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Despite appearences to the contrary - the tragic car accident that robbed drummer Rick Allen of his left arm; the extraordinary amount of time it took to complete their fourth album; the ongoing, behind-the-scenes drink and drugs problems of newly blond guitarist Steve Clark - there had never been a better time to be Def Leppard than in 1987. That fact is confirmed by the release in August that year - four-and-a-half years after 'Pyromania', it's squillion-selling predecessor - of said fourth album, the remarkable 'Hysteria'.

It was a landmark release that would, over time, become recognised as the very apotheosis of the era it so thoroughly evoked ('hair metal' writ so expansively large as to encompass all that was moving and exciting about rock and pop, and what happened when you melded the two together in that special way only producer Mutt Lange knew how to). The 12 intricately contrived tracks on 'Hysteria' also (though we didn't know it then) pre-figured the decade that would swiftly engulf it, introducing the concept of high-tech, computer-generated drums, hyper-real guitars and one-setting, all-the-way-to-11 vocals a full decade before the Prodigy 'invented' electronica.

'Hysteria' was, in fact, Leppard's first - and, as it would turn out, last - real masterpiece. It was one of the greatest rock albums of the 1980s, in the top three next to 'Appetite For Destruction' and whatever else you'd be brave enough to say out loud. It's even arguable that 'Hysteria' is one of the greatest rock albums of any decade; certainly in the top 100 for songwriting quality, and up there in the top 10 for sheer sonic invention. Quite simply, there has never been an album like it before. Sadly - not least for the band, who would spend the next 10 years making albums that either bent over backwards trying to steer clear of it's lush,

seamlessly-woven sound (the worthy but hopelessly contrived 'Slang' in 1995) or going all out to ape it (the second-rate 'Adrenalize' in '92 and the unashamedly copycat 'Euphoria' in '99) - there would never be an album like it again.

Breathtaking in it's full-spectrum sound, the way Mutt recorded a band has as much to do with them all playing in the same room at the same time as the moon-landing had to do with rubbing two boy scouts' knees together to start a fire. But rather than counting against it - as certain Luddie 'purists' subsequently claimed, preferring the more trad guitar-crunch of 'Pyromania' - the new infinitely layered sound of 'Hysteria' proved to be an innovation; a sparklingly original signature, as recognisably Leppard as the down-tuned, funereal guitars of Sabbath or the anguished, rage-filled howl of Axl Rose.

As a result. 'Hysteria' was also rather gratifyingly, Leppard's most successful album ever, selling more than 10 million copies worldwide in the first year of it's release, and more than half that amount again in the years since - thus proving along the way that good taste is not always the preserve of the all-too precious few.

What's more, this time the success was not confined just to America. Here in the UK, off the back of the preview single 'Animal', which became Leppard's first Top 10 hit, 'Hysteria' had gone straight in at No.1 in the British chart - another first for them; or as Joe laughingly put it at the time: "A bloody relief, actually!" Only Michael Jackson's 'Thriller'

had kept 'Pyromania' from No.1 in America in 1983. But, as Joe cheerfully confided, "everywhere else it died a death - including Britain. So when 'Hysteria' went in at number one it was just the best feeling ever. And doing 'Animal' on Top Of The Pops... I mean, those are the things you dream of as a kid!"

As sure as every cloud has it's silver lining, you can be equally sure, of course, that every silver lining has it's share of unsightly skid marks running down it. And, as already intimated, while the commercial and critical success of 'Hysteria' brought it's own undoubted rewards, the lifespan pf the album - from it's conception back in the summer of 1984, to the strangely subdued aftermath of the lengthy, record-breaking world tour that followed it's release - coincided with one of the bleakest periods in the personal lives of the band.

From Rick Allen's calamitous car smash on New Year's Eve, 1984 (his brand new Corvette Stingray spun off the road and hit a brick wall when he tried to take a sharp bend too quickly) to the death of Steve Clark, at 30, in January 1991 (an 'accidental' overdose that sounded to me like just another night of Clarky's usual boozing and pill-popping) 'Hysteria' was the album that would both make and break Def Leppard.

Not that any of us knew that then, of course. Rick's remarkable comeback and the album's immediate vaulting success on both sides of the Atlantic meant that the 'Hysteria' tour, which kicked off with a string of UK dates, was propelled from within by optimism.

