Those shades! Oceans of mid-Atlantic green plastic bounded by translucent brown frames, black electrical tape wound in large balls around the tips to protect the Hunter cranium from undue pressure. Large rectangles, like television screens, obscuring the top half of his face, a profusion of light brown ringlets framing them on either side. In conversation they cause problems: I can see his eyes, but I keep focusing on the shades, and the area of green is so big my eyes keep sliding off and end f up looking somewhere else. Bothersome...

Good image, those shades. Across five years of photos they keep prodding: what does he look like without them? In physical proximity it becomes a game. The eyes are visible, but it's impossible to mentally erase the screen and imagine the reality. One reporter even went so far as to wear his mirror shades to an interview, figuring on duplicating the Lester Bangs/Lou Reed I'lltake-them-off-if-you-will, when Ian popped them off all of his own accord. Damn it! Some people have all the ,luck...

Then, one morning, Ian Hunter, essence of visual rockarama raunch, is having a prebreakfast swim. He looks normal. Crashingly normal. Like the guy in school who was so boringly average you always wondered how he managed to acquire such foxy chicks for girlfriends. Within the course of the day he manages to remove his glasses twice more for no discernable reason whatsoever. The sight of the naked Hunter face is a shock. Whoa! That's your image, man!

"My eyes had begun to be bothered by [bright light the previous summer, ana it was becoming worse the summer I joined Mott, so I was wearing shades a lot. I went on stage a couple of times without them, but the bright lights really hurt, so I had to wear them. But it would look even more flash and arrogant than I already am if I took them off offstage, so I kept them on all the time. When we started, everyone was into looking at their dick while they played, and we,were well put down for my shades. It wasn't cool at all.

"They can be used to good advantage on stage, but in slow songs they get in the way. "Boy," for instance, would be much easier to get across if I could actually look at the audience and make eye contact."

I had assumed that someone who had cultivated the visual image Hunter has and who can write songs displaying such quintessential rock and roll implication as "Alj The Way From Memphis" and "Golden Age of Rock and Roll" and (especially) "SatuYday Gigs" and who adopts such an arrogant and omniscient stance on stage would really have an overt and cultured awareness of image and media and how to exploit it. It really surprised me to find that Hunter is basically a fan who had crossed to the other side while still remembering what it was like to be a fan. I mean, just ask the dude when rock and roll rqade its first impression:

"Jerry Lee Lewis: "Whole Lotta Shakin"." The first time I heard it I was 11, 12, 13, something like that. I was at home, and they never used to play much rock and roll. When I heard that I couldn't believe it...A lot of the time I never had that much confidence as I would appear to have. I used to think there was something up with me. I didn't think I was a rebel, I just thQught there was something up with me, because nobody else thought the way I did. And what it was, they were thick, and I was ready for something better out of life. But that's just the way you are. As soon as I heard "Whple Lotta* Shakin" " I knew what it was. I knew I had to get to London, I knew there was other people about, I knew that was what I wanted to do.

1 love arrogance, and 1*11 get it back.

"Soon after, I saw a clip of High School Confidential, with them all wearing striped shirts and panel shoes, and you know how you do...I was saving up to go to Birmingham— there's a place called Chapmans and I had orders in for months to get panel shoes. If I'd gone to a golf shop I could have got them right away. We want the group in stripes now.. .sort of full circle.

"1 saw Jerry Lee at the Palladium. He's like the king. All that arrogance. I love arrogance. It's just a new group starting out, but I shall get that arrogance back, because I love arrogance, I love to watch arrogance, I admire arrogance. That's why I've always loved Jagger, because he's a controller. I shit myself when I saw the movie of Altamont, because I knew how he must have felt.

TURN TO PAGE 77.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 30.

