Joe Elliot Doesn’t Know What The Opening Lyrics To ‘Pour Some Sugar On M...

Joe Elliot says he “doesn’t even know” what the opening lyrics to Def Leppard’s monster hit Pour Some Sugar on Me means.

And you know what? Same.

Elliot made the admission during a recent sit-down with the Ultimate Classic Rock Nights radio show.

He also said that the song started out with random noises while mucking around in the studio with producer Mutt Lange.

“I remember we got little microcassette players, and Mutt went to one side of the studio and I went to the other, and we just sang noises into it,” Elliot said.

“We swapped machines and translated each other’s noises. I thought the first thing he sang was, ‘Love is like a bomb,’ and I wrote it down. That was it, that was the start.”

Thing is, he never asked Lange if that’s what it meant – or even if that’s what he said.

“It was like we were Marc Bolan,” Elliott said, referencing the T. Rex singer, who wrote Bang a Gong (Get It On).

 “That whole lyric took us right back to being the ‘hubcap diamond star halo’ lyrics that Marc Bolan did.”

“‘Love is like a bomb, baby / C’mon get it on / Livin’ like a lover with a radar phone.’ Nobody knows what that means. I don’t even know what it means! But it’s not important. It wasn’t Bob Dylan, this wasn’t ‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’

“It was ‘Get it On,’ and that’s where we were going with it. It was all about the phonetics of the vocal rather than the meaning of the lyric.

“Much more important.”

(Funnily enough, I always thought Def were before their time, that the lyric said ‘red iphone’ instead of ‘radar phone’, but hey.)