Mott the Hoople - All the Young Dudes

 Books don't write themselves is a truth soon universally acknowledged by anybody who ever thought they'd write one. In some jobs the day will pass, whether you achieve anything or not, and you'll get paid at the end of the week, or month but a writer, whether doing it for money or not, is on piece work. If you don't do anything, nothing happens. So although this pop music book won't ever be finished, I do have to keep adding to it, bit by bit. It's already not going to be called 'A Pefect Day of Pop Radio' because that's an awful title but it's indexed here as such. Perhaps it will be called 'Playlist'.

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 It's become traditional by now for commentators on 70's glam rock to cite the moment that David Bowie and Mick Ronson put their arms across each other's shoulders during Starman on Top of the Pops as crucial, ground-breaking and seminal. By all means, Starman was a tremendous record and for those not yet teenagers while The Beatles were still making records, for those capable of intuiting how great Bowie was in the early 70's, he was more important. Maybe a spaceman, maybe transgender, certainly 'art' and definitely a genius at what he did but the anthem he provided for that generation was All the Young Dudes, very graciously given away to workaday Hereford rock band, Mott the Hoople, who might having been touring and going to lots of places but were also going nowhere. It is a measure of Bowie's talent that he could give away such a song, like Lennon & McCartney had given away the likes of World Without Love and Step Inside Love.

I'm sure every new generation of young people feels lost, left out, alienated and under-consulted but pop music has long since given them a vehicle on which to express as much. Bowie's declaration, 'I'm a dude, dad' is an update of the 50's proclamation that 'it's trad, dad' but it can hardly be one's parents' fault that they don't understand your music when it was specifically designed for them not to. The words are a catalogue of the overblown significance of teenage rebellion which admittedly did seem to catch the zeitgeist and be very much the point at the time. I'm disapponted that lyric websites, possibly quite rightly, say it's,

Oh, man, I need TV when I've got T. Rex.

There are any number of songs on which I sang my words rather than the proper ones either because they were indecipherable or because I improbed on them but that should have been,

Oh, man, who needs TV when I've got T. Rex.

 

Drive-in Saturday was, at first glance, an appalling mistake for Ian Hunter and Mott to turn down when they were offered that, too. It is an entirely credible Science Fiction story and there's not many of those. But, having found a sound and some sort of formula, Mott the Hoople were already away and gone with Honaloochie Boogie,

don't worry 'bout the shirt shine,

Roll Away the Stone and then quickly became nostalgic with All the Way from Memphis, Saturday Gigs and The Golden Age of Rock'n'Roll and they were welcome. They had a lot to be thankful for to Bowie. He owed a debt to Lou Reed, and vice versa, amongst others but by the 80's even the Bowie genius was flagging a bit and he needed the CHIC organisation to inject some disco into the likes of Let's Dance. Well, let's not. We'd be better off dancing to Chic.

But they helped each other in moments of need, I like to think.