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[quote="Andrew Perry, Telegraph UK"]The stakes in heritage rock reunions are getting so high that, soon, only the exhumation of some demised old stager will up the ante. This latest one, however, was pretty far-fetched.
Mott the Hoople were titans of mid-Seventies glam. In their early career, they struggled as unreconstructed rockers, until David Bowie, no less, remodelled them in satin suits and platform boots. He donated them a fabulously dissolute glam anthem, 'All the Young Dudes’, and thus began their tenure in the Top Five.
This, however, was a band destined to fail. They didn’t handle whirlwind fame well at all, and quickly disintegrated, only to be championed retrospectively by fans such as Morrissey, for their raunchy, wry take on the rock 'n’ roll life.
Forty years on from their inception, and thirty years since some of the members had actually spoken to each other, Mott stormed back into London for the first of five sold-out nights at the Apollo. Their singer, Ian Hunter, agelessly shrouded in corkscrew curls and face-blotting sunglasses, led straight into a ballad, 'Hymn For the Dudes’, his gnarly, Dylan-esque voice roaring at the high notes. This was not to be a half-hearted canter through the hits.
The first hour was mostly devoted to the band’s pre-Bowie, high-voltage rock 'n’ roll material. Hunter, a busy solo artist for more than three decades, and the silver-topped lead guitarist, Mick Ralphs, riffed vigorously, in active defiance of Time’s subsequent intervention. The partisan crowd — at least eighty percent of whom, gloriously, unrepentantly, were old enough to remember it all from the turn of the Seventies — responded with commensurate enthusiasm.
The electricity crackled to a new intensity, however, when Hunter moved to a piano stage-left, and finally unleashed a dazzling run of glam classics — songs about little more than rock itself. Glam, originally, existed purely to overturn prog-rock’s tedious virtuosity, to revive the raw, sexy thrill of Fifties rock’s simple, thumping beats and clanging riffs.
Perhaps it was daft, witnessing a seventy-year old man with a blond afro singing, “I get my kicks from guitar licksâ€
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