9. All The Young Dudes
I always regretted that the Spiders didn’t do that one as a single, Bowie and the Spiders. Because when he had written it, we did hear it and we did a version of it just to try it out, and you could hear that there was a real potential for it to be a big hit single. And we didn’t treat it like that, we just treated it as another song we needed to get a version down on record. Then he gave it to Mott The Hoople and it went absolutely huge! It turned out to be kind of like an anthem of the 1970s, really. An amazing song, another one of my favorites. It was one of those songs you hear, and you just know immediately: that’s a hit. Some you might hear and think it could be a hit if it was treated right, or it could be a minor hit, but with that one it was: no, this is a major hit. He wrote it for Mott The Hoople, really, they were on the edge of splitting up and it wasn’t going well, and they needed to be pulled out of it with a hit – so David, as he did, just went: ‘Okay, I’ll write one.’
