Mott The Hoople
“Bowie persuaded Ian Hunter he had to write hit singles. Before, it was just good songs.” The making of The Hoople.
Following the departure of band founder and co-songwriter Mick Ralphs to form Bad Company, the making of what became Mott The Hoople’s final album looked uncertain. Yet despite its chaotic birth, The Hoople provided a glorious full stop to the band’s career.
It’s December 14, 1973, and Ian Hunter is sitting in Mott The Hoople’s dressing room at the Hammersmith Odeon, tuning his guitar, minding his own business. The band have just finished their 6pm set, added by popular demand, and have scarpered to the bar, or to catch support act Queen, leaving Hunter to focus on the 9pm show. He’s doing what Hunter does: getting that balance of adrenaline and nervous excitement. Suddenly the door is flung open. “I hear, ‘Ooh, look ’oo’s preparin’ to face his public then!’ And it’s ’im – Mick Jagger with David [Bowie]. I said, ‘Well, you’re not doin’ so bad yourself after ten years.’”
And so the banter went on. “It was a great moment for me cos I’ve always admired Mick. He’s the governor general, really, and that’s what I try to do.”
His starry visitors are high on life and fame. Though Bowie killed Ziggy Stardust in the same venue five months ago, he’s continued his meteoric rise with the Pin-Ups album and the Sorrow single. The Rolling Stones have dropped Goat’s Head Soup. But now it’s Mott’s turn. Their single, Roll Away The Stone, Mick Ralphs’ last significant contribution before his departure to form Bad Company with Paul Rodgers, has careered to No.8 in the chart. The endless years of live slog and the little matter of their transformation after All The Young Dudes has paid off.
Mott are rock stars, finally.
During the second show, Hunter announces that Roll Away The Stone has sold 200,000 copies and there’s a riot in the £1 stall seats. Bowie and Jagger stroll around the stage, marvelling at the Hoople’s flamboyant ferocity and Hunter’s stagecraft. If Bowie harbours any resentment at the fact that Hunter messed around with his second gift, Drivein Saturday, before discarding the demo, he doesn’t let on, and Jagger’s seen it all before. When relative newcomer guitarist Ariel Bender takes a pause during the reflective song Rose, Jagger calls out, “’Ere, you got forty minutes to go, you lazy sods.”
Come midnight and Mott are still on stage so the management pull the curfew plug and lower the fire safety curtain. Second new recruit, keyboard player Morgan Fisher, pushes his piano in the way and all hell breaks loose with a full-scale stage invasion by the lieutenants and Hot Motts, vainly repulsed by zealous bouncers. A contemporary review wisely notes: “This will surely go down as one of the historical gigs when the annals of rock and roll are finally compiled. At the final judgement, Mott will be tried and not found wanting. It was their coming of age, just as All The Young Dudes was their arrival at the age of consent.”
Indeed, they were immaculate that night. The hours of rehearsals at ELP’s Manticore Studios in Fulham paid off. Queen will never support anyone again but tonight they too watch on enthralled, taking mental notes, turning slightly green. Before Mott hit the stage, their intro music is Gustav Holst’s Jupiter,
The Bringer Of Jollity from The Planets.
At the aftershow party, which doubles as drummer Dale ‘Buffin’ Griffin’s wedding reception, guests include
Jagger and Bowie, Mick Ralphs and Paul Rodgers, a couple of Roxys, original manager Guy Stevens, and Columbia labelmate, MOR god Andy Williams.
A day later, Hunter meets his publicist Tony Brainsby. “I made a fatal error. I walked into his office and said, ‘I’ve got the formula. I’ve cracked it.’ And that was the minute I stopped having the formula.”
But remember: this is the peak of the glam rock era. When Mott play Stone on Top Of The Pops, drummer Buffin smacks his kit with two pool cues. Other acts on the agenda are Slade, Sweet,
Alvin Stardust, Wizzard, Mud, Roxy Music and, er, Gary Glitter. It seems like everyone in the country under the age of 16 is walking around in satin and tat. Mott more likely agree with John Lennon’s sneer that “glam rock is just rock’n’roll with lipstick” but they don’t mind rummaging in the dressing-up box, encouraged by Pete Overend Watts’ view that visuals make the music.
