Highway To Mutt – Hocus is the only recording band who listed Robert John "Mutt" Lange as an official member. His first wife Stevie was the lead singer. They were based in South Africa. Lange himself was born in what used to be known as Northern Rhodesia. It became Zambia in 1964 after gaining its independence from Britain. Lange was born in Mufulira, now situated in Zambia's Copperbelt province. You can probably guess why they call it Copperbelt. There's a bunch of copper mines there. Zambia, in fact, is the world's ninth-largest producer of copper. In the late '60s it was the fourth-largest. The last couple of years have been a little tough on the copper mining industry of Zambia because in December 2014 the government raised the royalties on open-pit mining operations to 20%. It had previously been 6%. Companies stopped operations for a time at a major mine in Lumwana, west of Mufulira, because of the rate hike. The following April the government, under newly elected President Edgar Lungu, dropped plans for the 20% increase and set it back to 9%. But then the price of copper went plummeting because China, the world's biggest buyer of copper, cut their demands for copper by a sizable margin. As a result many of Zambia's copper mining towns are suffering through a major recession.
So, hopefully this report on the Zambian copper situation will spur you to take an interest in the situation, or at the very least help atone for the fact that I found almost no additional information about Hocus.
