“When I watched Marc Bolan on Top Of The Pops, I just wanted to be up on that same stage, covered in glitter and wearing women’s shoes,” Elliott recalls. “I dreamed of being the singer in the biggest rock ’n’ roll band in the world. Pyromania made it happen.”
On a freezing night in the winter of 1978, 19-year-old Joe Elliott was walking home through Sheffield city centre after a night in the pub. He and three other members of Def Leppard – guitarists Steve Clark and Pete Willis and bassist Rick ‘Sav’ Savage – were so broke that their last drink was a single pint of bitter with four straws in it. As he came to the City Hall, Sheffield’s leading music venue, Joe pulled a piece of chalk from his pocket and wrote on the wall beside the City Hall’s front doors: ‘DEF LEPPARD WILL PLAY HERE IN 1980!’
