Armageddon It

This song is a play on of words: "Our you getting it"/"Armageddon it." Like the other songs on the Hysteria album, it was written by the band with enough contributions from their producer Mutt Lange that he also got a songwriting credit. Lange took over for Jim Steinman, whose sessions were scrapped in 1985. With Lange, they created songs with a rock bombast and commercial appeal, and this one also played great in stadiums. Def Leppard became the first major rock band to play on a stage in the middle of the stadiums when they did so on the American leg of their Hysteria tour, which allowed them to sell more tickets and set them apart from other bands with long hair (that's you, Bon Jovi!) that were after their thunder.

In the book MTV Ruled the World - The Early Years of Music Video, Def Leppard guitarist Phil Collen reminisced: "The thing we wanted to do in Def Leppard is just be a hybrid of a lot of other things. In England, you don't really do the 'cover band thing.' When you start up, you start writing songs before you can even play an instrument, in most cases. So America's the complete opposite. We were creating our own thing, and I think it was going to combine a lot of different rock bands - Thin Lizzy, T. Rex, and the glam thing, along with the punk stuff, and Zeppelin. It was a total combination." Going on about the involvement of producer Mutt Lange, Collen continues: "We tried to do it with the music, and when we met Mutt Lange, he's great at creating 'the hybrid.' Obviously, what he did with Shania Twain - bringing country to a much larger audience. It crossed over into Pop, and Taylor Swift is the next example of that. There's very little country. It's more pop than it is country, but it obviously has its roots in it. And that's what we were, a rock band, but we didn't want to be like a lot of the American bands. Which we thought were great - Journey, Foreigner, and stuff like that. We still wanted to have that hard-edged thing that AC/DC had, but we still wanted to have the harmonies, a bit like Queen. So again, it's just an absolute hybrid."

This was the sixth single released from the Hysteria album in the US. By the time it reached #3 in January 1989, the album had been out for 17 months.