MOTT THE HOOPLE All The Young Dudes
“Hey you! You with the glasses! I want you!”
Hard to believe that it’s 50 years since Mott The Hoople, tired of slogging around the circuit for no reward, decided to split up. Of course, it’s also 50 years since David Bowie stepped in at the last minute and offered the band a new song, All The Young Dudes (after they’d famously turned down Suffragette City), which changed the band’s fortunes for ever. Dudes is one of the great rock anthems, the glam-rock Like A Rolling Stone, and the perfect song for Mott, who may have been a bit old for the sentiments (they were more like the brother back at home with his Beatles and his Stones than the glittered-up kids in the song), but brought to it a grungy soul (and a world-beating talk-over finale by Hunter) that Bowie’s version lacked. Bowie himself would move on after the band turned down follow-up Drive-In Saturday (causing him to shave off his eyebrows in a sulk, he later claimed) but then 1972 was his great year (as well as Dudes, Bowie also had the Ziggy album, and Reed’s ‘Transformer’ under his production belt).
Dudes was Mott The Hoople’s biggest hit, and the new album, on new label CBS, with shiny production by Bowie and his sideman Mick Ronson, fell into place with ease. Lou Reed turned up to be impressed by Mott’s version of his Sweet Jane. Mick Ralphs introduced both the hefty Ready For Love and the great One Of The Boys (later recycled as Can’t Get Enough for Bad Company). Ian Hunter wrote Sea Diver, one of the greatest of his great ballads. As an album it’s pretty good, but as a handbook for Mott’s future — mixing the Dylan-singsStones heaviness of their late-60s work with the pop snap of early-70s glam to create something new — it’s fantastic. Even better Mott The Hoople albums would come, but ‘All The Young Dudes’ is the template for everything that followed, even down to releasing Ian Hunter’s hitherto unknown talent for writing classic three-minute singles.
The extras on this limited-edition double CD are mostly familiar — different takes and so forth — but fans will delight in the Tippins tracks, rocking covers sung by road manager and original Mott vocalist Stan Tippins on a night when Bowie didn’t turn up and the band didn’t want to waste studio time.