady: 46, 37, 28, 21 through the first five weeks. The record crossed into the top twenty before the year ended and continued its rise into January. It peaked at number 3 on January 21, 1989, spending a total of 18 weeks on the chart. Missing the top two was essentially cosmetic; at number 3, the song was a full commercial success and extended Def Leppard's singles run from Hysteria into territory that exhausted nearly every other act's promotional cycles.

The Playful Title and the Rock Posture

The title was characteristic of the band's approach to their own mythology: grand in its reference, self-aware in its double meaning, and pitched exactly at the intersection of earnestness and absurdity that made hard rock radio so hospitable to Def Leppard. The pun embedded in "Armageddon It" (I'm getting it) was the kind of wordplay that critics rolled their eyes at and audiences loved, which was a dynamic the band had long since made peace with.

Def Leppard were never pretending to be something other than what they were: a hook-driven hard rock band with ambitions scaled to the largest possible venues. The 1988-89 chart run confirmed those ambitions as entirely achievable.

Put It On

The opening riff will reach you before you've had time to decide whether you're in the mood for it. That immediacy is the whole point.

"Armageddon It" — Def Leppard's singular moment on the 1980s charts.