Mott the Hoople - Hammersmith Odeon London 6th October 2009
Setlist: Intro (Jupiter) / Hymn for the Dudes / Rock & Roll Queen / Sweet Jane / One of the Boys / Sucker / Moon Upstairs / The Original Mixed Up Kid / I Wish I Was Your Mother / Ready For Love / Born Late '58 / Ballad of Mott the Hoople / Sweet Angeline / Walkin' With a Mountain / The Journey / The Golden Age Of Rock 'N' Roll / Honaloochie Boogie / All the Way From Memphis // Roll Away the Stone (with Dale Griffin) / All the Young Dudes (with Dale Griffin) / Keep a Knockin' (with Dale Griffin) /// Saturday Gigs
I mean, just look at the setlist… OK, let’s talk about the elephant in the room here. There was no Thunderbuck Ram. I know, I know… but that’s because Mick Ralphs sang it and he can’t reach the notes these days. Not a big surprise, it is in a really weird key and I could never sing it at all, so I’ll let them off that one.
35 years in the making. The last of five nights at the Hammersmith Odeon (it will always be the Hammy O to me and I just can’t call it the HMV-Carling-whatever-the bloody-hell-they-call-it-these-days-it-just-ain’t-right-I-tell-you Apollo). I bought my ticket back in March and was in a mad panic when I arrived back in the UK on the 2nd October because there was no little card waiting for me, telling me that they’d tried to deliver a letter, but no one was home to sign for it. Well, actually, there was a couple of those, but they were for something else... I had expected it to be sent out as a ‘signed for’ delivery, but it wasn’t; when I looked through the mountain of junk mail that had built up in the preceding 4 weeks, I found the aforementioned Golden Ticket in a random, plain brown envelope. Didn’t SeeTickets realise that these things were valuable and anybody could have made off with them?! OK, maybe I’m slightly exaggerating this, which is not like me at all – STOP THAT SNICKERING AT THE BACK – but… I have no idea where I was going with that train of thought, must have been a have been a Virgin West Coast service… Excuse me whilst I go and open another bottle of Helles…
So, after 35 years Verden Allen, Pete Watts, Mick Ralphs, Dale Griffin (for the encores) and Ian Hunter split up, they got back together, with Martin Chambers filling in on drums for the ailing Buffin. Who’dathunkit? It came as a surprise to me when it was originally announced, I’ll tell you what, but no way was I going to miss this reunion. When Mott were around back in the day, I was too young to go to a gig by a good few years and this offered the possibility of a totally new gig-going experience. Nope, now way I was going to miss this one.
For me, the early ‘70s were strange days. It was a time of political and economic turmoil, three-day weeks, power cuts, petrol shortages, the Motorway speed limit reduced to 56 MPH, food rationing (yes, in the 1970s!) with housewives fighting in the supermarket over, bread, coffee, sugar. You name it, it was in short supply and they really did fight over something as common as a bag of sugar. Scary times people, strange days indeed.
In my little world though, one thing remained constant: Friday, five-to-five: Crackerjack!
Well, two things, actually. Crackerjack, and watching Dr Who from behind the sofa on a Saturday tea time.
So, three things remained constant: Crackerjack, Dr Who, and every Tuesday lunchtime, the new pop chart was revealed on Radio 1 by Johnnie Walker (full run down on Sunday evening between 6pm and 7pm).
Actually, there were four things that remained constant in my pre-teen existence: Crackerjack; Dr Who; the new pop chart on Radio 1 and, every Thursday evening Top of the Pops.
Did I mention listening to Radio Luxemburg under the bed covers? Oh, and Alan Freeman’s Rock on Saturday radio programme, and OGWT. Yeah, alright, that’s seven things…
Some of you reading this may understand these things. The rest of you will just put it down to early onset of dementia. Whatever. Now, where was I? I think I may have to link great chunks of this next bit to Wikipedia, you know... Thank you for staying with me. I really do appreciate your patience. My rather circuitous, and somewhat laboured point is that (with the exception of Dr Who and Crackerjack) much of my life revolved around music. This really does have something to do with Mott the Hoople, I assure you. Eventually. It may take a little while though. J
Right, the medication is beginning to kick in. Yeah, music. In the early years of the 1970s, in the middle of all the madness that was Sailor Ted’s Mongolian Clusterfuck government, music was the only way for young people to stay sane. To quote Frank Norris: ‘I knew it for the truth then, as I know if for the truth now’. It was an exciting time though too. Mass-market popular music was still a relatively new thing and most musicians, I’m pretty sure, were actually surprised by the fact that they were still alive and that popular music was still, in fact, popular. Of course, this was mainly down to a few things. Allow me to elucidate.
