"Mutt" Lange takes on vocal duties in a synth-pop band
Label: Mercury
Year of Release: 1980
Robert John Lange, aka "Mutt" Lange is something of a music business legend, having produced some of the most enduring stars of the last forty years. His close, careful and polished style has been used on albums by Def Leppard, Foreigner, Bryan Adams, Celine Dion, Shania Twain (who he was once married to) and, er, The Boomtown Rats.
He's generally associated with "serious" musicians creating mainstream rock and pop, which makes this one-off 45 a real curiosity. It would seem that Vinyl were a group led by him on vocals who were purely synth-pop, a genre he barely ever dipped his toes into before or again, and the whole effort is inevitably deeply un-Lange in its stylings. "The Nobody Men" on the A-side sounds like Al Stewart gone futuristic - so you could argue it "invented" The Pet Shop Boys if you wanted to be inaccurate and harsh. It also has enough of a Euro feel to have popped up on some Italo Disco YouTube channels since, though the connections sound borderline to me.
Over on the flip, the Lange penned "Pulse" is a jittery, Moroder-esque piece of atmospheric pleasure which is worth your time as well. Both sides feature sounds that date them very clearly on the early side of synth-pop before the New Romantic cliches and stylistic tropes took hold, but the 1980 release date means that they were actually somewhat ahead of their time.
As for who the other members of Vinyl were and why this happened, you'll be lucky to find any answers. There's very little information out there and the only explanation I can think of is that they were a one-off production project for Lange who perhaps wanted to get his studio fingers around an emerging genre. Once this popped out, he seemingly never felt the need to go back in this direction again, which is a shame as this is really rather good. Our loss is Bryan Adams' gain.
If you can't hear the previews below, please go right to the source.
5 comments:
Couldn't anyone at the record company be bothered to time the tracks and put unapproximate durations on the painted labels?
It's a bloody disgrace, Arthur!
There are a few things about this record which make me suspect it wasn't a high priority release, actually.
This is fun: the A side is by Marek Rymaszewski and Robin Millar, the latter of which was starting his production career. The pair had written a musical/opera in the 70s, from which the Rock N' Roll Children single on Antic seems to have been drawn.
Damnit! If only I'd realised that I would have connected the two blog entries together. Thanks for letting me know.
Don't fret, it took a fair amount of digging to piece that together. Millar was also Mick Taylor's brother-in-law, and appears on an unreleased 1974 Millar album that was supposed to be on Atlantic. At one point it was on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/robinmillar/sets/cats-eyes
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