Happy Anniversary: Mott the Hoople, Mad Shadows

46 years ago this month, Mott the Hoople released their sophomore full-length effort, but its title reportedly wasn’t the one they’d originally planned to give it. We’ll get to that in a moment, though.

First, let’s talk a bit about the album itself. Recorded at London’s Olympic Studios, MAD SHADOWS featured seven original tracks, five written by Ian Hunter and the rest composed by Mick Ralphs, and it wasn’t what you’d call a big commercial breakthrough album for the band. Granted, it did chart slightly higher in the UK than its predecessor, but unlike their debut, it failed to chart altogether in the US, and its lone single, “Thunderbuck Ram,” didn’t chart anywhere at all. But if you ask noted Mott the Hoople fan Julian Cope – yes, that Julian Cope – you’ll find that he can’t say enough good things about it.

“MAD SHADOWS, was to be Mott's greatest statement of all and a true cry from the heart for Ian Hunter,” wrote Cope. “His wife had taken his children and returned to Shrewsbury, telling him that she would not accept his new longhair and new lifestyle, and the whole album resounds with Hunter's wailing and fist-pounding as the ghosts of his still recent former life spill over into every song. The sledgehammer attitude of the first album is, if anything, overtaken by the brutality of musical execution of MAD SHADOWS. Indeed, what makes MAD SHADOWS so powerful is the brazen way in which the other much younger musicians interpret Hunter's work. Simple to the point of repetition because of his ultra-limited piano playing, Hunter's songs actually gain from this flash, virtually punk energy which the rest of the band brings, and his desperate cry from the heart of a dissolving 30-something marriage is gloriously mistranslated by rampant musical interpreters barely out of their teens.”

Never knew it was quite that impressive, did you?

Mind you, Ian Hunter doesn’t agree: per Adrian Perkins’ history of Mott the Hoople, Hunter once said that it was the only Mott LP that he didn’t have at home, and he later claimed, “I single-handedly ruined that album.” But he’s a little too close to the project, so to close, let’s return to Julian Cope’s missive on the album, since his unabashed love for the LP is surely enough to sway anyone to step into MAD SHADOWS – with the possible exception of Hunter – and give it a go:

“MAD SHADOWS takes its name from a poem by Baudelaire, which Guy Stevens reproduced on the back of the gatefold sleeve. It includes such lines as: "Descend the way that leads to hell infernal, Plunge in a deep gulf where crime's inevitable." So we must presume from this evidence that, if Ian Hunter was really Pinocchio to Guy Stevens' Gepetto at this timeMAD SHADOWS a brilliantly unhinged example of an albeit briefly, but nevertheless perfectly balanced rock'n'roll symbiosis.”