50 years on from Mott the Hoople’s masterpiece ‘All the Young Dudes’
Brian Eno once said, “I was talking to Lou Reed the other day, and he said that the first Velvet Underground record sold only 30,000 copies in its first five years. Yet, that was an enormously important record for so many people. I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band!” Thus, it seems fitting that when David Bowie resurrected Mott the Hoople from the ash heap of history that they opened their soaring phoenix record with a cover of ‘Sweet Jane’.
It would seem that looking back, Velvet fanatic David Bowie was determined not to see the Hoople become the latest rock ‘n’ roll suicide whose flame flicked out before their moment in the moonlight arrived. At first, he offered them the as yet unreleased ‘Suffragette City’. They turned it down. Then he offered them ‘All the Young Dudes’. They accepted, and the rest, as they say, is ancient history.
Other than saving a band he admired, Bowie did this as a way to Svengali music in a more exotic direction. Mott the Hoople were trying to do something, and their glamorous approach might’ve largely gone unrealised at this point, but Bowie saw something glinting in it. Thus, it represented a fresh creative avenue for him.
This move is key to understanding the way that Bowie approached his work. “I was never unaware of my strength as an interpretive performer,” he once opined, “but writing a song for me, it never rang true. I had no problem writing something for, or working with Lou Reed, or writing for Mott the Hoople. I can get into their mood and what they want to do, but I find it extremely hard to write for me.”
As a producer, Bowie is wildly underrated (I still opine that Iggy Pop’s ‘Nightclubbing’ still features some of the finest production work ever), but that wasn’t the crux of his involvement on this occasion. All the Young Dudessoars on sex appeal and that swaggering sense of sultriness is a realm that Bowie would purr his into. Thunderously fresh, the album heralded glam rock’s collision with Black Sabbath beef in a powerful fist.
With only eight tracks, All the Young Dudes offers up a whirlwind of fresh attitude. It’s a fractious affair, the lyrics don’t always land, and parts of it seem oddly derivative in retrospect, but there is also a weird prescience for it in so many different areas—it’s like a smorgasbord of what was to come. And it’s a revving up for Saturday piece of wonder.
