“The hospital staff put this big piece of foam rubber at the foot of the bed to stop me from sliding down,” he told Modern Drummer in 1988. It’s up to him to tell us that he can’t play.” Allen instead returned to the band six weeks after the accident and began designing his drum kit, which used electronics to allow him to play his left hand’s parts with his left foot – and which he had devised the initial plan for while still in the hospital.
“I mean, he’s like a brother, he’s … he’s part of the family. “There’s no way he’s gonna get fired,” Elliott recalled in the Def Leppard episode of Behind the Music. Rick Allen’s hospital bed helped him dream up his new custom drum kit. Two weeks after Green and Def Leppard began recording together, Allen’s horrific 1984 car accident in rural England, which resulted in him losing his left arm, put the band on hiatus.Ģ. The band turned to Nigel Green, who had engineered the Lange-produced Def Leppard records, but the sessions resulted in songs that hewed too close to Pyromania. “We were a million miles apart in our ideas about sounds, style, timing. “He may be good for other acts, but he was hopeless for us,” Elliott told the Toronto Star in 1987. “We go into great detail on every element that makes up the song.” The band bought him out in November 1984, before recording a single note, putting themselves in a hefty amount of debt. “Jim just came from a completely different school of thought that was more vibe- and song-oriented, whereas we’ve always been more about the sound of the record,” bassist Rick “Sav” Savage says in Step Inside.
But the two parties clashed over the record’s direction – Steinman wanted the album to have a live-band feel, while Def Leppard was hoping to make an even more sonically extravagant album than Pyromania.