The song that made David Bowie hate Mott the Hoople
It can be argued that the genius of David Bowie was too much for just one career. Throughout his time in the spotlight, many of Bowie’s greatest works ended up resulting in entirely different projects, either helping Lou Reed realise his glam rock potential with Transformer or turning Iggy Pop’s solo career into one of the greatest resurgences that the proto-punk genre had ever seen. While Bowie could wear many different musical hats to achieve his vision, he always felt at home with glam rock.
Before he had adopted his rock and roll alien persona, Bowie was already fascinated with taking music in new directions. Coming from the world of abstract art, he had the idea of combining elements of theatre into his work, including sculpting the idea of a persona when working on the album Hunky Dory.
While the experimentation would birth the fantastic track ‘Life on Mars?’, Bowie wanted to take everything one step further with Ziggy Stardust. In his new persona’s namesake album, he plays with elements of punk, rock and roll, and glamorous androgyny at every turn, offering up epic ballads like ‘Five Years’ alongside sweeping rock and roll tracks like ‘Suffragette City’.
Around the same time, Bowie was also interested in working some of his magic with Mott the Hoople. Known as one of the lower lights of the British blues rock scene, the band would get a massive makeover when Bowie offered them ‘All the Young Dudes’, resulting in them becoming one of the biggest glam acts alongside Bowie.
For all the favours they got from their famous friend, Ian Hunter wanted to let the world know that Bowie didn’t invent the band. Throughout recording albums like Mott, the group wanted to branch out with their original material like ‘All the Way to Memphis’, which meant rejecting one of Bowie’s future hits.
Looking to bring Ziggy to America, Bowie’s following album, Aladdin Sane, featured the song ‘Drive-In Saturday’, which was slated for Mott the Hoople before they rejected it. After bringing them into the limelight, the lines were drawn between Bowie and Mott the Hoople for the rest of the 1970s, with Bowie going so far as to shave off his eyebrows in protest.
Even though the song might not have been the best fit for Mott the Hoople, ‘Drive-In Saturday’ perfectly fits what Bowie was trying to express on Aladdin Sane. Picking up on the dystopian theme, most of the track revolves around the various lustful escapades Bowie’s characters find themselves in, including learning how to fornicate again by watching videos of how it used to be done.
Granted, Mott the Hoople wouldn’t flame out after ‘The Starman’ flew away. Across their next few albums, tracks like ‘The Golden Age of Rock and Roll’ got them back in touch with their roots as a rock and roll act, earning them fans in aspiring artists like Joe Elliott of Def Leppard, who would go on to cover the song with his outfit years later. Bowie may not have wanted to work with his contemporaries for a while, but sometimes, it’s better to get two great acts for the price of one.
