On August 16, 1986, Def Leppard walked onto the stage at the Monsters of Rock festival at Donington Park in England. Near the end of their set, Joe Elliott stepped to the microphone during a drum break and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, Rick Allen on the drums.” The field exploded. Behind his kit, Rick Allen, who had lost his left arm less than two years earlier, broke down in tears.
Most fans know Rick kept his job. Fewer know how the safety net the band built for him quietly disappeared in the weeks before that day.
New Year’s Eve, 1984
On the afternoon of December 31, 1984, Rick was driving his Corvette on the A57, a winding road through the countryside just west of Sheffield, with his girlfriend Miriam Barendsen beside him. He had turned 21 only eight weeks earlier. After a running duel with another driver who kept blocking him from passing, he accelerated, lost control on a bend, hit a stone wall, and ended up in a field.
He was thrown from the car. His left arm, caught in the seat belt, was torn off. A nurse who lived nearby reached him within minutes, and a second nurse driving past stopped to help bandage the wound. Surgeons at the Royal Hallamshire Hospital in Sheffield reattached the arm, but infection set in, and on January 4, 1985, it had to be amputated.
A Block of Foam at the Foot of the Bed
Rick Allen has said he was regularly told he would never play again. One young doctor told him he would never even wave again. The first time Rick ran into that doctor again at an outpatient visit, he waved at him.
What he wanted was simple. He described it to Modern Drummer this way:
“All I wanted to do was play my drums again.”
To keep him from sliding down the bed, the hospital staff had wedged a large piece of foam at the foot of it. With his brother’s stereo in the room, Rick began playing along to the records he grew up on, tapping the rhythms out with his feet. He realized his left foot could take over much of what his left arm used to do.
Visitors helped push him forward. Guitarists Phil Collen and Steve Clark came by, and Rick has said it was their visit that first made him truly believe a comeback was possible. Producer Mutt Lange, who was making the next Def Leppard album with them, was convinced Rick could still drum. A Sheffield electronics man named Pete Hartley told him he could build him foot pedals, and he did. Doctors had expected a stay of months. Rick was out in weeks and soon flew to the Netherlands to rejoin the band in the studio.
The Safety Net in Ireland
By the summer of 1986, Def Leppard had not played a proper show in about three years. Before facing a big festival crowd, they booked a handful of small warm-up gigs in Ireland, and they brought a second drummer: Jeff Rich of Status Quo, playing an acoustic kit beside Rick. As Rick later admitted, “Nobody, myself included, was 100% sure I could play a whole show.”
The plan changed by accident. After three gigs, Jeff Rich missed his flight to the next one, so Rick played the first several songs alone until he arrived. At the following gig, the stage was too small to fit two drum kits, so Rick played the whole show by himself. He played Dublin alone too. Rick has said Jeff Rich took the hint and joked that he would be heading home.
Donington, August 16, 1986
Donington was a different kind of test. It was the first big show in Britain since the accident, and not everyone in the business believed in it. Rick later learned that some people had asked the band whether they would really put him onstage, as if he were some kind of freak show. According to the band’s 1987 biography Animal Instinct, even that year’s headliner, Ozzy Osbourne, had privately called the idea a freak show.
Backstage, Rick and Joe Elliott shared most of a bottle of whiskey in a trailer. As showtime got closer, Rick realized the gig would be either “great or a complete trainwreck.”
The press and many fans expected two drummers. Jeff Rich was nowhere to be found. Rick Allen played the entire set alone.
Within a song or two, he has said, he knew it would be fine. During the final song, a cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Travelin’ Band,” Phil Collen suggested that Joe give Rick a special introduction, something he had not done at any of the Irish shows. When Joe said his name, the cheering rolled over the stage in waves so loud that, as one account from inside the band recalled, it nearly drowned out Rick’s drums. Rick Allen burst into tears at his kit. He later joked that he wondered whether crying on the electric pedals would get him electrocuted.
Accounts of the crowd size vary, from around 60,000 to Rick’s own recollection of nearly 80,000. Every account agrees on how loud it was. And according to Animal Instinct, when the Monsters of Rock dates were over, Ozzy came to Rick’s hotel room and took back every word.
What Came Next
The hard part was not over. Rick Allen has said he should have accepted counseling after the crash, and that the real work of rebuilding himself began after Donington. Hysteria was released the following summer and became one of the best-selling rock albums of its era.
Four decades later, he is still Def Leppard’s drummer, playing barefoot so his feet can slide freely across the pedals. And he has said that every time he returns to Donington, he remembers it as the place where he became a man.