The decline and fall of Mutt Lange

Hysteria
Love Bites
Animal
Pour Some Sugar On Me
Rocket
Run Riot
Armageddon It
Gods Of War
Excitable
Don't Shoot Shotgun
Love And Affection
Women

This is just an insane way to make a record. I'm kind of surprised with all of the CPU power people have now you don't have more people at home just doing this kind of schizo band production (but hey maybe that's the next thing).

http://mixonline.com/mag/audio_mike_shipley_having/

There was a sound of the records in the Def Leppard era that was conceptualized between Mutt and myself. We'd have to invent types of drum sounds, because his thing was always, "Let's do something different. It can't ever be the same, it can't ever be just a boring drum sound, it has to be Star Wars! Everyone is watching Star Wars films and seeing things that are very three dimensional, so let's not just have this little honky drum sound that everyone goes for. Let's make it big, different, larger than life."

Larger than life is the definition of those records. It seems impossible that anybody could get so much top, so much bottom, so many effects, so many parts-so much of everything-crammed onto a piece of tape.

Mutt was just brilliant. There's so much depth of field to the way he produced those records in terms of the parts. The concept of how to make the drums sound and how to make the guitars sound and how to stack up hundreds of tracks of backgrounds. There were so many layers-it would take huge amounts of time to be as experimental as you could possibly be and then to start again and try a different approach altogether, let alone the time it would take to mix!

You were some of the first people experimenting with sampled drums. On Hysteria those huge drums were all samples, played in a Fairlight.

Lots of people didn't know that. They were always asking me how I miked up such great drums! Pyromania was done the same way, on cheesy 8-bit Fairlight technology where we had to figure out how to record everything at half speed into the Fairlight to make it sound like it had some tone to it, and we'd be stacking up a bunch of snares and bass drums.

I remember at the beginning of Pyromania there was no idea of how we were going to do the drums. All Mutt was saying was that we'd have to figure out some way to do the drums in the end. The drums would be one of the last things to get done, so it was, "Wonder how we're gonna do them. I'm sure we'll figure out something."

A very simple drumbeat would go down at the beginning, but at the time, there wasn't any way of locking multitracks up with drum machines. There was no way to sync the Fairlights up to SMPTE. So we had to figure out how to do that because we had to be able to change the parts. You could put a drum machine part down and work to it, but there was just that Linn drum code, and it didn't run anything but itself, so we had to figure out, with the help of some pretty smart technical people, how to get a system together to sync to tape.

The main reason the drums were done that way was because, at that point, the songs and the arrangements would be changing all the time. If you had a performance and Mutt and the band decided to rewrite the chorus, whatever the guy had been playing became irrelevant. So the best way was for them to keep working on the songs, rearranging them and changing them all the time, and then to worry about what the drums should do afterwards.

It seems like these projects took on a life of their own, almost like they couldn't be controlled.

It was never out of control with Mutt, but because he's so involved in the whole process, he'd get to a stage where you had a song finished, we thought-we'd busted our balls, spending days on guitar sounds, days on vocal sounds-and he'd change the chorus.

But see, there's no sense having an attitude or ever thinking for even a second that having an attitude is going to do anything but make the process really hard for anybody else. All having an attitude will do is get in the way of what the rest of the process is supposed to be, which is people like Mutt and whoever is in the band getting what they want. It's my job to have no attitude and say, "No problem. I'll figure out how to do it," and then to do it.

what's strange is that he didn't eventually turn into one of those guys (Axl Rose, Kevin Shields, Dr Dre, etc.) who worked on a single album for 15 years

You don't think of it that way as it's Def Leppard, but really the production technique is really very similar (and with a same degree of anal rentention) as someone like Trevor Horn.

The Synclavier and Fairlight definitely led to a unique period of music and it really seemed to take off in people that were totally musical obsessives like the two mentioned or say Frank Zappa or Peter Gabriel and others.

What's weird is that slaving to the machine kind of broke up the Police in some ways from what I always understood.

Neil Young was another early synclavier adopter, which is weird because while music-obsessed, polish is not high on the list of words describing his style up to that point.

I think Neil just jumped on whatever the new thing happened to be. Hence his immersion in all-digital recording in the 80s/90s, which took him all of about 4 albums to decide didn't sound right.

That's true, although he also probably dug that the synclavier would (theoretically) make music-making easier while caring for his son, which had caused difficulty on the last couple Reprise albums. It's probably for that same reason that David Briggs, as anti-tech as anyone in Neil's camp, endorsed the acquisition at the time.

Good point; I'd forgotten that many of Neil's tech acquisitions were as much for his son as for himself.

I only now came across this 1989 track from the post-Grace Slick Starship album wherein Mutt writes a song that's almost self-parody and Mickey Thomas tries to sing like Joe Elliott.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8JIbltEf_k

oh man

was surprised to see this wasn't a new thread about Maroon 5's Hands All Over and Nickelback's Dark Horse

that Maroon 5 started racking up #1s the second they stopped working with Mutt Lange was like...dang

Came across another article that is a look behind the veil of how Mutt Lange worked on some of those Def Leppard records.

http://tapeop.com/interviews/118/mike-shipley/

Good god, if I had to listen and work on mixing 'Pour Some Sugar on Me' exclusively for 13 hour days for 4 to 6 weeks, I would have been carried out in a straight jacket. I have read that Trevor Horn spent a totally insane amount of time mixing those early Seal records.

They're not a band that immediately spring to mind when discussing Mutt Lange's production work, but I thought his production on the single version of XTC's 'This Is Pop?', far more powerful and hard-hitting than the LP version. If only they could have got him to do 'Go 2' or something.

his first production credit. i think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fY-AIvM7DWU

there was nowhere to go but up!

i always kinda liked this 1974 slab of mutt glam. that intro riff could be on a shania song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_IFhWx8A2E

lol, wait, i think this might pre-date the hocus single.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3srwEvkyF8

mutt records i like that nobody cares about: the first city boy album and the second mallard record.

i actually like everything he did with city boy. and the boomtown rats. and the motors. he was a cool 70's dude.

a tonic for the troops is such an awesome sounding album. ambitious pub punk at its finest.

unjustly neglected mutt lange production:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dG0oIBBMBl8

I was almost gonna say that "T.N.T." will always be my fave thing by him but that was totally vanda & young and they are the ultimate wizards and true stars in my book.

Crazy thing was he was great at cutting more straight ahead records, but he got so successful that he was in that 'everything bigger than everything else' pop world. It's all 5-6 records a year then it gets into the mega hits era.

I got to wonder what a Martin Birch produced version of Def Leppard would have sounded like. They still might have ended up pretty huge.