I was a regualr guest throughout the band's 1987-88 'Hysteria' world tour, from the two warm-up shows they did in a half-empty dance hall in Holland in June 1987, to the brace of sold-out shows at the 15,000 capacity Memorial Hall Arena in Portland, Oregon, in October 1988, which brought the curtain down on the whole shebang nearly 16 months later. As on any lengthy tour, inevitablly there are tensions that build up between everybody working on it, including the band themselves. By the time the band had circumnavigated the globe once already and were now back in America ready to start again in the summer of '88, the masks had fallen away completely and I started to see past the all-lads-together facade they had traded on since the very start (another aspect of the band's appeal that it would grow increasingly difficult to maintain as the years rolled by and the lads turned into dads).

I noticed there was always a strange undercurrent running whenever they were all in a room at the same time; something behind the patient smiles they reserved for visitors to their backstage domain that hinted at darker, more complicated attitudes to the jobs they did and the lives they were forced to live as a result.

I remember them one night being presented with a special award for being the first artists since The Beatles to have two consecutive albums ('Pyromania' and 'Hysteria') sell more than seven million copies each in the US - a record that still stands. I watched as they smiled for some pictures of them shaking hands with various record company bigwigs backstage, taking it all cheerfully in their stride - like, nice, but no biggie.

"Buy a new pair of shoes," was all Rick Savage could come up with when I asked what he planned to do with all the money all those album sales would bring. But then what else was there? Already rich beyond their dreams with the proceeds from 'Pyromania', as Steve Clark shrugged and told me: "The first time someone tells you you've sold a million records you literally jump for joy. When they start telling you that every other month, though, it's like... it just becomes hard to get your head round it, you know?" he frowned. "You don't know what any of it means anymore."

Judging by the large number of vodka-and-cranberry juices Steve went through every night, I could believe that. Indeed, Steve seemed hell-bent on spending as little of his off-stage time as possible in the boring Land of the Straight. Apart from when he was on stage, Steve didn't seem to actually like touring. Or rather, he liked the idea of it, and had done since he was a kid reading about his hero Jimmy Page. He was just "temperamentally unsuited to it", he tried to tell me with a straight face one night, before cracking up. "Mmm, me too," I said grabbing the vodka bottle and filling our glasses.

The rest of the band had become no less isolated from each other by the end of the tour. For their eight-week swing around the 'sheds' - large outdoor stadiums popular in the summer months in America - both Rick Allen and Joe Elliott had their respective partners travelling with them, and away from the stage were rarely seen. Still burning with the fever of the recently converted, Phil Collen had become a teetotal, vegetarian gym rat, as different from his guitar partner as it was possible to be. Bassist Rick Savage, meanwhile, kept his own counsel. What he did off stage was nobody's business - and 'Sav' meant to keep it that way.

But then, a year in the enforced company of Jesus Christ and Jimi Hendrix would drive you crazy in the end. As Joe said: "We're not the 21-year-old ravers we were when we first came to America. We're all in our late 20s now and we've done all the rough stuff that bands do on the road. Making sure we've got other people to see now and again instead of the same old sweaty roadies - it's a welcome diversion. It keeps your mind fresh for the show each night, especially when you've been out there doing it night after night for a year."

An unrepentant rock 'n' roll romantic, Steve, inevitably, had a different take on things: "I just think it's a shame we're all locked away in our own rooms, not being together the way we used to be on the road," he sniffed, "all having a drink and a laugh together."

He sat there looking at me glumly, both of us still drinking but neither of us doing much laughing.

Just like most people who saw them back then - because let's be fair, it was that obvious - the first time I saw Def Leppard play I knew instantly that I was watching a band inexorably bound for stardom. It was at the Hammersmith Odeon in London, at the fag end of 1979, and they were opening for Sammy Hagar - no shrinking violet himself when it came to live performance. But for me it was the openers who were the sensation of the night.

outskirts of Amsterdam. Even then, as they readied themselves for what would be their first proper tour since bringing the LA Forum to a thunderous close in December 1983 (when Brian May joined them for a riotous encore of 'Rock And Roll'), their perfectionist producer was still beavering away in the studio control room, searching for the perfect mix.

The two club shows at the Nooderligt were unusual, to say the least. 'Pyromania' may have sold more than six million copies in America by that point, but it had sold less than 600 in Holland. When the band hit the stage at a little after 10pm, Joe screaming "Welcome to the showwww!!" as the band launched into 'Stagefright', there were less than200 people there to see it. "But that didn't worry us," Joe said afterwards. "I can remember playing gigs to about 11 people in the early days."