"There was a guy called Screaming Lord Sutch, and I always admired him because he had timing. Everybody thought Sutchy was a bit of a joke, but be had a lot of things he didn't know he had. I mean, when he was doing hjs horror act, he would hold back and hold b&ck and then lurch, and the timing was perfect—everybody used to freak. Chicks Would scream. His hair was about a foot longer than the Stones or the Pretty Things, and he was into makeup totally. And his taste in music.. .He loved people like Arthur Alexander years before anyone else cottoned onto it. Coz it was hard to get records in those days. Like Guy Stevens,! Moft's original manager— everyone loved him because he had a lot of imports! He had a club called The Scene and the Stones were always in there. That's where the Stones were learning, off Guy Stevens" records, and the Animals would be in fhere every night, just listening to this black music.

"I'd just got to London and I was a fan, amazed by all these people. Amazed by Johnny Kidd and the Pirates. There were so many good bands. Those was my big fan days— like those 15 year old kids who came to see us last night; that's where it's going to happen.

"I didn't know if I was going to become a musician, because I couldn't sing very good. In those days you really had to be a good singer. I didn't know I had a chance until Dylan came along. I couldn't really understand what he was saying, but then I heard Sonny Bono and I thought, well I could do it. And I used to dream about it, and then I started writing. I went to Germany with Freddy "Fingers" Lee as a bass player and wrote a lot of songs with him. Ate toothpaste to stay alive."

Mott the Hoople, the title of a book by Willard Manus, was the brainchild of Guy Stevens. During a period of detention at Her Majesty's pleasure, Guy had met a young singer whom he was going to call Mott when they got out. Then the kid died, and the name was mothballed, supposedly for all time.

Guy joined Island Records as an a&r man and one day Mick Ralphs appeared with tapes of his band from Hereford, called Silence. Guy listened and told Mick it was the worst shit he'd ever heard, take his goddamned tapes, and don't ever come back. It was the most positive thing a record company man had yet said, and Ralphs, being a persistent fellow, kept bugging Guy. Eventually, a vision formed in ' Guy's deranged mind of what Silence; could be, but they needed a pianist, for that Little Richard touch. Also, vocalist Stan Tippens was planning to retire because he was beginning to go bald.

An ad was placed in the trades and auditions held. In the afternoon the person working in the studio called a friend who eked a living as a songwriter for a publishing company—a joke, really, since they weren't .the type of songs likely to be recorded by the Tom Joneses and Petula Clarks of the world—and told hirp to come down for a bash at the job. Some time later, after hoardes of would be pianists/vocalists had paraded their, qualifications, this bloke in a grubby sweater and decrepiit sandals wandered in and banged out two songs on the piano, practically the only two songs he knew how to play on keyboards. The band wasn't convinced, but with Guy's encouragement they decided to try out this new guy on spec. | \

"When I joined them I didn't know anything about clothes, about Carnaby Street or Kings Road," muses Hunter. "I was wearing three button suits. I put myself totally in their hands, mostly Guy and Fete, who was the one in the group for clothes. They taught me everything about image and looks, and I soon knew far more than they'll ever know.

"At the time my hair was quite short; I was trying to grow it straight down over my ears like the Beatles, but it kept sticking out like wings. They said to let it grow a bit and the weight would pull it down„but as it got longer it began to curl and look really good, and it got longer and longer and better and better. I only cut it before Christmas because I had had a lousy haircut and it was looking terrible, so I cut it back so it would grow out properly."

Hunter brushed up his piano for a couple of weeks and then the group hit the studio. Guy taped them live, most of the time leaping around the studio with them, pushing them to greater heights, leaving the tapes rolling as he urged them to carry on endless manic jams. Then they would chop up the good parts, write lyrics and have songs. (A techhique used on Ian Hunter, e.g. the continuing chorus of "It Ain't Easy When You Fail;" "Shades Off," which is two years old, was added to give it some form.) "You Really Got Me" was meant to have vocals, but they didn't sound right and there wasn't time to do it again, or perhaps no one could be bothered, and anyway it sounded just as good as an instrumental.

It must have been terrifically exciting, and somewhere in the midst of it all Guy decided that this band was something special, and deserved to be called Mott the Hoople. Nothing else would do.

