Story of the song: All the Young Dudes by David Bowie

From The Independent archive: Robert Webb on how glam’s new boogaloo dudes helped carry the news

Mott the Hoople were gifted Bowie’s song and turned it into the perfect 1970s pop single (Rex)

In a conversation with the American beat writer William S Burroughs, printed in Rolling Stone magazine in 1974, David Bowie reveals how his song made famous by Mott the Hoople was originally intended for his 1972 album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

Bowie is asked to explain his Ziggy persona. “The time is five years to go before the end of the Earth. It has been announced that the world will end because of lack of natural resources,” he tells the croaking novelist. “Ziggy was in a rock’n’roll band, and the kids no longer want rock’n’roll. There’s no electricity to play it, Ziggy’s adviser tells him to collect news and sing it... ‘All the Young Dudes’ is a song about this news. It’s no hymn to the youth, as people thought. It is completely the opposite.”

Two years earlier, as Ziggy Stardust was taking shape, Bowie received a call from Mott the Hoople’s Pete Watts. With four fair-to-middling heavy-rock albums behind them, Mott had all but fizzled out and the bassist was looking for work. Bowie wasn’t hiring but he liked the band, so instead he offered them a lifeline – “Suffragette City”, a rocker slated for Ziggy Stardust. To his surprise, they turned it down. Within days, Mott the Hoople were sitting in Bowie’s management office listening to a new song, “All the Young Dudes”.

David Bowie had earmarked ‘All the Young Dudes’ for his Ziggy Stardust album (Getty)

Ian Hunter, Mott’s tousle-haired singer, had a moment of epiphany. “I knew immediately that was it,” he reported. “I’d been waiting all my life to hear something like that.”

Dropped from Ziggy, it was left to glam’s new boogaloo dudes to carry the news. “I knew it would be a hit and I couldn’t believe I was about to give it to someone else,” Bowie later recalled. It was the perfect Seventies pop single, from Mick Ralph’s liquid guitar intro to Hunter’s self-referential rap at the fade-out inspired, allegedly, by an audience heckler (“Hey, you there with the glasses /I want you at the front / I’ve wanted to do this for years”).

Bowie couldn’t entirely relinquish “Dudes”, recording his own studio version in 1973, slower and in a lower key, hung around a caterwauling saxophone. Hunter wasn’t too impressed: “To be honest, I much prefer our version.”