Mott The Hoople was formed in Hereford, Herefordshire, England in 1969 but only achieved big commercial success a few years later, on their fifth studio album when David Bowie gave them the song “All The Young Dudes”, that he had written not long before. They recorded the track and it became the title of their 1972 record.
The song became one of the biggest classics of Rock and Roll and still is their biggest hit. Even though Bowie and Hoople had a strong connection, the band’s vocalist and guitarist Ian Hunter revealed in an interview with Classic Rock that he and Bowie were never mates.
Ian Hunter explains why he and David Bowie were not friends
“David was a different kettle of fish. You know how people are. You go to a party, you get on with some people, you don’t get on with other people. Not because you don’t like them or they don’t like you, just because they’re accountants or they’re lawyers – they’re in a different neck of the woods to you.
“David was great all the time I knew him, but he wasn’t a guy I would have hung out with. Nothing personal. We got on fine in the studio. I went out with him a couple of times, but I don’t make mates easy. I never did. And when I do make a mate, it’s for life. He was a friend like lots of people you meet along the way. David was extremely ambitious. He’d been around.”
Hunter continued:
“He was determined and he was ambitious. I wasn’t – I just wanted to play rock ’n’ roll because it excited me. But David saw a whole lot more and was going for it, 24 hours a day. He just wasn’t the type I would hang out with. But generous to a tee, lovely with the band. I mean, he gave us ‘Dudes’. I’ve got nothing but praise for David,” Ian Hunter said.
The musician also said in an interview that only God knows why David Bowie decided to give “All The Young Dudes” to Mott The Hoople at the time, because he said if he was the one that wrote the track, he would never give it to anybody else. Curiously, back then Bowie also offered them the track “Suffragette City” and Hoople declined the song. In the same year Bowie released the song on the classic album “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars”.
In 1995, on the compilation album “Rarestonebowie”, Bowie released his original version of “All The Young Dudes” recorded in 1972.