Ian Hunter seems to have reached that point in his life and career where he feels the need to talk to the listener directly: He begins his first solo album with a spoken "Hallo" and toward the close of the LP takes over from the music altogether to read what sounds like a late-night page from some haunted diary. All of this is not surprising, given Hunter's recent sudden departure from Mott the Hoople, a concurrent nervous breakdown, the formation of a partnership and new band with Mick Ronson and the highly confessional nature of many of his later Mott songs. "Sea Diver," "Hymn for the Dudes," "Ballad of Mott the Hoople" and the extraordinary "I Wish I Was Your Mother" are works so drenched
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in introspection and relative defeat that it is no wonder he has to talk about it.
From the start in 1969, Hunter apparently recognized his demons and pursued his recurrent themes of madness, loss of self, the ultimate cost of sex and rock & roll and the complex relationship between success and failure. In the first of his own recorded songs, the Bob Dylan-influenced "Backsliding Fearlessly," he sings, "I wait for the rebel's conventional ways/For he loses his mind while the devious stay," then asks: "If the world saluted you/What would you do/If you could be there? .../Would you still want me?" In "Half Moon Bay," also from the Atlantic Mott the Hoople album, the singer realizes his dreams will never end but senses "the better half has already played."
Both of these early songs are immature and imitative, as is "When My Mind's Gone" ("If this feeling lasts/I won't have to find a thing to say") from Mad Shadows, the second Mott LP, but the thematic compulsiveness is evident. Two other songs from Shadows, "No Wheels to Ride" and "You Are One of Us," touch on an inspirational, self-resurrection motif. Re the third album, Wildlife, and Hunter's contributions to it, the less said the better; but on Brain Capers, he scores heavily with "Sweet Angeline," the first of his great songs about rock & roll women, and "The Journey," a schizophrenic sequel to just about everything that has preceded it. Actually two songs forced into one, "The Journey" artfully combines the singer's concern with madness and loss ("Well, I can see the end for the very first time/But I know I lost just a little bit on the journey") with the obsession to make someone—in this case, not himself but a woman—believe in herself. Also on Capers is the strange, out-of-control "The Moon Upstairs," in which Mott berate their audience for being "too fucking slow" and provide a raging, if premature, musical "epitaph."
After such a finale and singular lack of commercial success, many wondered what could be left for an obviously talented but troubled band that, up until this point, had not shown the stability to concentrate their strengths into a coherent whole. If all things come to those who wait, the Hoople had surely paid the
