Songfacts®:

• Def Leppard singer Joe Elliott told Rolling Stone about this cut. "It's a call to arms, you know?" he said. "Rick Savage [bass] wrote 80 percent of the song. I wrote the verses, he wrote all the music and the choruses. He came in with it, and we knew it was a classic Def Leppard song."
  
  "It's that three-minute pop-rock stuff with big chunky guitars and a big chorus," Elliott continued. "And it has that swaggering, mid-tempo rhythm, like 'Sugar', and 'Rock of Ages'. The idea was, we wanted something familiar. I mean, when AC/DC comes back after years away, you're not going to get 'Bohemian Rhapsody' from 'em, you know? And you don't want it, either — you want 'Back In Black', or something like it. For us, this is what we do. And it's something we enjoy doing."
• The song was released as the first single from the Def Leppard album. So why did the band go down the self-title route with their new record? Guitarist Phil Collen explained to Billboard magazine: "We started out sitting around, writing all these stupid names down like we normally do, and I said, 'Why don't we call it Def Leppard? 'Cause who knows if there will BE another Def Leppard album, per se, the way the industry is, and the fact that this record actually represents us."
  
  "It doesn't represent someone else's idea, a label or a business agenda or anyone else's idea of what Def Leppard is. This is actually Def Leppard's version of Def Leppard, and it was actually scary. This had never happened before in our career. this is the first time we've ever done an album for us, not to please anyone else, hence the title."