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Ian Hunter - Dandy (Ian's tribute to David Bowie, from his 2016 album)
This video was made by a fan. Amazing collection of Bowie photos.
https://americansongwriter.com/ian-hunter-rant-proper-fingers-crossed/
Ian Hunter & The Rant Proper
Fingers Crossed
(Proper Records)
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Ian Hunter’s run of 21st Century records has been so consistently excellent that he doesn’t have a contemporary in rock and roll even close in comparison. Starting with 2001’s Rant, you’d have to look to literature’s Philip Roth or film’s John Huston to see such superb work coming from an artist in his seventies. The former Mott The Hoople leader’s newest disc, Fingers Crossed, may just be the best of this golden group. Bob, Neil, Van, their glories are mostly in the past. Ian Hunter, 77, is now simply the finest practicing songwriter from the Classic Rock era.
-snip-
Longtime listeners will probably be most eager to hear Hunter’s musical eulogy for old pal David Bowie. They won’t be disappointed. “Dandy” manages the neat trick of being dry-eyed and warm-hearted, an emotional sendoff to “Mr. Jones,” that not only cleverly references Bowie song titles, but has the poignance of Hunter’s best ballads like “Saturday Gigs.” Keep the Kleenex handy for this “Dandy.”
Track by track, hook by hook, growl by growl, the guy has simply never been better. He may talk death (“Ghosts In The Room,” “Morpheus”), but the album is really about the continuing vitality of one of rock and roll’s living legends. At one point, our dude sings a song called “You Can’t Live In The Past.” Though he has many glorious accomplishments, with this album, Ian Hunter proves he is still incredibly active. As well as a man capable of taking his own advice.
Fingers Crossed
(Proper Records)
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Ian Hunter’s run of 21st Century records has been so consistently excellent that he doesn’t have a contemporary in rock and roll even close in comparison. Starting with 2001’s Rant, you’d have to look to literature’s Philip Roth or film’s John Huston to see such superb work coming from an artist in his seventies. The former Mott The Hoople leader’s newest disc, Fingers Crossed, may just be the best of this golden group. Bob, Neil, Van, their glories are mostly in the past. Ian Hunter, 77, is now simply the finest practicing songwriter from the Classic Rock era.
-snip-
Longtime listeners will probably be most eager to hear Hunter’s musical eulogy for old pal David Bowie. They won’t be disappointed. “Dandy” manages the neat trick of being dry-eyed and warm-hearted, an emotional sendoff to “Mr. Jones,” that not only cleverly references Bowie song titles, but has the poignance of Hunter’s best ballads like “Saturday Gigs.” Keep the Kleenex handy for this “Dandy.”
Track by track, hook by hook, growl by growl, the guy has simply never been better. He may talk death (“Ghosts In The Room,” “Morpheus”), but the album is really about the continuing vitality of one of rock and roll’s living legends. At one point, our dude sings a song called “You Can’t Live In The Past.” Though he has many glorious accomplishments, with this album, Ian Hunter proves he is still incredibly active. As well as a man capable of taking his own advice.
https://www.nme.com/blogs/nme-blogs/we-refused-to-support-ziggy-stardust-mott-the-hooples-ian-hunter-remembers-david-bowie-3449
“This world was black and white, you showed us what it’s like to live inside a rainbow,” sings Ian Hunter, ex-singer with Mott The Hoople, on his new song ‘Dandy’, a tribute to his one-time collaborator David Bowie. “What I was trying to illustrate was a kid going to see Ziggy or even before that ‘Hunky Dory’,” Hunter explains. “It was drab in England in the early 70s and I think David was the probably the first technicolour artist, going to see him was like going to the movies. Then you came out and caught the last bus home.”
Bowie was a huge fan of Mott The Hoople in the early 70’s, to the point where, hearing that Mott were on the verge of splitting up in 1972, he started trying to give them some of his best songs. Mott turned down ‘Suffragette City’ but preferred a new song Bowie had written for them called ‘All The Young Dudes’. The single became a huge hit and what critics described as “the ultimate 70’s glitterkid anthem”, although Hunter claims Bowie preferred the B-side.
“We did ‘… Dudes’ in two evenings at Olympic and we did the B-side as well,” Ian recalls. “He worked his ass off and we did them both, then sitting there listening to them, he said ‘One Of The Boys’ is the single. ‘No’! He was going ‘the back end of “…Dudes” is boring’. So I went out and did a little rap on the back end and then he was happy, then he thought it was the single. We knew it was the single right from the off.”
-snip-
Looking back at working with Bowie, Hunter remembers a “nice bloke, really generous with his time, as far as my band was concerned, very helpful. He was full on. He was strange, one eye was a bit dodgy, y’know what I mean? You had a feeling he was slightly otherworldly but he didn’t come off that way at all, he was perfectly normal and so was Angie. We didn’t know much about studios. He’d worked with Visconti, he knew how to mic stuff and so did Mick [Ronson, who played on the album]. He learned a lot off them. The studio was a different animal. Before that, when we were on Island [records], we treated the studio more like a gig. With David it was like ‘well, you can do this, you can do that’. It was a learning experience.”
-snip-
Bowie was a huge fan of Mott The Hoople in the early 70’s, to the point where, hearing that Mott were on the verge of splitting up in 1972, he started trying to give them some of his best songs. Mott turned down ‘Suffragette City’ but preferred a new song Bowie had written for them called ‘All The Young Dudes’. The single became a huge hit and what critics described as “the ultimate 70’s glitterkid anthem”, although Hunter claims Bowie preferred the B-side.
“We did ‘… Dudes’ in two evenings at Olympic and we did the B-side as well,” Ian recalls. “He worked his ass off and we did them both, then sitting there listening to them, he said ‘One Of The Boys’ is the single. ‘No’! He was going ‘the back end of “…Dudes” is boring’. So I went out and did a little rap on the back end and then he was happy, then he thought it was the single. We knew it was the single right from the off.”
-snip-
Looking back at working with Bowie, Hunter remembers a “nice bloke, really generous with his time, as far as my band was concerned, very helpful. He was full on. He was strange, one eye was a bit dodgy, y’know what I mean? You had a feeling he was slightly otherworldly but he didn’t come off that way at all, he was perfectly normal and so was Angie. We didn’t know much about studios. He’d worked with Visconti, he knew how to mic stuff and so did Mick [Ronson, who played on the album]. He learned a lot off them. The studio was a different animal. Before that, when we were on Island [records], we treated the studio more like a gig. With David it was like ‘well, you can do this, you can do that’. It was a learning experience.”
-snip-
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