Garbage Days Revisited #77: Mott The Hoople - "Wildlife" (1971)

 

"I have so much to say but so little time to stay..." - Mott The Hoople - Angel Of Eighth Avenue

Well, it's official, we have a new winner. For over a year now, the Dictators' Go Girl Crazy! has held the record of being the oldest album to feature in Garbage Days Revisited but today we're heading even further back than those hazy days of proto-punk to what I guess you could call proto-glam.

Of course, everybody knows Mott the Hoople for their glam rock years from 1972-74 when the band had their biggest run of success with the likes of All The Young Dudes, Honaloochie Boogie, All The Way From Memphis, Roll Away The Stone, Golden Age Of Rock 'n' Roll etc but what a lot of people don't know is that by the time the first of those songs became a hit, the group had already put out four albums, split up and hastily reformed again. So today, we're going to look at Wildlife, the best of the albums from that era as well as a quick peek at some of the less well known areas of the Mott story.

Mott The Hoople were formed in the dying days of the 1960s when Shrewsbury rockers the Doc Thomas Group came under the tutelage of producer Guy Stevens after moving to London. Stevens would go on to infamy a decade later when he produced the Clash's London Calling album (Clash guitarist Mick Jones was a huge Mott fan) and his, shall we say, decidedly out-there production techniques are legendary. Infamously on one of that album's best songs, Clampdown, you might notice that the vocals sound decidedly panicky - this is because Stevens opted to go into the studio and start swinging a mic stand around narrowly missing Jones and Joe Strummer's heads while they were trying to do their vocals! Stevens would also very nearly end up producing the UK Subs' Diminished Responsibility album around the same time (again, Subs bassist Alvin Gibbs was a Mott fan) but he didn't get the gig as even Charlie Harper thought he was too crazy to be let loose on the job.

But anyway, that was all a decade or so away at that point. Stevens' first move on managing the group was to link them up with 30-year-old singer Ian Hunter who'd been on the circuit with a number of London club bands for a good decade by this point (the group's original singer Stan Tippins would end up becoming their roadie similar to Ian Stewart with the Stones once they decided they didn't want a keyboard player in their early line-up). The group's first two albums would see them slowly starting to get a grip on their sound - their self-titled debut (which has a cool coloured in version of Escher's Lizards painting as its front cover) feels more like a demo collection but does have a couple of stand-out tracks like Backsliding Fearlessly and lead-off single Rock 'n' Roll Queen (although bizarrely their best song from that era, the Dylanesque anti-racism ballad The Road To Birmingham was left off the record, instead ending up as Rock 'n' Roll Queen's B-side)

1970's Mad Shadows saw the group starting to get more of a handle on the formula that they'd later serve up in a more glammed-up guise a couple of years later with the furious Thunderbuck Ram, the gentle No Wheels Left To Ride, the Stonesy boogie of Walking With A Mountain (which even rips off Jumping Jack Flash's chorus for its outro!) and the wrought closer When My Mind's Gone being good examples. However, the group were growing tired of Stevens' antics in and out of the studio and dispensed with his services shortly afterwards, opting to produce their third album themselves. Which is what brings us on to Wildlife.

Wildlife is a bit of an oddity among the early Mott albums, a much more gentle beast showing off the softer side of Hunter's songwriting which he'd develop in subsequent years. It's only the boogie of the opener Whiskey Women (sung by Mick Ralphs and arguably the weakest track on here) that could really have sat on either of the previous two albums and this is quickly followed by two genuinely beautiful songs - Angel of Eighth Avenue was written about a girl who Hunter had a brief relationship with in New York around this time and stayed with for a while following one of the group's early US tours*. Written during a sleepless night in the Big Apple by Hunter, it really shows why I genuinely think the guy is one of the great British lyricists of the last 60 years or so ("And as I look down, the streets are slowly forming/The little ladies of the night have stopped performing/And a trash collector's horn slows the dawn in/And soon the workward bound will awaken yawning/And I have so much to say but so little time to stay/Here with my Angel of Eighth Avenue, Manhattan morning").

