Next he leads the way to his studio, a vast spot-lit sanctum decorated with a few of his multi-platinum albums (AC/DC’s Back in Black, Shania’s Come on Over, the Backstreet Boys’ Millennium). But hey-the taxes aren’t as brutal, the people are nice, and it’s easier to keep a low profile. It wasn’t easy, he says, making the transition from the mansion in Lake Placid to the estate in Tour-de-Peliz. He laughs about that and then turns serious, his slight South African accent going soft. The Swiss “freakin’ ch-teau,” as the missus calls it. We tour the grounds, past the stables where we run into his wife grooming one of her five horses-“Hi, Shania!”-and then he gives me the tour of the house, with its sweeping southern views of Lake Geneva.
His hair is long, blond and shaggy in a style that hasn’t changed much since his glory days of the mid-‘80s-the headbanger’s ball may be long over, but at 52, Mutt’s keeping the faith, God bless him. He welcomes me at the front door of his 19th-century Swiss ch-teau wearing his usual outfit-Hawaiian print shirt, baggy pants and slip-ons. He may be a multimillionaire record producer and songwriter with unparalleled power in the music industry, but he’s also a regular sort of bloke, a former cover-band bassist who took his nickname from a beloved basset hound. The first thing Robert John Lange says when we meet is that I should call him Mutt. Good training for my run-in a few years later with another evasive celebrity, Mel Gibson. Investigative profile of pop genius Mutt Lange, a press-shy knob-twiddler behind chart-toppers as diverse as AC/DC, Tina Turner, the Backstreet Boys and Shania Twain.
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