"Armageddon It" is a song by the English rock band Def Leppard from their 1987 album Hysteria. It was released as a single in 1988 and went to No. 3 in the United States, becoming their 3rd top 10 hit. It also reached the top 10 in Canada and New Zealand and the top 20 in Ireland and the United Kingdom.
The vocal style of the song is described as "T. Rex meets Eddie Cochran with backing vocals", according to lead singer Joe Elliott in the liner notes for Vault: Def Leppard Greatest Hits (1980–1995). There are two mixes of the song that appeared on the single: the "Atomic mix", which is the album version, and the "Nuclear mix", which is an extended version.
Writing and recording
"Armageddon It" was one of the songs dating back to the initial writing sessions for Hysteria in Dublin in 1984. However, the original song was re-written, keeping the chord progression and key, as Steve Clark elaborated: "The chorus wasn’t strong enough so we changed the chorus. Then we thought the chorus is so strong the verse is a bit weak. We rewrote the verse and said the bridge stinks. There’s not one existing note from the original, but a progression that went over about three years."[2]
Music video
The video for the song was the second to feature Def Leppard in a live arena setting. On 12–13 February 1988, the band recorded two shows at the McNichols Arena in Denver, Colorado for a future live film release. However, a month later, "Armageddon It" was set to be released as the sixth single off the popular Hysteria album and a promo video clip was urgently needed.
From the band's end, there was hesitation to film another concept video. Although they were happy with the results for "Hysteria" and "Animal", they were very unsatisfied with the way "Pour Some Sugar on Me" had turned out for its concept. Therefore, an idea was pitched to quickly create a video edited from the Denver footage. It was another hit in the UK, reaching the Top 20. Months later, it was released in the United States and was even more successful, reaching the Top 3. However, "Pour Some Sugar on Me" was the first song used there for the "live" concept (in fact, many of the scenes are the same in the two), but instead of filming a different video, slight changes were made using footage filmed in October at the Omni in Atlanta, Georgia.
^Devores, Courtney (20 July 2014). "Kiss and Def Leppard rock the rain away in Charlotte". The Charlotte Observer. Archived from the original on 10 April 2021. Retrieved 9 April 2021. [...] "Armageddon It" held the most thematic weight as statistics about world hunger, HIV, the environment, and cancer, ticked up on a giant screen behind them. The climbing stats pitted the number of overweight people in the world against the number of hungry and the rate at which forests are being pummeled with the time with which the world's oil will run out—all quite interesting stuff. I'm not sure how many in the audience—fists raised, singing along wholeheartedly—were "really getting it", but it was quite a powerful way to present a 25-year-old pop-metal hit.
