Don’t let their staid portrait fool you — Def Leppard is fully poised to rock the living hell out of us all

I was one of the millions of young men for whom Def Leppard’s Hysteria was the greatest thing in the world. We were legion. The album, with roughly a thousand hit singles on it, was a like a soundtrack for an age. God, how I loved Rocket. The record — or tape, as it were — was so good, you didn’t even care about having to explain to your parents that the band had nothing to do with hearing impairment or large cats. Hysteria is now enshrined on my MP3 player, and is one of the few non-REM albums that I listen to from start to finish on a semi-regular basis. I’m still Armageddoning It. Magnifique.

That said, I don’t have many memories of Adrenalize, other than a sense of disappointment, that it was an early encounter with the concept of an underwhelming follow-up — despite the (limited) chart success of “Let’s Get Rocked.” Maybe the band knew they had a bit of a dud on their hands. Maybe that’s why they look so very glum here, with faces that could out-Gothic the American Gothic couple. The days of running riot were over, apparently.

Whether this album ad trumps the de-rouged lips of Mick Jagger? That’s up to the beholder. Doubtful, though.