

“When he brought in sax legend Junior Walker for a solo on ‘Urgent’ and recorded at least a dozen versions, Mutt had the wisdom to recognize that the very first solo Junior blew, rough edges and all, was The Take," said Dolby. That wasn’t always how it played out, though. Some simple strings of notes took hours and hours to record.” He would make me go over and over my parts, adjusting the inflections on every single note until it was exactly perfect. I've never worked with a more fastidious producer. "And I said, 'That’s like an experimental instrumental thing that I’m working on.’ He said, ‘No, it isn’t anymore -– let’s take that one, because that’s got a lot of potential.’ There wasn’t even a song with it.”įeeling the need for an outside influence on keyboards, Jones and Lange brought in the then-unknown Thomas Dolby, who described the experience as “very productive.” He noted in his 2018 memoir The Speed of Sound that “I gained the utmost respect for Mick Jones, a thoroughly decent bloke, as well as for Mutt Lange's amazing production skills. Nevertheless, among the “two or three gems” that Lange picked out was the beginning of the song “Urgent.” “I had the riff starting out," Jones recalled. The guitarist admitted that Lange “did challenge me” from the start, and “there were definitely ideas that I never would have played for anybody.”
