You’ve had the first look at Tom channeling the gods of 80′s rock in the Rock of Ages movie trailer, but now you can get your first listen to Tom stretching his operatic pipes! People.com has an exclusive clip of him rocking Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar On Me.”
Click Here To Listen To The Clip Of Tom Singing “Pour Some Sugar on Me”
Want more than 30 seconds of Tom giving the 80′s rock classic a workout? You can download the ENTIRE SONG! when you preorder the Rock of Ages movie soundtrack at iTunes starting today. The soundtrack is set for a June 5 release.
A History of Def Leppard & “Pour Some Sugar On Me”
Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar On Me“ will be front and center in Tom’s repertoire. Almost an anthem of the era, and a pretty good indication of what to expect from Rock of Ages, the song topped out on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 at number 2 in 1987 and was ranked second on VH1′s 100 Greatest Songs of the 1980s in 2006.
Here’s the original Def Leppard version of “Pour Some Sugar On Me.”
If Tom felt any pressure putting his own stamp on this monster glam-rock declaration of lust, imagine how he felt when the band showed up on set the day he performed it. Despite a work effort that leaves nothing to chance—Cruise put in extensive work to achieve a rock singer’s voice—he must have felt under the gun with Def Leppard staring from the wings. The result? Let the band’s guitarist Phil Collen sum it up:
“I can’t wait till people hear him,” he told noisecreep.com. “The guy did a great job. He told us he was taking five hours a day, five days a week for four to five months just to get the vocal aspect of the role down. That was fantastic to hear.”
While “Pour Some Sugar On Me” proved unstoppable on the Billboard charts, Def Leppard themselves reached similar milestones in the 80′s. Two of their albums, Pyromania and Hysteria, sold more than 10-million copies each, a rare feat in all of rock, and are included on Rolling Stone‘s 500-Greatest-Albums-Of-All-Time list. The movie Rock of Ages takes its name from a song on Pyromania.
Although Def Leppard is associated with the glam-rock scene of the 80s, they actually emerged from the New Wave of British Heavy Metal movement in the late 1970s, where bands like Iron Maiden and Venom also got their start. Over time, however, Def Leppard took on more of an American-oriented hard rock sound While most of their contemporaries from the early metal scene achieved only marginal success, Def Leppard exploded in popularity and came to define their era. Other than “Pour Some Sugar On Me”, they wrote such classics as “Rock of Ages”, “Hysteria”, “Photograph”, “Foolin”, and “Love Bites”. To this day you can catch them on tour with the likes of Heart, Styx and REO Speedwagon.
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