The South African who produced the second-best selling album of all time

South African record producer Robert Lange has worked with some of the biggest names in music history, including producing AC/DC’s Back in Black album in 1980, the second-best-selling album of all time.

Lange was born to German parents in November 1948 in Mufulira, Northern Rhodesia, known today as Zambia.

His family moved to Durban, where he grew up. This is where he acquired the nickname Mutt, which is said to have come from a beloved basset hound.

Growing up, Lange is said to have been fond of country music, with American singer Slim Whitman standing out as a favourite.

Lange attended Belfast High School in Mpumalanga, where he formed his first band and played guitar.

After finishing high school, he went on to perform his national service, which lasted two years. Once he returned, he formed another band in 1969 with local stage and film actor James Borthwick.

The group was called Sound Reason and remained together for two years before Lange started another band called Hocus with Zambian-born Stevie van Kerken, whom he had reconnected with at high school.

While together, Hocus recorded an album and released five singles. Popular tracks included Roll Me Over and River Roll.

This was the only professional band that Lange would form part of, with him and Van Kerken later marrying before his career took off.

It was while performing in bars as a member of Hocus that Lange met Clive Calder, who was also breaking into the South African music scene at the time.

While Lange was focused on the creation and recording of music, Calder was more interested in the artist management side of things and building a record label.

Calder had just started Clive Calder Productions alongside Ralph Simon, who was establishing himself in the live entertainment business.

CCP Records is best known for discovering artists such as Brenda Fassie, Mandoza, Chicco Twala, Aba Shant, and Arthur Mafokate.

After meeting Lange, Calder and Simon introduced him to radio host David Gresham, with whom he worked alongside to produce the local hit “Sunday Monday Tuesday” by Jessica Jones.

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In 1974, fed up with the apartheid regime, the three moved to London and formed Zomba Records, named after the Malawian city. Lange was their first client.

Within a few years of arriving in the English capital, Lange started making a name for himself with his first breakout hit coming in 1978.

It was a single titled “Rat Trap” by the Boomtown Rats, an Irish rock band, that rose to number one on the UK singles chart that year.

A South African connection to Colin Viljoen saw him produce Ipswich Town’s FA Cup Final song Ipswich Get That Goal derived from Paul Jones’s 1978 track 

He had also produced five albums for the English rock band City Boy since arriving in the country.

This was followed by the production of the album Highway to Hell by the Australian rock band AC/DC.

By this point, Simon and Calder had relocated to the United States to establish offices and uncover talent in the country.

Lange remained in the UK and continued to work with AC/DC, producing their next album, Back In Black, which was released in 1980. 

The production was declared the second-best-selling of all time in 2019, behind Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Today it has sold over 50 million copies and has been certified twenty five times Platinum.

He then began working with the English rock band Def Leppard, consisting of members Rick Savage, Joe Elliott, Rick Allen, Phil Collen, and Vivien Campbell.

Lange has been credited with helping the group define their melodic hard rock sound through their second album, High ‘n’ Dry, released in 1981.

While the album initially struggled to gain traction within the rock community, its breakout single Bringin’ On The Heartbreak became one of the first hard rock music videos aired on MTV.

Lange also produced the albums Pyromania, Hysteria, and Adrenalize, in addition to co-writing most of the songs.

He also worked alongside artists like Bryan Adams to write and produce (Everything I Do) I Do It For You, which won a Grammy, and Billy Ocean for his Tear Down These Walls production.

Shania Twain was another musician Lange worked closely with after hearing her music for the first time. The two first met six months after first coming into contact over the phone and became romantically involved.

They were married at the end of 1993, and Twain gave birth to their son in 2001.

In between marrying and the birth, Lange produced two albums for Twain: The Woman In Me, which won a Grammy for Best Country Album, and Come On Over. Twain and Lange eventually diverced in 2008.

Lange has since produced albums and singles for artists like Britney Spears, The Backstreet Boys, Celine Dion, Lady Gaga, Maroon 5, and Nickelback.

Today Mutt lives a rather secluded life, mostly staying in his 19th century chateau in La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland.

Christopher Noxon, who interviewed Lange in the early 2000s, described his reclusiveness as a “Howard Hughes-scale aversion to the spotlight,” saying that his friends call him private and his publicists say that he is press shy.

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