Songoftheday 1/23/19 - Walk away if you want to it's okay if you need to, you can run but you can never hide...
from the album Retroactive and Last Action Hero (Original Soundtrack) (1993)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #12 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 12
Today's song of the day comes from British pop-metal kings Def Leppard, whose 1992 album Adrenalize may not have been as massive as their cornerstone set Hysteria, but still managed to spin off four top-40 pop hits in America with "Let's Get Rocked", "Make Love Like A Man", "Have You Ever Needed Someone So Bad?", and "Stand Up (Kick Love Into Motion)". After touring with new guitarist Vivian Campbell, the band took a breather, releasing and "odds and sods" collection of B-sides and rarities called Retroactive. The first single from the record was a song originally recorded for the Adrenalize record, "Two Steps Behind". It didn't make the album, but the song, written by Joe Elliott, was made a B-side (kids, ask your parents) of their "Make Love Like A Man" single. When they were asked to contribute a song to the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Last Action Hero, without any time to write a new track they submitted "Two Steps Behind"'s stripped down version, which was juiced up with an orchestral session by conductor Michael Kamen. The resulting ballad ended up doing much better than even "Make Love..." tried to be. It was released as the second pop-promoted single from Last Action Hero, after AC/DC's "Big Gun", which went to #1 on Billboard magazine's Mainstream Rock chart at #65 on the pop Hot 100...
"Two Steps Behind" climbed up to the pop top-20 in the U.S. in October of 1993. The song also made it to #15 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock radio chart, while it was the first from them to reach "easy listening" stations, landing at #26 on their Adult Contemporary format list (spending over seven months on the chart, probably the first your gran heard of them). Internationally the "acoustic" take of the single peaked at #5 in Canada, and reached the top-40 in Sweden (#21), Ireland (#26), their native UK (#32), Australia (#33), and New Zealand (#34).
Besides AC/DC and Def Leppard, the Last Action Hero soundtrack proved to be quite a draw on rock radio, with three other songs making the charts. "Real World", a Queensryche track which like "Two Steps Behind" was fluffed by Michael Kamen, spent a week at #3 on the Mainstream Rock chart, while both "What The Hell Have I" from Alice In Chains (#19) and "Angry Again" from Megadeth (#18) made the top 20.
With the success of "Two Steps Behind", Def Leppard issued the Retro Active collection, which included an "electric" version of the song, which was re-released and hit the charts internationally, going to #5 in Switzerland, just missing the top-40 in Ireland at #41, and in the UK stopping at #73.
(Click below to see the rest of the post)
Here's the band performing "Two Steps Behind" live in concert in 1993 in Sheffield...
To compare, here's the much louder "electric version" of "Two Steps Behind" which hit the charts in its own right overseas...
When Def Leppard performed the song with Taylor Swift (yes, it happened) on the CMT Crossroads series in 2008...
And finally, another take of Def Leppard in a tiny pub concert in 1995...
Up tomorrow: An epic promise from a hungry rocker.
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