Another classic, and another of those songs that lifts my spirits the moment I hear that guitar riff. All The Young Dudes revived the fortunes of a journeyman group who were on the verge of splitting in 1972 after three years of failure… thanks to David Bowie.
Before Bowie came along Mott were a hard-working British band whose sound was a blend of dirgey piano ballads, with Ian Hunter singing in a whiney Dylanesque accent, and crunchy Kinks-style rockers. It earned them a strong live following – one concert in 1971 prompted a riot at the Albert Hall – but few record sales.
Eager to prevent them breaking up, Bowie first offered them Suffragette City but they rejected it, asking instead for Drive-In Saturday. He didn’t want to let that one go so, according to legend, he sat cross-legged on the floor in front of Hunter and knocked out this one.
Hunter sang it in an an exaggerated Cockney accent and Mott were reborn, setting them off on a sequence of hit singles and a couple of great albums after this – Mott and The Hoople.
All The Young Dudes is apparently regarded as some sort of a “gay anthem,” though that thought had literally never occurred to me in the thousands of times I must have heard it. I now find a quote from Lou Reed backing this up: “It’s a gay anthem! a rallying call to the young dudes to come out on the streets and show they were beautiful and gay and proud of it.”
I’m not sure anyone I knew at the time felt that way. I always saw it as some sort of hymn to the youthful rebellion of Glam, but Bowie subsequently said it was “the complete opposite” of that, being more of an apocalyptic forecast of the end of the world, like Five Years.
With its multiple characters it does have parallels with Walk On The Wild Side, and Bowie was friends with Lou Reed, who supposedly gave him a demo of that song, with its name checks not to Warhol ‘superstars’ but to British bands like the Beatles, Stones and T. Rex… and another British institution, Marks & Spencer.
That brought them trouble too, meaning they had to censor themselves in order to be played on the BBC: the line about “Wendy stealing clothes from Marks & Sparks” having to be changed to “unlocked cars” to avoid breaching broadcasting regulations about advertising.
It says something about how great this record is that Bowie’s own version, which he began performing on the Ziggy Stardust tour, is markedly inferior.