How David Bowie Saved Mott the Hoople

In 1972, English rock band Mott the Hoople were struggling, and their breakup seemed inevitable. The band had formed in 1969 and released four albums, but none had made much of an impression beyond their loyal fanbase.

“We were a great live band back then, but couldn’t get any chart success,” keyboardist Verden Allen said in a 2016 interview with Wales Online. “Bands like Free had done it, so had Traffic – but we couldn’t get a hit and we started to sense our record label Island was getting a bit impatient with us.”

And then David Bowie presented them with a song that changed everything.

“All the Young Dudes”

Bowie’s own career was taking off in the early ’70s. He’d already had a hit with “Space Oddity” in 1969, and he was putting together a backing band and on the verge of introducing his persona of Ziggy Stardust to the world. With Mott the Hoople practically finished, bassist Pete Overend Watts called Bowie to ask for a job.

Instead, Bowie—a fan of theirs—said he had a song for the band and presented them with a demo of “Suffragette City,” which they rejected because they felt it didn’t suit them. Bowie later included the song on The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, released later that year.

Bowie then wrote “All the Young Dudes,” an ode to misfits.

“I thought they were a fair little band, and I almost thought, ‘This will be an interesting thing to do, let’s see if I can write this song and keep them together,’” Bowie told Mojo in a 2002 interview.

He played the song for the band on an acoustic guitar, and when they went to record it, he provided rhythm guitar and backing vocals. It was the first song he’d ever written for another artist.

“Chills went down my spine,” frontman Ian Hunter later recalled. “I knew it was great and I knew I could sing it.”

“All the Young Dudes” did exactly what it was meant to—it kept the band together and gave them their first hit, peaking at No. 3 on the charts in the UK after it was released. It’s now remembered as the band’s signature song and a glam-rock anthem.

Bowie later released his own recording of “All the Young Dudes” in 1995. In an interview with Rolling Stone over 20 years earlier, he explained that the song also connected to the story on Ziggy Stardust, in which the titular alien visits Earth to warn the planet will only last another five years.

“Ziggy’s adviser tells him to collect news and sing it, ’cause there is no news,” Bowie explained. “So Ziggy does this, and there is terrible news. ‘All The Young Dudes’ is a song about this news. It is no hymn to the youth as people thought. It is completely the opposite.”

Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images