“Pour Some Sugar On Me” by Def Leppard

"Pour Some Sugar on Me" was the happy accident of Def Leppard's 1987 album Hysteria, a song that barely made it onto the record. Late in the sessions, on a tea break from vocal takes, Joe Elliott was noodling on an acoustic guitar with a riff he'd been sitting on, and Robert John "Mutt" Lange liked it so much he told him to build a song around it, with that riff becoming the chorus. The two of them bashed out a rough tape with drum machine, bass, guitar and guide vocals, and knew right away they had something.

Lange's polish does the rest: Rick Allen's stomp, Steve Clark and Phil Collen's guitars stacked sky high, the Bankrupt Brothers bellowing behind Elliott. It became the band's signature song, and VH1 ranked it second among the greatest songs of the '80s in 2006.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.