Steve Clark

Stephen Maynard Clark was born 23 April 1960 to Barrie and Beryl (née Beckingham) Clark. He was raised in Wisewood, Sheffield. From an early age, he showed an interest in music, attending his first concert featuring Cliff Richard and the Shadows at age six. At 11, he received his first guitar which was purchased by his father on the condition that he learn to play. Clark studied classical guitar for a year before he first heard the music of Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin at a friend's house. When Clark left school, his first employer was the engineering firm GEC Traction, where he worked as a lathe operator. He was three years into a four-year apprenticeship with the firm at the time Def Leppard was signed to a record deal with Phonogram Records.

Clark suffered from severe anxiety prior to performances. Clark was engaged to an American model, Lorelei Shellist, the two having been together seven years. Shellist revealed in her autobiography, Runway Runaway, that Clark's alcoholism played a major role in their breakup. Clark was close friends with Phil Collen. The two became known as the "Terror Twins" in recognition of their friendship and their alcohol-fuelled antics offstage. Collen stopped drinking in the late 1980s. In the winter of 1989, Clark was found unconscious inside a bar in Minneapolis and was rushed to Hazelden Addiction Treatment Center. His bandmates all subsequently flew to Minneapolis to be with him. There, a doctor urged them to convince Clark to enter rehab after he registered a blood alcohol level of 0.59; by contrast, Led Zeppelin's John Bonham had registered a blood alcohol level of 0.41 when he died in 1980. Collen and others held an intervention to urge him to cease his alcohol abuse. Clark agreed to enter a rehabilitation centre with the promise that his spot in Def Leppard would be held for him until he was healthy. He was placed on a six-month leave of absence from the band. While in rehabilitation in Arizona, Clark met a recovering heroin addict named Janie Dean, and the pair agreed to help each other with their addictions. They soon became engaged. …

On 8 January 1991, Janie Dean found Clark dead on his couch. He was 30 years old. The postmortem revealed that the cause of death was respiratory failure caused by a lethal mixture of alcohol and prescription drugs. At the time of his death, Clark had a blood alcohol level of .30 and morphine in his system. Clark was buried at Wisewood Cemetery in Loxley, Sheffield, near the Clark family residence.