Mick Jones isn’t the sort of man who usually lets himself be bullied into things. The genteel Englishman’s aristocratic air hides a steeliness that helped him rise from hired gun in the 60s to leader of one of the biggest rock bands of the late 70s and early 80s. But when producer Mutt Lange demanded in the summer of 1980 that Jones play him all the ideas he had for his band Foreigner’s fourth album, the guitarist decided to comply.
“I’d never done that before, but I sat down and played him this tape of stuff I had, even though it was all unfinished,” Jones says today. “There was one little idea on there that I thought sounded like The Shadows, but he went: ‘What’s that?’ I didn’t think it was much, but he spotted it right away. It ended up being the intro to Urgent.”