After Radio Caroline and Radio London were closed down by the fascists in Whitehall, Radio 1 actually rose to the occasion and started playing the music that the nation’s youth wanted to listen to. Every Sunday, all over the UK, young people would sit next to their transistor radios (it was a time before iPods) and avidly listen to the latest chart rundown, to see where their favourite songs were this week, and I was no exception. In fact, I used to dash home from school, on a Tuesday, to listen to Johnnie Walker run down the new chart, so I would know what I wanted to record on Sunday. I always got into trouble for being late back to school, and for having been out of school in the first place!
In those days people actually went to a record shop and physically purchased 7 inches of plastic - it was more innocent than that implies – and artists had to sell tens of thousands of singles to make even the lower reaches of the pop chart. It was religious thing and involved so much more commitment than clicking a mouse button. There was a wide choice of music styles accessible to the record-buying public: Motown; TSOP; Prog; R ‘n’ B; Soul; West Coast; East Coast. For me, it was the era of Glam that started it all. Slade, The Sweet, Gary Glitter (before he became famous for being a child-molesting perv, he was the biggest pop star of his day), Barry Blue (What?), Alvin Stardust; and who can forget Suzy Quatro in that leather outfit? OK, so there was also the Bay City Rollers, the Rubettes, and much dross, as there always was, and still is, but let’s gloss over that.
Between 1973 and ‘74, some things happened that would affect the path of my life, little did I know it at the time:
It was, however, Top of the Pops which was unmissable. Kids all over the UK would take over the TV every Thursday evening around 7pm and, ignoring parental mutterings that ‘you can’t understand what they are singing’, that ‘they all look like girls’, and ‘why do they have to dress like that?’ I discovered Nazareth, Deep Purple and, yes, you got it, Mott the Hoople. The thing that made Mott special was that, whilst Deep Purple and Nazareth, for example, were straight-ahead rock, Mott effectively bridged the gap between true rock music and the popular Glam.
Phew. Told you we’d get there eventually! I have to also admit a certain amount of pride in the fact that I’ve managed to rabbit on for almost 1000 words between mentions of Mott. I have to get my little pleasures where I can.
Incidentally, the name Mott the Hoople was taken from the title of a 1960s comic novel by LA-based writer Willard Manus, the main character’s name being Norman Mott, and ‘hoople’ being a slang word for someone who is a lazy-assed deadbeat.
In 1974 I was eleven years old. The world suddenly mutated from Black and White into glorious Technicolor. Firstly, I came home from school one day to discover that a little man from D.E.R had installed a colour TV in the lounge. If you are of a certain age you will appreciate the magnitude of this event. For all those young whippersnappers out there, remember the day you got your first mobile phone and your whole universe suddenly went supernova? Well, that’s what getting a colour TV was like in the early ‘70s. Whilst the fashionable areas of trendy London may have had a serious case of the RGBs in the late ‘60s, in Yorkshire, it took a few years to make the journey north. Watching Top of the Pops suddenly took on a new dimension. Seeing Mott, in colour, on TOTP was a defining moment. They had the glam look (who can forget Buffin’s huge drumsticks, or Pete Watt’s silver hair?) as did Wizzard, Glitter, Slade, Sweet etc., but they seemed more like a bona fide rock group.
Fast-forward 35 years.
I arrived in London, checked into my hotel (hey I’m getting too old to spend the night on Euston station!) and arranged for a cab to take me to the gig. To someone of my generation the Hammersmith Odeon is one of the temples of rock music in the UK. Like The Rainbow, The Venue, The Marquee, and The Shepherds Bush Empire, amongst others, the Odeon is from another time and any gig here becomes special by virtue of the fact that it is here. Harry Weedon’s Art Deco design for Oscar Deutsch (ODEON, incidentally, stood for Oscar Deustch Entertains Our Nation) looks as fresh today as it would have done in the 1930s and, for anyone in my age group it conjures up memories of J. Arthur Rank (who owned the chain between 1938 and 1978) and Pearl and Dean advertising. Just seeing the band’s name on the sign above the entrance sends a tingle down your spine and, as I found my seat, right at the front in Row 4, I felt like something special was on the cards.
