Mott The Hoople

1-25-08 Mott The Hoople

I have previously written about my interest in Island Records from England – and Mott The Hoople were definitely one of the groups that I heard purely because they were on Island. I believe I got “Mad Shadows” first – then their debut…and it took a while to get the next two – no, my copy of “Brain Capers” doesn’t still have it’s ‘party mask’ included!

What I will say is that now I have the first four MTH albums on CD from Angel Air Records in England. I have listened to all four recently and still enjoy them a lot, particularly “Mad Shadows”, the one I always did like. All respect to Guy Stevens, their enigmatic producer – all the tales of his ‘working the band into a frenzy’ etc.

As a youth, after “Mad Shadows” I next ran into Mott The Hoople on the back of my discovery of David Bowie. The “All The Young Dudes” b/w “One Of The Boys” 7” provided a good excuse to re-evaluate MTH. My Bowie fandom didn’t last – after the bright flame of “Ziggy Stardust”, I wasn’t all that into “Aladdin Sane”. My MTH fandom kind of died with my Bowie fandom. I guess.

I have really been into UK 70’s glam rock since an ’03 visit to Japan – and the CBS era MTH albums all made themselves apparent to me more recently. So, it took 40 years for me to hear all of the ‘proper’ MTH albums – but the verdict is strictly ‘thumbs up’! Naturally, my glam interests made me try Ian Hunter’s first solo album, “Overnight Angels” – I guess it will take me another 40 years to digest Hunter’s solo career. I always found it interesting that British reviewers always seemed to make a lot out of the mild fact that Hunter sounded something like Bob Dylan – I always thought he sounded / acted a bit more like Mick Jagger! “…with his Beatles and his Stones…”

Now we get to the “not progressive enough” argument: another reason I likely didn’t carry on with MTH at the time was that by ‘72/3, I was totally into German artists like Neu!, Harmonia, Cluster, Faust, Can, Amon Duul II et al. Electronic music, if you will. MTH were a rock band, not entirely unlike The Rolling Stones, for instance. Mainstream rock music. Not progressive rock, which is what I was after as a teenager.

It’s much easier for me to fully embrace the first four (Island) MTH albums these days. The Angel Air re-mastered CD’s sound great, and have great, extensive liner notes. All have bonus tracks, but often I only play the tracks on CD’s that constitute the original vinyl release. I do like the first few CBS MTH albums, but…re-compartmentalized as “UK 70’s glam rock”. In fact, I think it would be really fun to listen to the Island UK LP catalogue, catalogue numbers ILPS 9100 to, say, ILPS 9200 (the first Roxy Music album!) (roughly ’69 – ’72). What a truckload of great rock music that would be, eh, readers? That would certainly get you at least the first four MTH LP’s!

Seems to me that there needs to be a proper Guy Stevens biography and CD boxed set of his ‘notorious’ productions.

"How Long...?"