Ah, Mott the Hoople, what can you say about Mott the Hoople that hasn't already been said? Come to think of it, what can you say about them at all? I know one thing about Mott the Hoople, the title track off this album was written by David Bowie, and I'm sure that neither I nor anyone else would want to know anything else. Even looking at that album cover fills me with a painful indifference, I have no interest in listening to this album at all, I pretty much know what kind of music lies therein and I know that it's not for me, I know the music is going to wriggle in one orifice and politely shuffle out the other without ever even making eye-contact with my conscious. A large part of me just wants to skip this album altogether and save myself 40 minutes. My life, my day even will not change one iota by listening to this album. No-one's life has ever been truly affected by this record. It's not even going to be rubbish enough to slag off. Sigh...
So as I say I'm approaching this from a purely objective standpoint...
00:31 Starts off with a Lou Reed song (this band were certainly well-connected), the singers delivery is a further reminder that absolutely everyone has a better voice than Lou Reed
04:10 One of those sepia-tinged-guitarist-playing-with-a-cheeky-smile-on-his-lips-all-boys-in-it-together mid-tempo FM rock songs that were all the rage in the 70s. The 80s were much better musically than the seventies- discuss...
7:34 There's an obvious laid-back approach to the songs here that I can kind of understand people warming to, but to me it just suggests that they've probably worked very hard for a sound that makes out like they've put in no effort at all, which to me just makes it sound disconnected from the listener
12:17 All the Young Dudes' is a great little pop song and stands out a mile when placed next to the first two half-arsed tracks. The singer seems to really connect with the words for the first time (ironically, seeing as they didn't write it) and in doing so delivers his first performance where he actually sounds like he gives a shit
14:37 United are playing Liverpool tomorrow, it'd be fantastic to get a result and really hammer a nail in their coffin, but I've got a horrible feeling the Liverpool players are going to play like they've got something to prove and sneak a result, especially if Fergie packs the midfield as a cautionery measure
20:45 This band owe David Bowie a massive drink- every other song has been so tediously mediocre that it's actually making me want to weep
21:56 Any band that has a song called 'One of the Boys' really isn't worth 40 minutes of anyone's time
25:18 It's a damning indictment of the music that,when I try and picture the lead singer, I can only think of Robin Askwith.
27:50 That song did seem to come alive at the end, for a moment there the album actually had a pulse.
30:14 The album's trying to mount an unlikely comeback now- 'Soft Ground' is a great hammond organ-led number, shot-through with a sense of malevolent charisma that finally suggest the band may have a personality to speak of. I think you can actually here Deep Purple making notes if you listen hard enough
33:37 'Ready for Love/After Lights' single-handedly invents the Glam-rock-ballad, and while it's hardly going to be playing at my funeral, it exudes some slight variety and invention which is a Godsend after the sludge-rock of the album's first half.
37:45 Are Mott the Hoople the best band to have ever come out of Herefordshire? Are they the only band to have come out of Herefordshire? I mean, there's Fred West, but he was less a band and more of a freaky-haired serial killer.
39:52 And Lady Godiva of course, she was pretty rock and roll
40:44 Oh, it's finished.
There's an issue raised here that's going to crop up dozens of times throughout this list. I can accept that this was a very influential record, and in listening to it I can hear its impact on glam-rock and a lot of the heavy rock of the 70s, I'll even accept that it's an important album (though in terms of importance and influential it's severl furlongs behind 'It Takes a Nation of Millions...'), but that doesn't mean that it still stands up as a great album more than 30 years later. The fact is that this kind of music has been done so many times and often so much better that this album just sounds simple, undemanding and ultimately almost naively primitive. It's cruel, but thems the breaks- one piece of work doesn't dserve to be ahead of another merely because it did it first. Of course, there are plenty of albums that could be described as both the first and best example of their field, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
The album itself sounds so pedestrian and workmanlike in places that it's almost depressing, if the fantastic 'All the Young Dudes' didn't make like a sore thumb on the record's first half then I honestly believe cement would've started pouring out of the speakers. Luckily the last three tracks belatadly injects the album with a modicum of life, which is just as well as the first few tracks had merged into one tuneless aural dirge in my head to the extent that I resembled Jack Nicholson at the end of 'One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest', or Keanu Reeves in... well... anything really.
While it's patently not as bad as the borderline offensive Kiss record, it's unrelenting mediocrity actually made it a lot harder to listen to. Kiss had the decency to be spectacularly bad, there was absolutely nothing spectacular about this record
D-
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