On stage, Hunter and Bender have perfected a play act that involves a lot of pushing, shoving and mock fingerwagging from the lead singer. They’ve got the shoulder pads and the thigh-high silver platform boots, even though they resemble five hod-carriers from the West Midlands and the Welsh Marches.
Hunter and Bender are firm pals by now and, along with their wives, they enjoy a brief holiday in Bermuda, recharging in preparation for their seventh album, prosaically called The Hoople since its predecessor was Mott.
Speaking today from his home in New Milford, Connecticut, Hunter laughs:
“We must have been stuck for a title!
But in retrospect it was so different to the Mott album, which was geared to the original band. The Hoople is like the second half. I’d lost my writing partner in Mick [Ralphs]. We’d always kept it quite simple but left to my own devices I started experimenting, pitting cellos against saxes. And given our success, we could afford to try stuff out.”
In January 1974, a new-look Mott The Hoople began sessions. They wanted to use George Martin’s AIR Studios’ No.2 room. It was taken. They opted instead
for Advision in London’s Fitzrovia, which boasted a state-of-the-art 20-channel Neve Console. The band found the place too claustrophobic and clinical and by February they were back at AIR and in the comfort of their favourite engineer, Bill Price.
Problems mounted, though. The Advision tapes were incompatible. With most of the album done, it was deemed too late to scrap and start again and CBS Records were hovering at the door demanding product, pronto.
Hunter has said of this period that he suffered a temporary writer’s block and now he says his memory of The Hoople is “a bit hazy. I remember not getting Price meant we had a bad time to start with. He was the ace up our sleeve – a hot ticket doing Paul McCartney and Wings. We did have Graham Preskett as violinist and conductor. He was an angel. I had no knowledge of written music but he translated my ideas and hired people to play the scores. Those guys are superior musicians who don’t mess with rock’n’roll at all, but Graham wasn’t like that so we struck lucky.
“Bands were leaving odd instruments around so we nicked some tubular bells. We found a marimba and vibes that we used, though we didn’t play ’em. Hire companies would be coming round to get what Marc Bolan, Roxy Music and the Faces had left behind and we’d got them!”
The Hoople took shape now and the band’s mood improved. “AIR was great. We were on the fourth floor where the bathrooms had wall-to-floor windows. If you wanted to, you could have jumped out onto Oxford Circus. Not a great idea. George Martin would come by and sit at the back and say nothing, then he’d disappear. Very enigmatic. It was his studio. He could do what he wanted.”
Maybe he was keeping tabs on his acolyte, Bill Price. Either that or watching Mott self-produce: never an easy thing to do. Given the upheaval, should they have brought in someone new? Hunter isn’t certain. “We did consider getting
Brian Eno who was far more technically gifted, but I don’t think it would have been a good fit. He was all drum machines. Buff wouldn’t have worn that.”
Speaking to Classic Rock from his long-time home in Tokyo, Morgan Fisher remembers the album vividly. “George had obviously taken pity on the children of The Goons [whom he had produced in the pre-Beatles days]. He’d given odd jobs to Sean Milligan [son of Spike and a trainee tape op] and Michael Sellers [son of Peter]. They were funny, charming lads and basically hung around enjoying the music and occasionally making – and smoking – tea.”
There were other visitors. Joe Brown dropped by, as did Roxy Music, who were in Studio 1 recording Country Life. Fisher recalls: “Me and Overend walked into their room dressed as a safari hunter and a cricketer, to the great amusement of Bryan Ferry. Robert Fripp was remixing a King Crimson track, and while doing so gave me and Overend a scholarly lecture on how each key had an associated colour and mood. He was actually a Mott fan and that delighted me because my background prior to joining was progressive rock.”
Fisher was the replacement for Verden Allen, who quit in early 1973. “I answered an advert asking for a keyboard player prepared to go on an American tour,” he says. “That’s why I joined because I’d never been to America. I wasn’t a Mott fan until I started playing with them and realised what a great band they were. My debut was at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago. An amazing gig because Joe Walsh and Barnstorm were headliners and it was a Mott stronghold.
“I shared a flat with Mick Ralphs in Chiswick and we got on fine. I noticed that Paul Rodgers was coming round a lot [his post-Free band Peace supported Mott in 1971] and they were quite secretive. We’d be playing cards and drinking and it seemed like something else was going on, but no plans as far as I heard.”