Their stage act carried much the same maniacal intensity , and coming as it did in a time of British rock introspection—"Pete Townshend was always saying, "Why doesn't anyone leap; about anymore?""—they were well set for it. But they soldiered on until three years, four albums and $100,000 in debt later, they decided to call it a day. Enter David Bowie and Tony DeFries. Enter Success.

"It was largely to do with the book (Diary of a Rock Star), coz I'd seen how Dave was working and it was a lot of. self-discipline and it was working. So when we split from MainMan I thought, "This is it; everyone thinks it's all oyer, but what I'll do is go into a period of self-discipline! I started that period with the book, which forced me into a situation where morning, noon and night I had to do it, and that put me in a good frame of mind...

"DeFries didn't think Mtt were star quality and that was annoying me intensely. DeFries really managed us more after we left him, because I was so angry that -he didn't figure that Moft could make it that I really got those numbers—"Honaloochie," "Memphis." I remember after "Honaloochie" I saw him the night Dave packed up playing and I said, "I told you you was wrong"... And he said (measured, detached) "That remains to be seen." WHAAATH I went straight back home and wrote "Golden Age" and "Roll Away.""

The rest, as they say, is history, but even during the period of hits they seemed to be still carving a career out of failure.

"It was like we made a success out of failure, which I thought was kind of nice..." '

Ian was very wary about his return to the limelight. He felt very much the villian of the Mott split, especially since the press had, inadvertently or not, angled it that way. Also, he didn't think he wanted to tour any more.

"The feeling at the end of the Mott the Hoople tours was "no love lost," and I mistook that for not wanting to tour. It wasn't that at all, it was just different situations, different people, people not getting on well together."

Besides, Ian had been champing at the bit to get to America. Part of it has to do with the way he perceives himself.

To wit: "In America, rock is a lifestyle. Here it's divided between rock and football, and everything in its place. But in America rock is it, which is why I^m moving there, because rock is my life. And then, if it gets boring in two or three years, I'll move somewhere else..."

Another reason for the move is Hunter's assimilation of American roots. When "All The Way From Memphis" was released as a single it was played on British Radio One's Round Table, a program where a deejay and guest celebrities review new releases. /Clifford T. Ward, a longhaired girls School English teacher who moonlights in the Top Twenty with diaphanous prepschool ^cademic/intellectual ballads for which the term "wimp" seems to have been invented, and a guest of the evening, claimed "Memphis" inauthentic, since Himter wasn't American. "Why didn't he call it "All The Way From Hereford?"" Clifford opined. Ian, driving down Marylebone Road at the time, nearly went off the road laughing—he's been to Hereford four times; he's been to Memphis five times. V

For the moment, though, teen worship will out.

"It's all new to me. Mott was a boy's band, with very few girls, while Bowie, and then Mick, was a girl's band. It's mostly his people who have been coming to see us, and I've been feeling wary about being the villian of the Mott split. I'm probably a monster in their eyes...

"You won't see this band at its best for a year, because it takes people a while to get like.. .You know, Mott had their standards and with Ronson and Dave, they.had their standards, but we've got no standards. We've got fuck all, we've got eighty percent unheard. Eventually, when the songs become known, we can begin to form our own act. Butin a year...Mick will have done an album by the autumn that we worked on as a band, and that's when this band will happen."

A closing vignette: As everybody falls into the dressing room prior to the Newcastle gig, Blue Weaver rushes to the uptight piano resting in a corner.

"You remember in Don't Look Back at the Dylan gig in Newcastle when Alan Price opens beer bottles on the piano?" He points to a series of gouges on the edge of the piano. "Those are the mairks." Instantly Hunter starts banging out the rhythm to the song he played at the Mott the Hoople audition all those years, tours ago apd ambitions ago: "Like A Rolling Stone ".

"I am rock and roll," Ian says, "as much as Keith Richard is rock and roll. I live it and it's my life. If it ever went away then I'd be stuck in a little room with me records like dn old eccentric; a stamp collector or something. I'm dedicated to it. It's morning, noon and night. I bore myself intensely, because I .wake up with the same things that I go to/bed with, if you know what I mean." W