Face concentrated, hunkered down over his new specially designed electronic drum kit, was the man of the moment, Rick Allen, blowing the kind of rhythmic storm most drummers with two arms would be proud of. When Joe called him out from behind the drums halfway through the set and put his arm around him and said: "I'd like to introduce you to my mate Rick," it got the loudest cheer of the night - as it would throughout the whole of the 'Hysteria' tour. It was a symbol of the personal resilience and courage of their drummer and, more obliquely, of the band's own steadfastness in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

Chatting to Joe on the terrace of his hotel room the next day, he told me how, after Rick's accident, the rest of the band re-evaluated what they were doing and "owned up to each other". In a harbinger of the struggles they would face in the 90s, when Mutt had originally been unable to take the 'Hysteria' album on, the band had "wasted three months" with leather-clad Metal Loaf songsmith Jim Steinman in the production hot-seat. When Steinman was sent packing, the band turned to Nigel Green, Mutt's regular right-hand man engineer, who suggested relocating to Wisseloord - which is where they were working at the time of Rick's accident.

"Inevitably, it made us really think about the future of the band," explained Joe. "It made us question everything." The Green sessions had produced some fine material, he said, "certainly as good as anything on 'Pyromania'. It's just that it wasn't any better. ANd we realised it was very important for the survival of this band that whatever we released next had to be better than anything we'd ever done before."

And so plans for the new album were rejigged yet again. And by the time Rick was ready to return to the studio in May 1985, so too, like the calvary arriving in the last reel of the movie, was Mutt. Fresh from a year's sabbatical - "I think it was the first time he'd stuck his nose outside the studio for about 15 years!" quipped Phil Collen - Mutt was in the perfect frame of mind to really take the project by the scruff of the neck and, as Joe said, "turn it in to something special. We knew we had something good, we needed Mutt to help make it something great." So much so that the name Lange would eventually appear on the songwriting credits of every single track on the album.

With the album finally finished, it seemed that the only things that could hold Def Leppard back were the sorts of intangibles we all rely on - what you might call the weather and the price of milk: the things nobody can control. In other words, they just needed a little luck. Their record company's main concern at the outset was that while the band had been away new stars had come along to replace them - Poison, Motley Crue, and, not least, a little combo out of New Jerseysigned to the same label as Leppard, that had made a considerable splash the year before with the mega-million selling album 'Slippery When Wet'.

"I'd never even heard of Bon Jovi the last time we released an album," Joe said. "The first Bon Jovi record I ever heard was 'You Give Love A Bad Name'. We were in Britain in [the summer of '86], and I turned on the radio and there it was. I thought fucking hell! Rock music on Radio One shock! And lo and behold, they've become like the band we should have become back home.

"It's a fair comparison. Bon Jovi are like we were on 'Pyromania'. They're 24, it's their third album, new producer and so forth... I say good luck to them. I love it that I can hear a Bon Jovi record on the radio. Obviously it made me want to get out there and do things too, but I still bought their album."

Back then, with the solid-gold weight of 'Hysteria' about to be unveiled, the idea of Leppard having to catch up with anybody was still ridiculous enough to be considered a joke. By the time they came to make their next album, though, the antiseptic 'Adrenalize', the joke was now on them, as the onset of grunge and the absence of Mutt as producer contrived to put the band into a critical zone they'd never even heard of before: the one marked Old And Dated.

As he had done previously with AC/DC, where he bowed out after helping them make three of their greatest albums ('Highway To Hell', 'Back In Black' and 'For Those About To Rock'), Mutt had already decided that' Hysteria' would be his last album with Def Leppard, the crowning achivement of a triptych he had begun with them on their second album, 'High 'N' Dry', in 1981, before reaching its first dizzy peak with the stunning 'Pyromania' in '83. With three albums that turned a bunch of scruffy, know-it-all teenagers from Sheffield into the biggest, most musically forward-thinking rock band of their time, Mutt felt he had taken it as far as he could. And he was almost certainly right, for where do you go after an album as effortlessly multi-faceted as 'Hysteria'? That's a question the band have been asking themselves ever since.

As Joe later admitted: "You can't recreate something like that. You can try, but it's like trying to fly the Tardis without Doctor Who - you don't know which button to push."

But that was all for the future. The last thing I remember asking Joe that day in Tilberg, back in the summer of 1987, was how he would like the band to be looked back on in the years to come - say some distant spot like the start of the 21st century?

"I'd like us to be remembered as a legendary band," he smiled. "That's not how I perceive the band right now. To me, a genuinely legendary band would be Led Zeppelin, and I couldn't possibly think of Leppard in the same way. But I'd take it as the highest compliment we ever had if in years to come that's the way the new generation of rock bands looked back on us. But the only way we'll do that is if we never give in and release a dog of an album. And then if we do split up, stay that way."

Well, the dog ('Slang') did eventually run out of the gate. But thankfully we've yet to see the second part of Joe's proposition put to the test. And judging by the strength of the new 'X' album - their first since 'Hysteria' to successfully stand out from beneath it's shadow - it promises to stay that way for some time to come.