Of course, as I have postulated many times before in my gig reviews, building up a gig can lead to expectations that can never be achieved, and this was still a possibility. Nevertheless, I’ve seen Hunter solo, as well as playing with Ralphs, in recent years and he delivered on each occasion, so I figured that my disappointment was limited. Then again, Hunter is now 70 years old…
Support act for the evening’s proceedings was one Joe Elliot, squawker with Def Leppard, and he wasn’t that bad, I have to say. I’ll even go as far as to say I quite enjoyed his set. I was, however, only there to see the headliners. I had deliberately avoided the Interweb, and the possibility of reading any reviews or comments of the previous nights’ performances, as I wanted this to be a surprise, for good, or bad.
After what seemed like an eternity, although it was no more than half an hour later, the house lights went down, the leader tape began, the stage lights came up and the band ambled onto the stage. It was all so matter of fact when compared to modern-day concerts where there is so much reliance on lighting effects, pyrotechnics, and elaborate stage designs. This was a gig with a difference; it was old-school. This must have been what it was like to go to a rock concert back in ’74. No frills, no fuss, just go on-stage and play the songs. The only nod to the 21st Century was a video screen either side of the stage which displayed old posters, logos, and photos during the show.
It was epic. If you know the Mott back catalogue, then the setlist speaks for itself. It was everything I had hoped it would be, and then some. It just got better and better and by the time they launched into All The Way From Memphis, to conclude the main set, I was already in 7th Heaven. Once they came back on for the encores, now with Dale Griffin also on drums, starting off with Roll Away the Stone, I’d ascended to Cloud 9. One of the nice touches during an amazing evening’s entertainment was the introductions of the band and backing singers, which featured Hunter’s and Ralphs’ offspring, Stan Tippins the original singer in the band, and Mick Ronson’s daughter. Through All the Young Dudes and Keep a Knockin’ I pretty much sang my little, black heart out. To end one of the best gigs I’ve ever seen, they came back once more and played Saturday Gigs, Joe Elliot appearing at the mention of platform boots with what, today, looks like a ridiculous item from the Museum of Stupid Footwear. As Mott quit the stage for the last time, we all kept singing long after the house lights came up, not wanting it to end.
This was a fantastic night. No bullshit, just good old-fashioned rock ‘n’ roll. It doesn’t get any better than this.
Do you remember the Saturday gigs? I do!
Mark L. Potts
The God of Thunder
10th October 2009
35 years in the making. The last of five nights at the Hammersmith Odeon (it will always be the Hammy O to me and I just can’t call it the HMV-Carling-whatever-the bloody-hell-they-call-it-these-days-it-just-ain’t-right-I-tell-you Apollo). I bought my ticket back in March and was in a mad panic when I arrived back in the UK on the 2nd October because there was no little card waiting for me, telling me that they’d tried to deliver a letter, but no one was home to sign for it. Well, actually, there was a couple of those, but they were for something else... I had expected it to be sent out as a ‘signed for’ delivery, but it wasn’t; when I looked through the mountain of junk mail that had built up in the preceding 4 weeks, I found the aforementioned Golden Ticket in a random, plain brown envelope. Didn’t SeeTickets realise that these things were valuable and anybody could have made off with them?! OK, maybe I’m slightly exaggerating this, which is not like me at all – STOP THAT SNICKERING AT THE BACK – but… I have no idea where I was going with that train of thought, must have been a have been a Virgin West Coast service… Excuse me whilst I go and open another bottle of Helles…
So, after 35 years Verden Allen, Pete Watts, Mick Ralphs, Dale Griffin (for the encores) and Ian Hunter split up, they got back together, with Martin Chambers filling in on drums for the ailing Buffin. Who’dathunkit? It came as a surprise to me when it was originally announced, I’ll tell you what, but no way was I going to miss this reunion. When Mott were around back in the day, I was too young to go to a gig by a good few years and this offered the possibility of a totally new gig-going experience. Nope, now way I was going to miss this one.
For me, the early ‘70s were strange days. It was a time of political and economic turmoil, three-day weeks, power cuts, petrol shortages, the Motorway speed limit reduced to 56 MPH, food rationing (yes, in the 1970s!) with housewives fighting in the supermarket over, bread, coffee, sugar. You name it, it was in short supply and they really did fight over something as common as a bag of sugar. Scary times people, strange days indeed.
In my little world though, one thing remained constant: Friday, five-to-five: Crackerjack!
Well, two things, actually. Crackerjack, and watching Dr Who from behind the sofa on a Saturday tea time.
