Rocket (Def Leppard Song)

Rocket (Def Leppard Song)

"Rocket" is a song recorded by British hard rock band Def Leppard in 1987 from the album Hysteria. It was the sixth (seventh in the US) and final single release, coming out in January 1989 and hitting the Top 15 in the US Billboard Hot 100 and UK Singles Chart.

The song was considered experimental for hard rock at the time. Most notably, producer Mutt Lange used backmasking effects to feature the line "We're fighting with the gods of war" (from "Gods of War", also on Hysteria) sung backwards throughout the track. This sample was omitted from the single version of the song. The word "Bites" (from "Love Bites") is also used as a sonic effect midway throughout the song, in order to replicate the sounds of a rocket launch through musical samples. "Rocket" also features a sample of "Burundi Black" by Burundi Steiphenson Black, which had previously had an influence on such UK bands as Adam and the Ants and Bow Wow Wow, as well as monk-like chants that were also similarly used by Adam and the Ants in their song "Dog Eat Dog". The drumbeats taken from the Royal Drummers of Burundi are played at the beginning of the extended and edited version after audio transcripts from the Apollo 11 Moon landing.

In its single release, "Rocket" was heavily edited from its original length of 6:34 for radio airplay, but would omit many of the portions that greatly distinguished the track from the rest of the album. At some shows, the album version gets performed, while at others they play the edited version instead.

It was used by professional wrestler Flyin' Brian Pillman as his theme music, when he came to NWA/WCW in 1989.

UK versions of the single release also featured a rather unconventional cover of the Engelbert Humperdinck song "Release Me", credited to "Stumpus Maximus & The Good Ol' Boys", which was actually Malvin Mortimer, the band's future tour manager, backed up by the band members themselves. The vocal is particularly notable for starting out as a rather exaggerated pub-singer version of the opening verses, becoming more and more extreme as the song progresses. In the last verse, Stumpus' histrionics are interrupted by a brief belch, followed by a polite "'scuse me" before going back up to eleven without even a split-second pause. Some commentators at the time saw the track as indicative of cynical commercialism on the part of the record company.