Nineteen-seventy-three was a peak year for Mott The Hoople, boosted by classic hits that, while reaffirming the band as glam originals shot through with latent mania, displayed a new sensitivity, wisdom and feel for killer, era-defining singles. They still sported the longest hair, the loudest amps and the tallest platforms, but that July’s Mott was their state-of-the-nation masterpiece that ultimately trounced any trend.
“We didn’t invent glam rock; it was there so we went for it,” declares Ian Hunter, former Mott leader and still, at 79, the perennially be-shaded rocker. “We knew that was what it was going to take at that time. David [Bowie] and Roxy [Music] were doing it, and a lot of pop bands were doing it badly, but we were classy. Sad day when we came down off those shoes.”
Britain’s wildest live attraction, by ’73 Mott had released four albums on Island that failed to sell: the Dylan-drenched Mott The Hoople (1969); the near-psychotic Mad Shadows (1970); the lighter Wildlife (1971); and the punk-presaging Brain Capers (1971). Disillusioned, the band broke up in March ’72, only to be rescued by Bowie, who gifted them All The Young Dudes, that summer’s anthem, and produced the same-titled album.
Opting to break from Bowie and losing organist Verden Allen, they produced Mott and ’73’s chart-scaling singles Honaloochie Boogie (May, No 12), All The Way From Memphis (August, No 10) and Roll Away The Stone (November, No 8). They recruited loony guitarist Luther ‘Ariel Bender’ Grosvenor after Mick Ralphs left to start Bad Company, then keyboard maestro Morgan Fisher.
Mott then undertook one of the year’s most successful UK tours in November, supported by the then-near-unknown Queen, but started losing their shine after ’74’s The Hoople led to Bender being replaced by Mick Ronson. In November, Hunter left with Ronson, commencing the rollercoaster solo career that continues well into the 21st century with his Rant Band and late-period golden run of exquisitely-crafted albums.
RC catches Hunter at home in upstate New York, where he is enjoying a year off to write songs, only broken by a recent
run of Mott gigs that conjoined Grosvenor and Fisher with his Rant Band. Still in the spotlight thanks to the republication of his acclaimed tour memoir Diary Of A Rock ’N’ Roll Star (first published in 1974) and the Mental Train (The Island Years 1969-1971) box set (compiled by this writer, formerly the head of Mott’s UK fanclub), Hunter is relaxed, obliging and humorous as we trace his evolution from nascent rocker to one of the UK’s venerable living songwriters.
Your life is a game of two halves: early days slogging the circuit, the Star Club, working with Billy Fury and in factories. Then, at 30 years old in 1969, Guy Stevens picked you for Mott and you never looked back.
It really started with Bill Farley at Regent Sound, where me and Miller Anderson used to make demos. They say I answered an ad in Melody Maker but I didn’t. Bill rang up and said, “These weird blokes are here looking for a singer. They’ve tried everybody else!” That was Bill. He came from Dalston and looked both ways before he even spoke to you.
I remember doing [Sonny Bono’s] Laugh At Me and they were very non-committal.
I felt very uncomfortable. In a moment of panic, I said, “I can do this bass solo” and killed it off completely. Guy rang me a couple of days later and said, “You don’t look good. We’ll get you a suit.” He took me to a tailor and Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks was playing. It was like the perfect day: listening to Madame George and getting measured up. That was probably the biggest thing that had ever happened to me. Then I’m in and half of them don’t like me. That went on for about nine months before we cleared it up.
Since we last spoke we’ve lost Pete (Overend Watts, Mott bassist) and Buff (Dale “Buffin” Griffin, drums), who
I remember as robust country boys.
I was older than all of them by far. Who’d have thought? It’s ridiculous.
You recorded the debut album before playing gigs. By early December Mott had become the wildest band on the circuit.
Yeah, I started off on piano, because that’s how it was gonna be, then Guy came in
and went through a phase where he wanted me out. He wanted a frontman like Jagger.
I just thought, “I’ll have a go, then.”
At Letchworth, I opened my big mouth and said, “I’m singing this and the light ain’t
on me.” The audience went, “Ohhh”.
I thought, “That’s cool, that works.” I got
a bit arrogant after that. Jerry Lee Lewis was my focal point in that area. I don’t think
an audience likes to be served, they like to
be led. I learned that night that you can do this and not get kicked in the teeth. Guy
was happy and on we went.
Mott was initially a vehicle for Guy’s vision: there he is on the box set and he can’t sing!
That was part of his angst: “Why do I have to do this through other people? I know what to do!” He couldn’t do it. He’d launch in trying to illustrate something and we’d go, “Oh no, Guy!”