So, three things remained constant: Crackerjack, Dr Who, and every Tuesday lunchtime, the new pop chart was revealed on Radio 1 by Johnnie Walker (full run down on Sunday evening between 6pm and 7pm).
Actually, there were four things that remained constant in my pre-teen existence: Crackerjack; Dr Who; the new pop chart on Radio 1 and, every Thursday evening Top of the Pops.
Did I mention listening to Radio Luxemburg under the bed covers? Oh, and Alan Freeman’s Rock on Saturday radio programme, and OGWT. Yeah, alright, that’s seven things…
Some of you reading this may understand these things. The rest of you will just put it down to early onset of dementia. Whatever. Now, where was I? I think I may have to link great chunks of this next bit to Wikipedia, you know... Thank you for staying with me. I really do appreciate your patience. My rather circuitous, and somewhat laboured point is that (with the exception of Dr Who and Crackerjack) much of my life revolved around music. This really does have something to do with Mott the Hoople, I assure you. Eventually. It may take a little while though. J
Right, the medication is beginning to kick in. Yeah, music. In the early years of the 1970s, in the middle of all the madness that was Sailor Ted’s Mongolian Clusterfuck government, music was the only way for young people to stay sane. To quote Frank Norris: ‘I knew it for the truth then, as I know if for the truth now’. It was an exciting time though too. Mass-market popular music was still a relatively new thing and most musicians, I’m pretty sure, were actually surprised by the fact that they were still alive and that popular music was still, in fact, popular. Of course, this was mainly down to a few things. Allow me to elucidate.
After Radio Caroline and Radio London were closed down by the fascists in Whitehall, Radio 1 actually rose to the occasion and started playing the music that the nation’s youth wanted to listen to. Every Sunday, all over the UK, young people would sit next to their transistor radios (it was a time before iPods) and avidly listen to the latest chart rundown, to see where their favourite songs were this week, and I was no exception. In fact, I used to dash home from school, on a Tuesday, to listen to Johnnie Walker run down the new chart, so I would know what I wanted to record on Sunday. I always got into trouble for being late back to school, and for having been out of school in the first place!
In those days people actually went to a record shop and physically purchased 7 inches of plastic - it was more innocent than that implies – and artists had to sell tens of thousands of singles to make even the lower reaches of the pop chart. It was religious thing and involved so much more commitment than clicking a mouse button. There was a wide choice of music styles accessible to the record-buying public: Motown; TSOP; Prog; R ‘n’ B; Soul; West Coast; East Coast. For me, it was the era of Glam that started it all. Slade, The Sweet, Gary Glitter (before he became famous for being a child-molesting perv, he was the biggest pop star of his day), Barry Blue (What?), Alvin Stardust; and who can forget Suzy Quatro in that leather outfit? OK, so there was also the Bay City Rollers, the Rubettes, and much dross, as there always was, and still is, but let’s gloss over that.
Between 1973 and ‘74, some things happened that would affect the path of my life, little did I know it at the time:
- Late one night, I was listening, rebelliously, to Big L and I heard a piece of music which hit me like a flying half-brick; The Band Played the Boogie by CCS (read Alexis Korner, and CCS stands for Collective Consciousness Society!) It was just so different and I couldn’t get that song out of my head then, and still can’t.
- One Saturday afternoon, as I was scraping ice from the freezer in the basement, Fluff played Alice Cooper’s Hello, Hooray. Wow.
- Around the same time my cousin introduced me to Alex Harvey. You could have hit me with a 2x4.
- A chap called Chris Chambers played me a cassette tape (young people look it up on Wikipedia!) of something called Brain Salad Surgery by Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. (BSS was going to be called Whip Some Skull on Yer, both titles, in fact, being slang for fellatio, as is the case with the title of the first Grateful Dead Live album, sometimes referred to as Skull and Roses, or amongst Dead Heads, as Skull Fuck).
It was, however, Top of the Pops which was unmissable. Kids all over the UK would take over the TV every Thursday evening around 7pm and, ignoring parental mutterings that ‘you can’t understand what they are singing’, that ‘they all look like girls’, and ‘why do they have to dress like that?’ I discovered Nazareth, Deep Purple and, yes, you got it, Mott the Hoople. The thing that made Mott special was that, whilst Deep Purple and Nazareth, for example, were straight-ahead rock, Mott effectively bridged the gap between true rock music and the popular Glam.
Phew. Told you we’d get there eventually! I have to also admit a certain amount of pride in the fact that I’ve managed to rabbit on for almost 1000 words between mentions of Mott. I have to get my little pleasures where I can.
