Mott the Hoople – Brain Capers (1970)
Mott the Hoople, along with the New York Dolls, Iggy Pop and Alice Cooper have a credible claim to have anticipated and directly influenced punk rock. This, their third album is a bona fide classic – bringing the adrenaline rush of their live performances (banned from the Royal Albert Hall for inducing a riot) ferociously to life. Originals such as ‘Death may Be Your Santa Claus’ and ‘Sweet Angeline’ jostle with gleeful and loutish abandon the more reflective ‘Darkness, Darkness’ and the Dion tribute ‘In Your Own Backyard’. Promoted by the ‘Rock ‘n Roll Circus’ tour, this album should have propelled the band to the heights they would have to wait a further three years to scale. The secret of Mott the Hoople’s subsequent and short lived success lay largely in Ian Hunter’s knack for writing about disaffected youth without appearing patronising – making a mythology out of the band’s travails and including his audience in a way that became a trademark but never quite descended into self-parody.
Diary of a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star – Ian Hunter
Also worth checking out Ian Hunter’s book, ‘Diary of a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star’ for a glimpse behind the scenes of the music industry in the seventies. No sex and very few drugs, this is the story of a gruelling American Tour leavened by a hilarious account of an attempted break in to Graceland and a ceaseless quest for rare guitars. Witty and self deprecating, this is an excellent account of a ‘make or break’ tour in a period when music was important and PR was an amateurish and haphazard nuisance tacked onto the real business of performing – and tracking down musical heroes and antique guitars.