When he burst into song it was hilarious. He was incensed because he couldn’t play anything. He was like Phil Spector without the musical knowledge, but he had the same grandiose [ideas].
It was more his knack for pulling things out of you, like When My Mind’s Gone on Mad Shadows.
I found it very flattering that he would take the time and trouble to make me better. Everybody has their hopes and dreams, but they’re buried. That’s to do with lack of confidence, being told you’re crap. I thought I was crap. It took a long time for me to get it together. But Guy made you believe in yourself as opposed to putting you down.
At that moment, I became his vehicle.
This intense songwriting apprenticeship saw you writing Waterlow and Angel Of Eighth Avenue within two years.
That was just confidence. Guy telling you, “You can do it, you’re good”, when you don’t think you are. With that confidence you start branching out a little bit.
The relentless bad press contributed to Mott’s (punk-predicting) desperado outlaw image, culminating in Brain Capers, like Custer’s last stand.
Yeah, in every department it was Custer’s last stand. The press, Island, everybody was fed up with us. The gigs were okay but we knew that would only last so long. In those days you had to have a hit or they would go away.
Throughout their five-year existence, Mott had this wild reputation, more than any other UK band. How did that happen?
We played flat-out rock’n’roll, 110%. That’s the only way we knew. People were going nuts; riots, all that kind of stuff. If we got bored, we’d just speed it up. Nobody else was doing that. Very powerful band – legions of dedicated fans.
You split in March ’72, and along came Bowie to commence phase two.
That was Switzerland. Island sent us to play those tin gas tanks, like the ones in England. You can’t play in them things, it’s ridiculous. Then we split up. I remember Buff bought
a chunk of hash. He always denied it but what’s wrong with that?
We became total buddies on the way home from the split: “Why couldn’t we be like this yesterday?” I guess the heat was off. Then Pete rang up David for a gig.
When I ran your fan-club and visited (management company) MainMan it always seemed like Bowie’s success had taken everybody by surprise.
The office was run by fans. I guess they were cheaper. Nobody knew what the fuck they were doing, which was kind of nice, too.
Later on, I was on a plane, coming back from New York. Johnny Rotten was on it
and came over to me. We got talking and
he had [lived at] No 1 Gunter Grove. I said, “That’s Bowie’s old place,” and he didn’t
even know.
Wasn’t Bowie always bombing off somewhere while producing the All
The Young Dudes LP?
No, no. David was always there, full stop.
He was coming to rehearsals. That’s how we chose the songs. He was fucking great; chuffed he was making a breakthrough but very unselfish. He could be a pain the arse but I couldn’t have done what he did, give stuff away.
Did you really turn down Drive-In Saturday because you didn’t want to continue in Bowie’s shadow?
No, it wasn’t that at all. In retrospect, I think it was [MainMan’s Tony] Defries. [Bowie] said he offered it to us and we said, “No.” I don’t remember that. Tony probably wanted him to keep the song and told him, “No, they don’t want it.” My take was, “Defries didn’t want us to do it.” Bowie’s was. “He’s shaving off his fucking eyebrows,” so something happened in between.
But that did motivate you to do Mott.
It was fucking scary because it was like, “If David’s there they can do it.” Me and Mick [Ralphs, guitar] were both frantically trying to write stuff so we wouldn’t be one-hit-wonders.
You were with MainMan when you did
the US tour in Diary Of A Rock ’N’ Roll Star. How does it feel reading what you wrote 46 years ago?
I read the back end and it feels like I wrote
it yesterday. I think and write the same way now as I did then. I don’t know if that’s
a good or bad thing. I just thought it was humorous, not to be taken too seriously;
little bits here and there, incidental stuff.
The Ballad Of Mott The Hoople marked
a new, self-examining era for your ballads.
That was because I had nothing else to write about: my experience was nothing other than the band. I started writing another one yesterday called The Third Rail. You’re the first one I told. It’s nice. Having said that,
it’ll probably die a horrible death and never
see the light of day.
The Mott album was sink or swim.
We were looking for producers. We wanted [Gary Glitter’s] Mike Leander cos he was getting great sounds but everybody was busy. Roxy were in Air 1 and we were in Air 2 for maybe three days with [producer] Bill Price.
We hardly knew how good he was. Brian Eno came in and said, “What do you want
a producer for? This sounds great.” That was all we needed so we just carried on as we were and that’s how the Mott thing got done. Mick [Ralphs] and I fell out over Violence.