Incidentally, the name Mott the Hoople was taken from the title of a 1960s comic novel by LA-based writer Willard Manus, the main character’s name being Norman Mott, and ‘hoople’ being a slang word for someone who is a lazy-assed deadbeat.
In 1974 I was eleven years old. The world suddenly mutated from Black and White into glorious Technicolor. Firstly, I came home from school one day to discover that a little man from D.E.R had installed a colour TV in the lounge. If you are of a certain age you will appreciate the magnitude of this event. For all those young whippersnappers out there, remember the day you got your first mobile phone and your whole universe suddenly went supernova? Well, that’s what getting a colour TV was like in the early ‘70s. Whilst the fashionable areas of trendy London may have had a serious case of the RGBs in the late ‘60s, in Yorkshire, it took a few years to make the journey north. Watching Top of the Pops suddenly took on a new dimension. Seeing Mott, in colour, on TOTP was a defining moment. They had the glam look (who can forget Buffin’s huge drumsticks, or Pete Watt’s silver hair?) as did Wizzard, Glitter, Slade, Sweet etc., but they seemed more like a bona fide rock group.
Fast-forward 35 years.
I arrived in London, checked into my hotel (hey I’m getting too old to spend the night on Euston station!) and arranged for a cab to take me to the gig. To someone of my generation the Hammersmith Odeon is one of the temples of rock music in the UK. Like The Rainbow, The Venue, The Marquee, and The Shepherds Bush Empire, amongst others, the Odeon is from another time and any gig here becomes special by virtue of the fact that it is here. Harry Weedon’s Art Deco design for Oscar Deutsch (ODEON, incidentally, stood for Oscar Deustch Entertains Our Nation) looks as fresh today as it would have done in the 1930s and, for anyone in my age group it conjures up memories of J. Arthur Rank (who owned the chain between 1938 and 1978) and Pearl and Dean advertising. Just seeing the band’s name on the sign above the entrance sends a tingle down your spine and, as I found my seat, right at the front in Row 4, I felt like something special was on the cards.
Of course, as I have postulated many times before in my gig reviews, building up a gig can lead to expectations that can never be achieved, and this was still a possibility. Nevertheless, I’ve seen Hunter solo, as well as playing with Ralphs, in recent years and he delivered on each occasion, so I figured that my disappointment was limited. Then again, Hunter is now 70 years old…
Support act for the evening’s proceedings was one Joe Elliot, squawker with Def Leppard, and he wasn’t that bad, I have to say. I’ll even go as far as to say I quite enjoyed his set. I was, however, only there to see the headliners. I had deliberately avoided the Interweb, and the possibility of reading any reviews or comments of the previous nights’ performances, as I wanted this to be a surprise, for good, or bad.
After what seemed like an eternity, although it was no more than half an hour later, the house lights went down, the leader tape began, the stage lights came up and the band ambled onto the stage. It was all so matter of fact when compared to modern-day concerts where there is so much reliance on lighting effects, pyrotechnics, and elaborate stage designs. This was a gig with a difference; it was old-school. This must have been what it was like to go to a rock concert back in ’74. No frills, no fuss, just go on-stage and play the songs. The only nod to the 21st Century was a video screen either side of the stage which displayed old posters, logos, and photos during the show.
It was epic. If you know the Mott back catalogue, then the setlist speaks for itself. It was everything I had hoped it would be, and then some. It just got better and better and by the time they launched into All The Way From Memphis, to conclude the main set, I was already in 7th Heaven. Once they came back on for the encores, now with Dale Griffin also on drums, starting off with Roll Away the Stone, I’d ascended to Cloud 9. One of the nice touches during an amazing evening’s entertainment was the introductions of the band and backing singers, which featured Hunter’s and Ralphs’ offspring, Stan Tippins the original singer in the band, and Mick Ronson’s daughter. Through All the Young Dudes and Keep a Knockin’ I pretty much sang my little, black heart out. To end one of the best gigs I’ve ever seen, they came back once more and played Saturday Gigs, Joe Elliot appearing at the mention of platform boots with what, today, looks like a ridiculous item from the Museum of Stupid Footwear. As Mott quit the stage for the last time, we all kept singing long after the house lights came up, not wanting it to end.
This was a fantastic night. No bullshit, just good old-fashioned rock ‘n’ roll. It doesn’t get any better than this.
Do you remember the Saturday gigs? I do!
Mark L. Potts
The God of Thunder
10th October 2009