Ralphs later proclaimed, “I loved Mott. But after the success we became a pop band. Which was great in terms of acceptance and popularity, but
I felt we’d lost some of our wildness and simplicity.”
Fisher says: “When Mick made his announcement it wasn’t a shock, it was a surprise. I was happy that Luther [Ariel Bender] Grosvenor joined because I was a big fan of Spooky Tooth. I started going round to Ian’s humble North London abode. He was hospitable. He also had a shit piano and liked to say that he’d broken all the white keys because it was easier to write on the black ones – less of them. I’m not sure he had. He played me one of the songs that ended up on the album, The Golden Age Of Rock ’n’ Roll, before it had lyrics. His method was to bring a melody and the rhythm then scat over the top. Eventually the words came out. I hadn’t seen anyone do that before but later David Byrne did it for the Talking Heads album Speaking In Tongues in a more self-consciously arty way.
“Ian wanted to play the piano on that song. He’s good at that Jerry Lee Lewis bash. Before I arrived he was playing a lot until Bowie advised him to move out and be the frontman, the figurehead. I asked him to give me a crack at it and he liked what I did, which meant I played nearly all the keyboards on the album. He said, ‘That’s fucking good, better than I can do.’ Job done.”
The Golden Age became the album opener, with searing tenor and baritone sax provided by Howie Casey and Roxy’s Andy Mackay, who was christened Jock McPherson for contractual reasons. Anglo-Indian girl backing singers
Sue Glover and Sunny Leslie gave the track an appropriate swinging sixties vocal glamour.
The even more eccentric Marionette became a centrepiece of the 1974 American and European tours. Hunter pitched the song as an operetta detailing a rock star’s fall from grace, laced with swipes at the rock industry. Mott threw the kitchen sink in, adding more sax and Mike Hurwitz the classical cellist, while Fisher ran his organ through a VCS3 synth – a first for a Mott album.
“It was an exciting song to play,” Hunter says. “I always had a few beers in the studio, which helped lubricate the crazy ideas. I had to conduct Mike Hurwitz because rock was new to him. Preskett did his magical strings arrangement. I suggested lowering the pitch of the ‘Marionette – teacher’s pet’ vocal on the chorus to make them sound unnatural. It was done by speeding up the tape about 15 per cent while recording the vocals, something The Beatles often did.”
If anybody was missing Ralphs, they couldn’t have been disappointed with Ariel Bender’s manic contributions to these two songs. He slashed and burned, prisoners not welcome. Bender/Grosvenor’s role in the making of The Hoople has been compromised by complaints
“When Mick made his announcement to leave, it was a surprise.”
Morgan Fisher
that he was too much of a loose cannon, although his on-stage prowess and ridiculous flamboyance were essential ingredients. Hunter, well used to collaboration, may have found Grosvenor less inclined to come up with creative ideas in the studio. When the album was released, Bender was credited as appearing courtesy of Island Records, which seemed to put distance between him and the others. The Hoople’s main producer was Dale Griffin.
“He [Bender] was the right man, wrong guitarist. Lovely chap. He was a great person to have around. He embraced everybody from the road crew to everyone in the group. But to me, he was playing guitar for a different group. He wasn’t playing for our group. He played for somebody else in his mind. That’s the only explanation because he was so far away from what we wanted it to be.”
Speaking today from his home in Worcester, Luther holds no grudges. “We took The Hoople on tour; we had a smash with Roll Away The Stone… Bloody hell, it was forty-four years ago! I’ll have to make it up! The truth is I’d had five glorious years with Spooky Tooth, gone solo, then briefly been in Stealers Wheel with Gerry Rafferty and Joe Egan and that wasn’t pleasurable. No socialising – just do the show. I left. They were nice guys [he says through gritted teeth] but now I was out of work. Out of the blue, Ian phones me. I knew him from Island Records [when Mott and Spooky Tooth were on the label]. I knew Mick better but Ian says, ‘Let’s meet.’ So we go to the pub and he tells me, ‘We’ve decided you’re going to replace Mick but you’ve got to change your name to Ariel Bender.’”