I was a bit out of it, and he might have mentioned it, and I might have taken umbrage… And then he’s not there for the mix, playing it for Columbia. Columbia flipped when they heard it but he thought it was more my input than his on that record, which it was, so there you go. That was the end of the original Mott The Hoople, really; Guy’s Mott The Hoople.
I remember the day in ’73 in Air Studios when you all heard Mott for the first time as a sequenced album. There was definitely triumph in the air.
Yeah, all the Island records had been leading up to it… whoo! This is chart material as opposed to under-the-radar stuff. It proved we could do it.
All The Way From Memphis was like
a continuation of the book…
I had that for about six months but couldn’t get words. It sounds like it’s a nice little rocker, no probs, but it was fucking hard work. …Memphis took forever. Sometimes you have to persevere.
After that was a hit you seemed to tap into the spirit of ’73 and master the art of writing hit singles.
I actually said that to [PR] Tony Brainsby.
I regretted it the moment it came out of my mouth because the minute you get cocky about something like that, you’re done.
But I did feel I had the formula. The Rolling Stones had the formula for god knows how long; we had it for a couple of years. It’s a great feeling, but I was exhausting my options.
A lot of that stuff was written on piano.
I had a piano in my flat. The white notes went, so now I was into black notes. Memphis and Roll Away The Stone were written on sharps and flats and I didn’t know where anything was so I didn’t know what was relevant. Everything was an adventure. By the time Roll Away The Stone was done, maybe the middle of Golden Age Of Rock
& Roll, I’d exhausted the black notes as well! Now I didn’t know where to go.
It was still a great time for the band:
Top Of The Pops every week, it seemed.
I was doing good then, cos I had Roll Away The Stone in the can. We didn’t put it on Mott cos we knew we were alright but we didn’t know what would happen on The Hoople. But we knew we had a hit with Roll Away The Stone. Then Golden Age Of Rock & Roll came along, and we knew we were alright with that.
You had a more difficult time recording The Hoople. First Verden ‘Phally’ Allen went, then Ralpher. It was a changed band.
With Ralphs going it was like, “For fuck’s sake!” He couldn’t make up his mind. We did a US tour and you could see he was struggling with it. After he finally left,
we didn’t have long to figure this out.
Plus, we were opening at the Hollywood Palladium in a couple of weeks. Panic stations. Now, I would’ve died, but then, when you’re young, you don’t give a shit. Luther [Grosvenor, guitar] dove in and it
was fine. Enter Bender [Grosvenor’s pseudonym was Ariel Bender].
On the ’73 tour he came like a shot in
the arm with this manic energy, but he couldn’t rise to the occasion in the studio.
He was a different sort of guitar player. He didn’t really write. When he joined Mott,
he invented this Ariel Bender persona. Luther was amazing onstage – a totally crazed individual – and we had a routine going where he wanted to be me, and he wanted the middle of the stage, and there was all this pushing and shoving. It started getting a little showbizzy, but it was fun. We used to come offstage in he US – now we were doing big places, 10,000 [people], sometimes 20,000. The press would be waiting out there for me and Luther to fight so we’d go in the locker rooms and just kick lockers for about 10 minutes, so they all thought we were having
a fight, daft stuff like that.
You were supported by Queen on the late ’73 British tour, then again in the US…
You’ve got to go everywhere in the States; it’s a big country. I remember Fred [Mercury], when Queen were opening for us, marching up and down going, “When will these silly bastards get it?” We’d only been there five minutes. I said, “Fred, it’s 300 million people. You’ve got to go around at least three times before it gets through.” But he wanted it then.
Overend took the glam image about as far (and high) as it could go. Then there were those amazing guitars.
He’d be six foot but used to wear monster [boots] and the silver hair. He’d use car spray: totally mad. We weren’t daft, we could see the funny side of it, but we still did it.
After Ronson replaced Bender, the haircuts came like a disavowal of 1973’s glam excesses.
New Mick, new everything. I looked in the mirror and I looked bald and fat. No hair;
it just seemed ridiculous to me [laughs]. We knew we had to do it. It wasn’t going to go on much longer. But doing it was another thing altogether.
Then it finished, after (1974 single) Saturday Gigs failed to dent the Top 30 and with a UK tour cancelled.
The band and Mick didn’t get on. I really didn’t get it. We were probably one
of the best guitar bands in Britain, with an amazing arranger. Why the in-fighting? It was difficult enough without the in-bitching. I just thought, “If this is what it is, fuck it.”
It’s been reported the songs on your first solo album (1975’s self-titled LP) were a spill-over from Mott’s next record (1975’s Drive On, their first without Hunter).