(* - Quick sidenote, Hunter's book Diary Of A Rock 'n' Roll Star which details one of the band's American tours around this time is also well worth a read)

Waterlow, named after the park next to Highgate Cemetery (which I've walked around a few times in my London days), is similarly stark and haunting - an ode to Hunter's estranged children who lived nearby and who he'd visit and go for walks there with on the occasions he was back in the capital in between tours ("Blue broken tears/Our love disappears/The evergreen dies/Drowned in my eyes"). Consisting of just Ian's piano and voice, it's another song you may find a lump rising in your throat to.

There's two other brilliant songs on this album - Hunter's Original Mixed-Up Kid is another I seem to have come back to a lot down the years when life hasn't been going to well to keep the light burning. Written by the frontman after his divorce, it details his life of aimlessly drifting around London clubs, meeting girls to take away the loneliness and searching for some sort of light at the end of the tunnel ("Is there a heaven, is there a hell , well he just don't know/For in a crowded street, he can see the sleet/Where other men just see the snow") Home Is Where I Want To Be, written and sung by Ralphs, is proof that Hunter wasn't the only one in the band capable of writing a good song either, a gentle tale of the guitarist wanting to get away from the capital and back home to his family in Shrewsbury - again, in my early days of living in London and missing my family back in Bradford terribly at times, it was a song that gave me solace.

Unfortunately, Wildlife wasn't a hit and the group, getting frustrated with still not breaking through to the charts, quickly disowned it (by the following year they'd taken to referring to the album as "Mildlife" which is a bit harsh). The group would get back together with Stevens for one final attempt at doing something and came up with a completely insane album which was never in a million years going to bother the charts but must be up there as one of the great "fuck it, it's all over, let's just make the album we've always wanted to make" records of all time (see also These Animal Men's Accident and Emergency and a few others) in the form of 1972's Brain Capers. At times this album goes full on indecipherable but it's bookended by two full on awesome songs which have been described as proto-punk - certainly if you can imagine a cross between the Pistols and Deep Purple then you wouldn't be a million miles off. The songs in question are the spiky Death May Be Your Santa Claus ("I don't care what the people may say/I don't give a...anyway" - I think we can guess what the missing word is) and the album highlight, and one of the band's best tunes, the MC5-esque The Moon Upstairs.

The Moon Upstairs is basically the group exorcising all of their frustrations of the last few years - the endless near-misses, the changes in direction which still didn't produce a hit, the in-band arguments etc to come up with what would have been a brilliant full stop on their career - the pay-off line of "Well I swear to you, before we're through you're gonna feel our every blow/We ain't bleedin' you, we're feedin' you but you're too fuckin' slow" is delivered with real venom by Hunter and the whole thing will knock the air clean out of your lungs.

The group wouldn't be long for the world afterwards - their deal with Island would run out and they would be dropped and split in early '72 (as documented on the heartbreaking Ballad of Mott The Hoople song a year or two later). A few weeks later, drummer Overend Watts heard that David Bowie, who Mott had toured with a few times in the previous few years and who was right on the verge of his Ziggy Stardust imperial phase after chalking up his first hit in three years with Starman, might be looking for a new drummer after the departure of John Cambridge from the Spiders From Mars. The two had a chat and it turned out that Bowie had already recruited Woody Woodmansey for this role but he was stunned to find out that Mott had called it a day and offered a song to them if they wanted to get back together and record it as well as signing them to his MainMan stable of artists. The song in question was All The Young Dudes. The rest you probably know.

Mott would stay in existence right up until the end of the '70s in one form or another but the original gang of five who'd battled through the pre-fame years together - Hunter, Ralphs, Watts, bassist Dale Griffin and keyboardist Verdun Allen - would soon fracture. Allen would leave soon after the All The Young Dudes album to be eventually replaced by Morgan Fisher while Ralphs would do the off after the following album Mott to be replaced first by Luther Grosvenor (aka Ariel Bender) from Spooky Tooth and then Mick Ronson after Bowie dissolved the Spiders. However, by 1974 the hits were starting to dry up and following the failure of Saturday Gigs, which they regarded as a surefire hit, to make the Top 40, Hunter and Ronson would both leave to pursue solo careers. However, I get the impression listening to the lyrics of that song that Ian had made up his mind to go already as it sounds a lot like a farewell song to the fans with its "Goodbye goodbye" outro.

