Near the end of recording the album Hysteria, during a production break, lead singer Joe Elliott was jamming with a riff he had come up with two weeks earlier on an acoustic guitar. Producer Robert John "Mutt" Lange, expressing great liking of it, suggested that it be developed into another song.[11]
Although already behind schedule, Lange felt that the album was still missing a strong crossover hit and that this last song had the potential to be one.[citation needed] Within two weeks the song was completed, smoothed out, and included as the 5th track on Hysteria.[12]
Elliott claims the song was at least partially inspired by the Aerosmith and Run-DMC version of "Walk This Way", which made him realize the potential of the mixing of rap and rock.[13]
The song's lyrics were written after Elliott and Lange went to opposite ends of the studio control room and delivered stream-of-consciousness words into a pair of dictaphones while the song's backing track played. They then swapped dictaphones and tried to determine what each other's words were. In the Hysteria episode of the Classic Albums documentary series, Elliott said he thought he heard the phrase "love is like a bomb" on Lange's tape "and that set the whole tone for the lyric."[14] (However, some of the key lyrics as well as the overall theme of the song are similar to those of the song "Sugar, Sugar" by The Archies.)
Two intros were recorded for the song: the studio version has "Step inside, walk this way, you and me babe, hey hey!" and then cuts immediately to the guitar, while the single version has "love is like a bomb" and a slightly longer progression.
By the spring of 1988, Hysteria had sold 3 million copies, which was not enough to cover the album's $5 million production costs. Thus, the band edited footage from an upcoming concert film to make a new promo clip for "Pour Some Sugar on Me" and finally released it as the fourth single in North America.
Reception
The somewhat delayed success of "Pour Some Sugar on Me" (due to the new promo release) helped send Hysteria to number 1 on the Top Pop Albums chart (now the Billboard 200) a year after release, selling four million copies during the single's run. The song reached number 2 on the US Billboard Hot 100 (denied the top spot by "Hold On to the Nights" by Richard Marx), number 18 in the UK Singles Chart and number 26 on the ARIA charts (Australia).[15][16]
MTV ranked "Pour Some Sugar on Me" number 1 in its "Top 300 Videos of All Time" countdown in May 1991. In 2006, VH1 ranked the song number 2 on its list of the "100 Greatest Songs of the '80s."[10]
In 2012, due to royalty conflicts[17] with their record company regarding profits from online sales, the band re-recorded the song, along with "Rock of Ages", under the title "Pour Some Sugar on Me 2012" and released both digitally in June 2012 (similarly, a re-recorded version of the single "Hysteria" entitled "Hysteria (2013 Re-Recorded Version)" was also released online the following year).
The song is a mainstay of classic rock and classic hits stations. In the 2010s, it was added to some adult contemporary stations despite never hitting that chart.[a]
Music video
Two different music videos for the song were produced. The first version (directed by Russell Mulcahy) shows the band playing inside a derelict Irish stately home (Mount Merrion House at Stillorgan, Dublin) while it is being demolished by a wrecking ball and a burly, sledgehammer-wielding, female construction worker played by Rosemary Henderson, who at the time was appearing on Saturday morning children's television in Ireland.
Filmed before the song became a hit in the United States, a second video simply of the band playing the song live was released for American MTV. The American video (directed by Wayne Isham) was edited from the band's full-length 1989 video release, Live: In the Round, in Your Face, recorded at McNichols Sports Arena in Denver, CO, in February 1988. The music video for the song had an extended, distortion-laden intro in lieu of the album version's "Step inside, walk this way" intro. Most compilations use the extended music video-style intro.