That’s not really true. We went in with a set of songs and came out with a completely different set of songs. Once Bitten Twice Shy and I Get So Excited were written in there, Lounge Lizard being the exception.
All American Alien Boy (1976) was your first record as a US resident.
I wanted a bit more respect. Of course,
I never got it! I never understood why it bombed so tragically. I guess it wasn’t what people wanted.
You weren’t happy with (’77’s) Overnight Angels, produced by Roy Thomas Baker.
It wasn’t Roy’s fault. It was my fault. It
was fabricated.
You’re Never Alone With A Schizophrenic (1979) was your best yet, and
was acclaimed.
That tells you what happened there. I learned a lot from Overnight Angels and it paid off with …Schizophrenic.
Then you worked with Clash guitarist Mick Jones on Short Back ’N’ Sides (1981, working title Haircut).
Schizophrenic was doing well but now
I couldn’t write anything. Me and Mick [Ronson] were bored with each other, we’d toured ourselves stupid. I’d written this song, Theatre Of The Absurd. We knew it was reggae but didn’t know much about it, so
I said, “Why don’t we get Mick Jones in?” Mick was kind of like Guy, but obviously more musically adept. We just thought we’d get his energy in because we didn’t have any, and let him get on with it.
After All The Good Ones Are Taken (1983) you didn’t record again until Y U I Orta with Ronson in 1989. Then another gap till Dirty Laundry (1995) and The Artful Dodger (1996). You once told me it took Mick Ronson’s death in ’93 to get you serious again.
Me and Mick were fed up with what was going on in the music biz. There’s certain periods of your life when you can’t keep up. It was hard getting back. There’s a song
I wrote around 1990 called Now Is The Time. It was like, “Oh, that’s what it was.” I’d been writing songs like Tin Pan Alley; mathematical problems that had to be solved. They weren’t coming from the heart. I got Now Is The Time just before the Freddie Mercury tribute thing [1992]. I was so excited I’d got this song, I played it to Brian [May] and Roger [Taylor]. I don’t think they got it, but they were really nice. It’s simple, from the heart, and it says something;
one of the best things I ever wrote – and nobody fucking notices it. From then on,
it was, “Now you gotta beat that.”
By now I was so far off the planet there was no way I was going to get a deal. Some bloke said, “Come and do three gigs in England; 10 grand.” That’s when I started thinking I could ease my way back in. I was basically starting again – motivation it itself. It’s not easy when you’re 50. It’s a young man’s game.
Your passion was back on Rant (2001).
That’s [producer] Andy York. He rang and asked me to come down to this gig at the Bowery Ballroom. I was there in the afternoon. This guy got up, great guitar player, sexy sort of singer. I’ve always worked with singer-guitar players. I met him afterwards and it was Andy York, John Mellencamp’s guy. Mellencamp was out solid so I had to wait nine months. Andy wanted to do it so I started to get Rant together. By the time he’d finished touring it was ready.
It opened the gate to your 21st century purple patch and proved that people of later years could still show the youngsters a thing or two.
That was the idea, yeah. Old guys rule! No,
I don’t wanna take anything away from kids – it’s hard enough – but why can’t we?
The real run began with Shrunken Heads (2007), then Man Overboard (2009), When I’m President (2012) and Fingers Crossed (2016).
Look, it’s gotta be good. I ain’t got far to fall, know what I mean? A big band has a long way to fall. If you’re halfway up, it’s shorter!
You’re the only one who could get away with writing a song about Bowie after he passed (Dandy on Fingers Crossed).
That was sheer luck. Years ago, I was watching TV when Judy Garland died. Mickey Rooney came on Johnny Carson and said, “This is a tribute to Judy” and stood there with his arms in the air going, “Judy, Judy, Judy!” If you’re gonna talk about somebody who’s passed, there’s a lot of places you don’t go. He went to every single fucking one!
I learned a lot from that. It’s an insult to the person’s memory.
Dandy captured what it felt like following Bowie and Mott: “the last bus.”
“Then we caught the last bus home” was
my favourite thing on it, ’cos I used to do that. It’s written through the eyes of a fan, not me. That’s what you always try and do
as a writer; try and find those lines. Everybody can relate to something like that.
You once told me, “I’ll keep doing this until I start falling apart.” You’re facing
80 but still doing it.
Yeah, I’m sitting on about six or seven [songs] right now. It’s coming along nice.
I look at meself and think, “You’re joking. This is fucking ridiculous!”
Diary Of A Rock’N’Roll Star is published by Omnibus Press. Mental Train (The Island Years 1969-1971) is released by Universal.
