As you will no doubt by now be aware, tragedy struck the rock worls at the start of this year, when Def Leppard guitarist Steve Clark was found dead at his apartment in Chelsea, London. His unconscious body was discovered by his girlfriend, who summoned medical assistance after failing to rouse him. But it was too late. Official reports state that Clark appeared to have passed away sometime during the early hours of the morning of January 8. On February 27, 1991, Westminister Coroner's Court announced the cause of death was "respiratory failure due to a compression of the brain stem, resulting from excess quanities of alcohol mixed with anti-depressants and pain-killers." The coroner also said that there were no suspicious circumstances surrounding Clark's "accident."

Other than the fact that he was only 30 years old, of course....

That Steve Clark had been battling for quite a while with a drinking problem was hardly a secret, yet his sudden and untimely demise has nonetheless sent reverberations of shock and dismay throughout the rock world.

Ozzy Osbourne-himself a self-confessed recovering alcoholic-admitted he took the news very badly. "I didn't really know the kid," he told me with a long face, "but I knew he had a problem. I never expected it to end like this though. It's such a tragedy, a terrible tragedy. And, as usual, it's the ones that are left behind that have to pick up the pieces, it's just very sad."

Steve Maynard Clark was born in the poor Hillsborough section of Sheffield, in the north of England, on April 23, 1960, the son of a hard-working cabdriver and a typically house proud mother. At school, he did well without excelling. Lessons bored him. When he was eleven, he talked his parents into giving him a guitar-they acqueisced only after Steve agreed to take classical guitar lessons. He spent a year studying the music of the old masters, while at the same time posing in front of his bedroom mirror to records by Led Zeppelin, Thin Lizzy and the Sensational Alex Harvey Band.

When he left school at 16, he became an apprentice lathe operator in a nearby factory. As part of the course, one day a week he was required to attend Stannington College. It was in the college library that he met another young apprentice by the name of Pete Willis. "Do you play?" was the first question Steve asked the guy he spotted leafing through a guitar-effects manual.

"What do you think?" Pete replied, and then went on to boast a bit about the band he was putting together with another local lad, a singer by the name of Joe Elliot. The band was called Def Leppard.

When Steve asked if they could use a second guitarist, Pete was hesitant. He had come across plenty of wannabes before. Wastes of time. Nevertheless, he mumbled an invitation for Steve to drop by a rehearsal sometime.

Steve's first jam with Def Leppard was on January 29, 1978, at their small garage-cum-rehearsal room in Bramall Lane. The band at that time consisted of Pete, Joe, Rick Savage(bass) and Tony Kenning(drums)-shortly to be replaced, fo course, by a 15-year-old Rick Allen. The stunned silence of the lads as the last note of Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird" faded away meant one thing:Steve was definitely in the band. As of that moment, Def Leppard had the classic twin-guitar shape that was to become their trademark, and that would, by the end of the '80s, help turn them into the biggest-selling British rock group in the world.

From his first gig with the band-at Wakefield School in Sheffield in July 1978, for which they smuggled in their own beer and were paid 5-to his last-at the 15,000 capacity Memorial Arena in Tacoma, Washington, in October 1988, on the last date of their 14-month Hysteria world tour, during which they saw the Hysteria album go to No.1 in both Britain and America and eventually sell over 15 million copies worldwide-Steve Clark was always an essential component of the Def Leppard enigma.

Visually charismatic-sleek, skinny frame; guitar slung low at the knees;long blond hair hiding nervous, fretful eyes-and musically a master when it came to no-nonsense, all-out riffing, Steve was the bad man of the band; the raffish lout who threatened to quit in the early days, if they didn't get off their arses and do a bloody gig; and the main musical muscle behind many of the band's early raunch an' roll crowd-pleasers, like "Another Hit and Run," "High 'n' Dry (Saturday Night)," "Rock! Rock! Till You Drop," "Photograph" and "Rock Of Ages."

Yet in person he was, as Joe Elliot put it upon hearing of the tragedy, "A really quiet, shy, humble, nice, gentle sort of bloke."

Indeed, the Steve Clark I knew was all the things Joe said he was, and more. He was warm, friendly and as easy to read as an open book. Steve's face could hide nothing-he would have made a very bad poker player-and before long he began to regale me with his seemingly interminable tales of woe.

What was the problem? THe truth is, I still don't really know. Everything and nothing, he said. He was the most flamboyant member of one of the biggest rock bands in history-a dream come true, one would have thought. Yet a sadder, more introverted superstar you could not hope to meet. Steve Clark appeared to have everything going for him, and yet to talk to him on the Hysteria tour, you'd think he'd never had a stroke of good luck in his life. He seemed freaked-out, f?!ked-up and, ultimately, alone. It was a paradox: Def Leppard were at the very height of their powers, and yet here was their most glamorous member, as wobbly and insecure as a newborn foal.

Only once did he offer me any clue as to what might have been troubling him. We were talking one night after a show in Boston on the Hysteria tour, and he began to bemoan the fact that Leppard producer (and co-songwriter) "Mutt" Lange invariably preferred to use Phil Collen for most of the guitar parts when the band was recording.

"I'm not saying I didn't play on Hysteria," he told me shakily, but there was a lot of waiting around with nothing but time on his hands, he said. "I drank more out of boredom."

And the more Steve drank, the more Mutt was likely to turn to the other guitarist in Def Leppard to provide the sober technical runs needed to satisfy the feverishly precise demands of the Svengali producer.

It became a rut; a well of fear and loathing that Steve helped dig for himself.

When Phil Collen first joined the band during the making of Pyromania, in 1983-following the firing of Pete Willis because, significantly, his drinking problem had gotten out of hand-he and Steve quickly became known as the terror twins, ripping it up together onstage and off, bicycling to gigs together, boogying till dawn and all that other good stuff. Then, in 1984, after a particularly prolonged drinking bout between the two guitarists that resulted in Phil waking up in Amsterdam one morning, where the band was recording, wearing a $10,000 watch he couldn't remember buying, Phil quit drinking. Nothing stronger than mineral water has passed his lips since. And neither has meat, nor any other animal product. Phil has been a vegetarian for the last seven years. Not only that, but these days he is also a fitness fanatic.

At the onset of the Hysteria tour in 1987, then, the contrast between the two Def Leppard guitarists could not have been more striking, and whatever guilt Steve was feeling every time he had one over the eight (as we say in the old country) seemed to be amplified a thousand times, at least in his mind, by the fact that his guitar-slinging partener on the other side of the stage never seemed to put a tootsie an inch the wrong side of perfect. Although he gave a good impersonation onstage of someone enjoying himself, he felt sick at heart, Steve said, at what he saw as his increasingly diminished roll in the band. At best it was a troubled conclusion for him to draw; at worst, paranoia-a symptom, perhaps, of his own increasing lack of self-esteem.

But what was Phil to do? What were any of us who stood by and looked on helplessly as Clarky began to disintegrate out on the road on 1987 and '88 supposed to do?

. His excessive drinking didn't help, of course, but his periods of drying out in various rehabilitation centers around the world (many of them paid for by the band) and his eventual participation in several alcohol recovery programs didn't seem to bring him much releif either. Not even Aerosmith's manager, Tim Collins, who successfully brought his once-rotted-out boys back from the brink and offered Steve assistance in recommending a detox center, could help. Indeed, one doctor, Steve told me, even went so far as to diagnose his problem, whatever it really was, as "incurable." And so it proved.

The Steve Clark I knew was an extremely melancholy young fellow who I was immensely fond of and proud to have known. A sad mystery with as even sadder ending. I, like the rest of his millions of fans around the world, will cherish his memory always.