Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

The members of Mott were not pretty. They were
pub rockers, but they had a genuine appeal and a
great front man in Ian Hunter, who wore sunglasses
everywhere and had a great voice. Ronson would
join Hunter’s band after leaving the Spiders. Mott
was about to break up when he offered them “All the
Young Dudes.” Defries negotiated a deal and
signed them from Island to CBS, where the Stooges
were newly signed.
“Well, he offered us ‘Suffragette City’ first,” Hunter
says today, “but I knew that wouldn’t work because it
was okay, but it wasn’t that great, and English radio
was closed up to us because we had two or three
singles out already and our time was up. But then he
came back with ‘Dudes,’ and very seldom in your life
if you’re in music do you get to sit behind a hit and
know it’s a hit. We were sitting in an office on Regent
Street and he sat on the floor and played it on
acoustic guitar and the first thing was ‘Can I do this?’
and the second was ‘Why is he giving it to us?’”
“If they were doing okay at the time, I don’t think
they would have wanted to link up with me, because
they were quite macho, one of the early laddish
bands,” Bowie told NME. “But things weren’t good,
and I literally wrote that within an hour or so of
reading an article in one of the music rags that their
breakup was imminent. I thought they were a fair little
band and I thought, ‘This will be an interesting thing
to do, let’s see if I can write this song and keep them
together.’ It sounds horribly immodest now but you
go through that when you’re young. How can I do