The pair would go on to solo careers but Watts, Griffin and Fisher would press on for another four albums, initially shortening the group's name to Mott and bringing in new boys Nigel Benjamin on vocals and Ray Major on guitar. However, with Hunter gone and glam rock fading from view, the group's commercial heyday was pretty much over and 1975's lacklustre Drive On was very much missing the spark of earlier efforts (with the possible exception of the swaggering opener By Tonight). 1976's Shouting And Pointing (especially the title track, Storm and the gentle ballad Career (No Such Thing As Rock 'n' Roll)) was a more respectable effort, probably the band's best post-Hunter, but the group would lose Benjamin soon afterwards as he'd emigrate to the States eventually ending up in Los Angeles and becoming vocalist for early days Sunset Strip glam metallers London (whose line-up at this time also included Nikki Sixx and Blackie Lawless and who are not to be confused with the UK punk band of the same name that was also doing the rounds at this time and featured future Damned/Culture Club drummer Jon Moss in their one of their initial incarnations).

The group would bring in new singer John Fidler, formerly of glam-folkie types Medicine Head, and change their name again to the British Lions. They'd put out another two albums in this guise with their self-titled 1978 debut, which similar to the Stones' Some Girls showed a more new wave influence creeping in, having a decent first side but fading away for the second (that bane of GDR, the dreaded Sonic Temple syndrome again...), give One More Chance To Run, the frenetic Fork Talkin' Man and the group's covers of Wild In The Streets and Kim Fowley's International Heroes a spin though, they're all worth a listen. By contrast, 1980's Trouble With Women, released a few weeks after the band had split up, sounds like the group had pretty much just given up by this point with literally nothing memorable on there to recommend it. Post-split, Fisher would go on to play keyboards for Queen for a few years (another band who had been given their first big support tour by Mott back in their early days - Brian May even wrote the early Queen hit Now I'm Here about the bands' US tour together in '73/'74) and Watts and Griffin would both move into production, working with John Peel at the BBC and producing briefly successful new wavers Department S (of Is Vic There? fame) as well as Hanoi Rocks' all time glam-punk classic Back To Mystery City. Both have sadly passed on in recent years and are much missed.

Hunter has of course gone on to his solo career ever since and covering that would probably require a whole new GDR in itself (as a starting point though, give his self-titled debut, 1976's All-American Alien Boy and 1977's Overnight Angels a spin as well as his underrated collaboration with various Boys and Crybabys, 1995's Dirty Laundry) as well as producing one of the ultimate glam-punk albums, Generation X's Valley of the Dolls. Ralphs would go on to '70s AOR mainstays Bad Company and Ronno would put out a couple of decent solo albums (1975's Slaughter On Tenth Avenue which was part-inspiration for Slaughter & The Dogs to get their name from along with Bowie's Diamond Dogs and contains the excellent Growin' Up And I'm Fine, his best solo song, and 1976's Play Don't Worry) as well as collaborating with Hunter on a few albums before his untimely death in 1993 with one of his final recorded sessions being to play the guitar solo on the Wildhearts classic My Baby Is A Headfuck - Ronson was originally down to produce the album but his ill-health sadly restricted him to just that track. However, I remember doing an interview with Ginger many moons ago where he said that working with Ronno was one of his favourite memories and even though it was only briefly he learned an awful lot from the guitar legend.

Anyway, that turned into a bit of an epic didn't it?! Hopefully it's a good retrospective on Mott the Hoople's less well known material and has encouraged you to check a few of them out. I won't lie, they're up there with Bowie, T-Rex and the Sweet as one of my favourite glam bands but there was always so much more to them than that. One thing that’s become apparent while typing this article up and the sheer amount of links to other GDR articles that I’ve had to put in here - these guys were a key influence on a LOT of my favourite bands, as well as the already mentioned, the Dogs D’Amour supported Hunter and Ronson on one of their first US tours and obviously there’s the Down ‘n’ Outz, formed by Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott, half the Quireboys and Share from Vixen/Bubble who started out as a Mott/Hunter/British Lions covers band. People often understandably refer to Hanoi Rocks as the godfathers of glam-punk but to me, it’s Mott (and probably the Faces, Slade and the Sweet as well) who were the first ones to blend that T-Rex style elfin boogie with that brick wall rock sound to such thrilling effect - you could even probably make a case for the Stones there as well to be honest. And even though Wildlife is a more gentle and thoughtful affair, it’s still a very underrated album which more than deserves its place in their pantheon.