Beautiful losers
Six-disc trawl through Mott’s back pages. By John Harris. Mott The Hoople Mental Train: The Island Years 1969-71 UNIVERSAL/ISLAND. CD
TO GET a flavour of Mott The Hoople’s pre-fame period, you could go straight to the opening verses of their career-closing 1974 single Saturday Gig, and Ian Hunter’s memories of a spell in commercial purgatory when he and his compadres “slipped down snakes into yesterday’s news”. That song lasts a little over four minutes. Here, Mott’s backpages are stretched out over seven and a half hours. Two stories run through everything. One revolves around Guy Stevens, the crazed impresario who wanted Mott to mix Dylan and the Stones, and worked his charges into the kind of frenzies heard on such standout tracks as Rock And Roll Queen and Walkin’ With A Mountain. The other sub-plot centres on tensions between Hunter and guitarist/co-vocalist Mick Ralphs, whose later role at the core of Bad Company revealed their artistic gulf. The over-arching story is of creative travails, and plenty of wrong turns – but also of a band finding its identity. On Mott’s self-titled first album, Hunter sounds so Dylanesque it’s almost funny – whereas on its follow-up, 1970’s Mad Shadows, he is audibly starting to find himself. 1971’s Wildlife finds him taking something of a backseat as Ralphs channels the aesthetics of Laurel Canyon circa ’69, though you can hear the former’s confidence building, not least on Angel Of Eighth Avenue, and the wonderfully downcast Waterlow, Hunter’s first great song. By way of a grand finale, Brain Capers (also 1971) finds the band’s talent tantalisingly close to fruition – most obviously on The Journey, the look back over his shoulder that still stands as one of Mott’s greatest achievements. Outtakes woven around this stuff are often fascinating – never more so than on the unreleased material such as Hunter’s hitherto-unheard songs Can You Sing The Song That I Sing and I’m A River. The first lasts for nearly 16 minutes; the second just under 11. Both are tentative and apparently unfinished, but full of auguries of the glories to come, pointing ahead to such melancholic later triumphs as Hymn For The Dudes, Trudi’s Song, and his late-’70s solo masterpiece Ships. By contrast, the in-concert CD conveys insane energy, collective power, and the devotion of Mott’s audience. Along with the cream of the studio material, it reveals itself anew as Hunter’s later source material: the musical story that his own writing went on to mythologise, as he conveyed the idea that failure and struggle are actually what the romance of music is all about. “Rock’n’roll’s a loser’s game,” he sang on The Ballad Of Mott The Hoople, “It mesmerises and I can’t explain/The reason for the sights and the sounds.” Immerse yourself in this flawed, questing, heady music, and you’ll quickly understand.