Hunter, a great admirer of the Spooky Two album, had scanned the odd Grosvenor interview and decided he sounded too much like a stoner. The name Ariel Bender was coined by the late, great Lynsey de Paul after witnessing Ralphs walking down a street in Germany in a strop, snapping car aerials off. It became Luther’s nom de guerre.
“Rather than lose the gig, I said, ‘Alright, call me what you fucking like. Luther doesn’t mind and Ariel’s mad for it.’ I knew I’d get stick for replacing Mick, but it didn’t bother me. I didn’t leave. I joined! My view was, I’m a replacement and it’s a job and I was there for the biggest time of their career in 1973-1974. It was the best two years of my life – if not musically. I was used to the blues rock of Spooky but I loved the boots and the camp. It was a sad old day when we came off those high-heeled shoes.”
Back in the studio, high jinks from the Mott men often interrupted Hunter’s serious business. Advision tape op Hugh Padgham recalled the mounting hysteria.
“Everyone had drunk a few too many ciders and they wanted this song that had a long decrescendo to end with a big crash, but not a cymbal crash. Advision had a tea lady who brought it in on a tin tray. They started hitting it with their fists but that didn’t work – it wasn’t spectacular enough. Pete Watts said, ‘Why doesn’t somebody go out into the room, he can kneel down and I’ll smash the tray on his head? Bender?’”
Ariel stepped forward, ever game. Padgham mic’d his skull up with a Neumann U87 and looked on as Watts did the deed, whacking it over Bender’s head. Wincing in agony, the guitarist shouted, “’Arder, Pete, hit me fuckin’ ’arder!”
Hunter: “It’s a tin tray, right, but it won’t work on a hard surface. Had to be a soft surface, like Luther’s head. I was sitting in the booth watching and laughing cos he’s sitting down and Pete’s really going at it. I asked Luther if he was alright. He was a bit woozy.”
Fisher: “When we mixed the track, it stood alone like a spare prick at a wedding. It was a really wimpy, anticlimactic sound that disappeared once any other instrument was mixed on it. The tea lady wasn’t too pleased though. Pete bent the tray almost double. We had more success recording handclaps in the toilet. The tiled walls made them sound much livelier.”
Comic capers aside, Advision were doing everyone’s head in. Hunter says: “Buff was particularly freaking out because he couldn’t get a drum sound. It got so bad I was pleased to disappear to New York to do a week’s promo. When I got back, there were lawyers everywhere. The band had trashed the studio, smashed up the glass in the booths. Don’t know what the bill was.”
Evicted on their arses, Mott decamped to the safer haven of AIR, and (ab)normal business was resumed. Hunter’s Dylanesque extravaganza Alice was next up, with Fisher’s organ inspired by The Band’s Garth Hudson. “I had the best time playing with Mott. With Queen they wanted perfection – everything had to be the same every night. Mott weren’t like that. We were sloppy like the Stones.”
Crash Street Kidds was punk before punk (The Clash were huge fans), a reminder that The Hoople had not only toured with the New York Dolls, but they’d studied them too. Hunter got in the groove by punching himself in the stomach and insisted on the machine gun effects at the end. Fisher made the singer sound robotic, pushing his vocal through a Leslie cabinet.
Overend brought in Born Late ’58 while Hunter was away in New York. The bass player’s unique Cadillac rock’n’roll song, where he plays rhythm guitar, is of the period.
Hunter’s homage to his wife, Trudi’s Song, is all piano and twelve-strings. The backing vocals sound suspiciously like an uncredited Bowie. Forty-five years later, this ballad is as enduring as Hunter’s marriage.
“Bowie persuaded [Ian Hunter] he had to write hit singles. Before, it was
just good songs.”
Morgan Fisher
Not so much sensitivity on Pearl ’n’ Roy (England). Hunter ripped into the British class system with such venom he made the sentiment of All The Young Dudes sound vanilla.
“It was a fertile period for music,” says
Hunter, who was developing a love-hate relationship with his homeland. “I moved shortly after the Hoople split up. I always thought I’d come back, but I don’t miss it. I’ve had the requisite New York and London periods. I go where the muse guides me. I found I write better in the countryside.”
His finest moment here was probably Through The Looking Glass. “There are a lot more notes on The Hoople – it’s more colourful and varied. This was that time in my life when I wanted to use a lot of chord structures.”
