Tuesday’s Tune: All The Young Dudes
My son was obsessively listening to Green Day’s 21 Guns the other day. I was obsessively trying to recall the song it reminded me of. Two-and-a-bit plays later and I was able to irritate the lad with a now-I’ll-play-you-a-SONG interruption. He reluctantly agreed that yes, 21 Guns sounds a lot like All The Young Dudes.
All The Young Dudes was a big hit for British glam rock band Mott the Hoople. Only ever flirting with success, they were on the verge of breaking up in 1971 when David Bowie persuaded them to give it another go and offered his services to produce a new album. He also offered a few songs, among them Suffragette City and Drive-In Saturday. But they decided on All The Young Dudes, and in the summer of 1972 it became the band’s breakthrough hit – in both the US and UK. The album, also named All The Young Dudes, was likewise a hit.
This explicitly gay song became an anthem for the glam rock era. As such it was a fitting song to feature in The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert for AIDS Awareness, held at London’s Wembley Stadium in 1992. David Bowie was joined on the stage by Ian Hunter, Mott’s lead singer to do a powerful perfomance of this great song.
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