10 Classic Songs You Didn't Know Were Ripped Off

At the end of the '80s, Def Leppard actually found themselves in a pretty dire situation. Even though they wrote one of the masterpieces of hair-metal genre with Pyromania, the idea of following that up with something even better almost felt like a pipe dream, with Rick Allen losing his arm during recording. While the tunes were pretty much bulletproof by the end, Steven Clark did include a little nod to another pop classic in Gods of War.

When looked at next to the other tracks on Hysteria, this is one of the more epic tunes, with the guitar lick setting up the story about the dissection of war and man's tendency towards violence. Once you start speeding up the lick though, things start to sound a little bit familiar. As Phil Collen told it during an interview, the original idea for the song came when Clark was riffing on Message in a Bottle by the Police, which quickly evolved into something much more gritty when they locked in on the right tempo.

Given the amount of craftsmanship that Leppard puts into every track, the influence is clearly hidden, instead sounding like you're entering a war zone without a safety net. For as much as some people might think that every song has been written, it takes a certain talent to turn something that you've heard a billion times into something original and refreshing again.