Mott never played it live: “It was just too orchestral” says Fisher. “Graham did a fabulous arrangement – he said he wrote it on the back of a fag packet. He also played the tubular bells at the end. It’s Ian’s epic and it’s got that quiet, intimate verse with a deafening, high-powered chorus, much like the grunge bands did years later.”
Roll Away The Stone was remodelled to become the closing track. At the time Hunter said, “I wrote that around the time of the Mott album, and they said to hold it cos it’s a hit. Mick Ralphs played on that, then we took him off and put Bender on for the album. Bender played the same thing. That’s why the guitar sounds good.”
The Hoople was released on March 29, 1974 and achieved more success in the US than the UK. The Golden Age Of Rock ’n’ Roll single sold well. On the B-side, Rest In Peace, Hunter started dropping hints that he might be off soon – but not yet. The final American tour included five nights at the Uris Theatre on Broadway, and it was madness as usual. Bender recalls: “Every day I was taken there in a big white Cadillac limousine with Union Jacks on it.”
Road manager Stan Tippins kept him company. “Me, him and a chauffeur driver. We stormed up Broadway with all the bells going and people looking on from the sidewalks. It was a wonderful feeling. And Bender was a lovely lad.”
The guitarist noticed, “Ian was under pressure. We were reliant on him.”
Fisher agrees. “Bowie persuaded him he had to write hit singles. Before, it was just good songs.”
The frontman was feeling it too. “To an outsider, it looked like Mott was my group. I remember being in New York and Bowie took me to the Stage Deli on Seventh Avenue and he said, ‘You’ve got to leave this band.’ I got back to the hotel and told them, ‘We’ve got to start making decisions cos David says I should quit.’ Mick said, ‘Like fuck you are,’ and that was the end of that.
“But it was frustrating. It was hard to make decisions. I wasn’t top man. Everyone got their own way. When it came to choosing a song it had to be 5-0. It couldn’t even be 3-2.”
Cracks appeared when the Foxy, Foxy single was only a minor hit. Bender drifted away and was replaced by Mick Ronson in time to record the final single Saturday Gigs. Originally called (Do You Remember) The Saturday Kids, it was erroneously titled Saturday Gig when it was pressed, much to everyone’s annoyance. Fisher says, “Foxy was an attempt to rewrite a Ronettes song [Baby, I Love
You]. It was half-arsed Phil Spector. I put more into Saturday Gigs with epic harmonies and a synth part. When we were ready, Ronno said, ‘Go away, I need to be on my own.’ He didn’t call us in for three days! I thought, ‘It’d better be bloody good.’”
Hunter’s nostalgic lyric seems in retrospect to be Mott’s career obituary, with telling lines like:
‘Did you see the suits and the platform boots in ’74 on the Broadway tour/We didn’t much like dressing up no more/ Don’t wanna be hip, but thanks for a great trip.’
Hunter says: “That was Ronson weaving his magic. Buffin always said it was preferable if I didn’t go to the room or the studio for that one. The idea being I’d listen to what they’d done and go away and find something better. I thought it was gonna be huge and it wasn’t, so that was the end of that.”
Almost. The Uris shows were partially captured on Mott The Hoople Live, alongside some Hammersmith highlights, but by the time of release in November ’74, not only had Hunter left, but he’d been hospitalised in New Jersey, suffering from exhaustion. In 1980, five years on, Hunter’s memory of The Hoople experience wasn’t great.
“This album was the beginning of the end,” he said. “A lot of stupid things were going on. I was real upset with Bender and the trouble was that I liked him a lot. We were working hard, we were successful, but I didn’t like it. I knew I had to find a guitar player, but we were touring constantly so there was no room to stop, get Bender out and put another guy in. I think we knew we were cheating ourselves, that we could only get away with it for so long.”
Today, with the benefit of both hindsight and the passing of time, Hunter is far more conciliatory. “Luther and Morgan were stalwarts, they were such gentlemen. The new reunion is paying them back.”
And The Hoople? “I’ve never bothered to rate the albums against each other,” Hunter says. “Always thought that’s daft. We did ’em, and so be it.”
“I knew I’d get stick for replacing Mick [Ralphs], but it didn’t bother me.”
Luther ‘Ariel Bender’ Grosvenor