Hit Parade | Pour Some Sugar on Me Edition Part 1

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4 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 15 November 2025

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When you hear the term “superproducer,” names like George Martin, Quincy Jones, Max Martin, Pharrell Williams or Missy Elliott might come to mind. But … Robert “Mutt” Lange? Probably not. Yet Lange was by some measures the biggest hitmaker—the producer of more top-selling albums than any of those better-known producers. The South African studio wiz crafted the arena-rock sound of AC/DC and Def Leppard. Then, Lange transformed the Cars, Billy Ocean, Bryan Adams, and Shania Twain into fist-pumping stadium-fillers, too. Join Chris Molanphy as he traces Mutt Lange’s legacy of loud—and his uncanny success on the pop charts. He poured sugar on every hit. Podcast production by Kevin Bendis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there, hit parade listeners. What you're about to hear is part one of this episode. Part two will
0:07.0	arrive in your podcast feed at the end of the month. Would you like to hear this episode all at
0:12.2	once the day it drops? Sign up for Slate Plus. It supports not only this show, but all of Slate's
0:19.6	acclaimed journalism and podcasts.
0:22.5	Just go to slate.com slash hit parade plus.
0:26.9	You'll get to hear every hit parade episode in full the day it arrives.
0:32.0	Plus, Hit Parade The Bridge, our bonus episodes, with guest interviews, deeper dives on our episode topics,
0:39.8	and pop chart trivia. Once again, to join that's slate.com slash hit parade plus. Thanks. And now,
0:48.6	please enjoy part one of this hit parade episode.
1:09.0	Music one of this Hit Parade episode. Welcome to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate magazine about the hits from coast to coast.
1:17.6	I'm Chris Malanfi, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number One series?
1:24.1	On today's show, 37 years ago, in March of 1988, British hard rock band
1:31.9	Death Leopard were scoring the first top 10 American pop hit of their career when hysteria,
1:40.2	the title track from their latest smash album rose to number 10 on Billboard's Hot 100.
1:47.4	Their breakthrough hit sounded sleek and polished.
2:00.5	That same week on the pop chart, five spots higher and rising, was a more danceable,
2:08.4	exuberant and very kitschy song by Trinidadian R&B singer Billy Ocean. It was his comeback to the charts after a string of mid-80s hits,
2:21.0	and he was a couple of weeks away from scoring another number one. The punchy, knowingly silly name
2:29.2	of the song at number five that week, get out of My Dreams, Get Into My Car.
2:36.0	Get Out of my dreams.
2:40.0	Get into my car.
2:44.0	On the surface, these hits wouldn't seem to have much in common.
	...

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