Very similar to the phenomenon that found Marc Bolan and T. Rex get some attention and recognition in the Sixties, so did the wave of interest in a particular sound and style crest in the Seventies that left flotsam like Mott The Hoople on the banks of popular taste. Ironically, David Bowie was the individual responsible for creating the fanfare in both cases; it might have been muscle flexing on the part of the glitter rock svengali to see what kind of power he held, but Bolan only required a little word-of-mouth to help get him off the ground while, in Mott The Hoople’s case, Bowie handed the band their single greatest hit (“Àll The Young Dudes“) and let both Hunter and the Hoople ride his coattails for the better part of a decade.
Now removed from that context by time, it`s more difficult to understand the appeal that Mott The Hoople held and, in that way, Old Records Never Die is as much a condemnation as it is an epitaph.
Collected here, the best songs from Mott The Hoople and Hunter`s solo career illustrate that, while the best of intentions may have been present through the life-supported career of both band and singer, they were hard-pressed to write a hit on their own but were remarkably good at capitalizing on trends. Opening with “Rock And Roll Queen” (the only song that appears from Mott The Hoople’s self-titled 1969 debut), Old Records Never Die paints The Hoople as the anthropological half-step between the glitter rock coming out of the UK and the more sexually-aware, cock-swinging rock coming out of Detroit around thhe same time. The downside, of course, is that being the half-step means that the amalgam is half-formed. Perhaps recognizing this, thhe set presses on into a new decade quickly to show where the band went next. It’s at this point that the problem MTH always suffered from becomes apparent: too fey to actually rock hard, too aesthetically conscious and stereotypically proper in the English sense to not cringe at the thought of getting their hands dirty and too single-mindedly earnest to play to their strengths, Mott The Hoople limped along through the Seventies with Bowie’s help and a well-placed Velvet Underground cover (“Sweet Jane”) as well as a series of songs that emulated those styles closely enough so as to blend in with or possibly be mistaken for those acts if listeners weren’t paying attention but not close enough to be actionable. It’s funny to listen to as well because as songs like “Honaloochie Boogie,” “Roll Away The Stone” and the ironically entitled “The Golden Age Of Rock N’ Roll” roll out here, it’s hard not to think of the band as being the designer impostor brand of the big acts of the day but with the recording budget to throw as many additional baubles as possible into the proceedings; thus trying to buy credibility. This earnest behavior continued for six years and eleven albums (one of which was a greatest hits comp represented here by “Saturday Gigs” – the previously unreleased track that was rightly unreleased) before Hunter – still certain that his voice was a unique one that needed to be heard by everyone within earshot – went solo in 1975.
The second disc of this set collects a smattering of those songs least forgettable from the singer’s solo career, but it gets really frustrating really quickly because someone was obviously continuing to encourage him; still painfully twee and campy but trying to be sleazy (“Once Bitten Twice Shy” – while definitively covered in 1989 by Great White – just sounds ridiculous and limp in its original form here) and exercising his pitiful little libido to try and get some with results that could be characterized as limited at best. The funniest part, at this point, proves to be that the singer could occasionally write a decent song but couldn’t do it justice in performance; on disc two, the greatest moments manifest in the forms of “Once Bitten Twice Shy” and “Cleveland Rocks” (which the uninitiated will recognize as the theme song for The Drew Carey Show – as performed by the Presidents Of The United States Of America) but only seem great when one remembers other people’s versions of them. Is that the best a singer with a nearly-four-decades-long career can hope for? Apparently so because, as Old Records Never Die illustrates, first of all the album’s title is accurate (they won’t die no matter how bad they are) and, in the realm of rock n’ roll, even lousy bands can stick it out long enough to be a fantastic footnote if they’re allowed.
Band
Mott The Hoople/Ian Hunter Online
Ian Hunter myspace
