Rick Allen is and will always be one of rock music’s most resilient and inspiring drummers. The Def Leppard drummer lost his left arm following a 1984 tragic car accident, but through relentless determination, he relearned to play on a custom drum kit and was a crucial part of the band’s creative and commercial success. But a life changing moment happened with Phil Collins for him.
The process of recovery was an arduous one, and the overwhelming amount of uplifting messages and letters that he received helped me steer through the pain.
He remarked that one such letter stood out to him. It was from none other than the legendary drummer Phil Collins.
Allen was in a dark and uncertain place after the accident, which happened on December 31st, 1984. The prior year, Def Leppard had an amazing run when the blockbuster LP Pyromania, which featured the hit singles “Photograph,” “Foolin’,” and “Rock of Ages was released. Fast forward to a year later, and the future looked bleak.
But hearing from a famous artist and one of the world’s most respected drummers immensely boosted Rick Allen’s hopes and provided the much-needed morale boost.
“Phil Collins happened to be one of the first letters that I opened, a letter of encouragement while I was still in the hospital in 1985,” Allen said in a recent episode of Rock Talk With Mitch Lafon. “So if you get to see him, please send him my love and regards.”
He stated Collins’ “incredible words of encouragement,” noting that “there were hundreds of thousands of letters, but his stood out because he knew what it would be like, or he had an inkling of what it would be like to be a drummer and to be involved in something so horrific, so it just meant that much more.”
Allen was talking about how many people from all over the world sent him letters, and they also helped him in the recovery process, inspiring him to find other unconventional ways to drumming and music. As Blabbermouth reports, he had told Modern Drummer, “I remember coming around in the hospital and then realizing what had happened to me after the accident, and honestly, I wanted to disappear. I didn’t wanna do this anymore. And then I started getting these letters from all over the world.”
“I don’t know what happened,” he added, “but I discovered the power of the human spirit and just said, ‘You know what? I can do this.’ It was a collective thing. It was all the encouragement I was getting from other people, and then it just manifested in wanting to succeed. And that’s exactly where it came from.”
He returned to live performances on Aug. 16, 1986, at the British festival Monsters of Rock, and played on their biggest-selling album to date, 1987’s Hysteria, which features a series of massive singles, including “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” “Love Bites,” and “Armageddon It.”