Ian Hunter's stories of Freddie Mercury, David Bowie, Bob Dylan and more

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Ian Hunter’s first brush with celebrity came in the early 1960s when he met Freddie Fingers Lee, formerly the keyboard player with Screaming Lord Sutch And The Savages.

“Sutch wasn’t employing him, cos he’d fallen off stage in Liverpool with a piano,” Hunter says now. “He was back doing steel erecting, and I just happened to meet him in the pub. He wasn’t famous in the eyes of the rest of the world, but to me he was really famous.”

That fateful meeting led to Hunter and Lee starting a band. Since then the singer’s journey - first with Mott The Hoople and subsequently as a solo artist – has seen him cross paths with pretty much any rock star worthy of the epithet.

His two most recent albums, 2023’s Defiance Pt 1 and its new sequel Defiance Pt 2, feature an all-star guest list including Ringo Starr, Jeff Beck, Slash and members of Def Leppard, Metallica and Pearl Jam.

“It’s funny,” says the 83-year-old Hunter, “every time I meet someone who’s supposed to be crazy, they’re not.” And he’s met a lot of people, including…

Mick Ronson

I met Mick when he replaced a mate of mine, a great guitarist named Miller Anderson, in this religious thing called The Voice. I met him again on the All The Young Dudes record. He came in and did a Randy Newman-style arrangement on the last track, Sea Diver. He wrote it out on a cigarette packet, which impressed me.

He was a sweet guy, very modest. If you wanted to get him involved, arrangement-wise, you had to ask him. But there was another side to him. He knew how good he was: “I can handle anything.”

We shared a room for god-knows how many tours. He’d wake up in the morning and drink last night’s wine and start arguing with stuff on the TV. Apparently I used to leave water on the bathroom floor. He hated that, so he’d moan at me for that.

We worked on and off for seventeen years. People say: “How was it with Mick?” It was complex. He’d go off and do whatever he wanted to do, then he’d get fed up with that, so he’d ring me and go: “I want to do something.” That’s how we did it.

David Bowie

We’d made the decision to split Mott, and Pete [Overend Watts, Mott bassist] had asked him for a gig. That’s when he did his thing: “You shouldn’t split.” He’d send flowers to every show. Our label were going: “What the fuck’s going on here?”

We played the Guildford Civic, and he turned up. They were down one end of the dressing room and we were at the other, with Pete trying to be the middle man. He was different to us. He was definitely a star, he was working at it twenty-four hours a day. We weren’t, we were just having a good time, that was our version of rock’n’roll. He was on a different level. But he was lovely. You couldn’t have met a nicer guy.

Freddie Mercury

Out of all of Mott’s support bands, we got on with Queen the best. They became part of us, we became part of them. It was just like being in a nine-piece band. Fred was a character right off the bat. He was hilarious. He would say things that were extremely funny but he didn’t realise they were funny. And he was impatient. Everything had to be immediate – he had to be a huge star right now.

I remember him walking up and down in my room in Las Vegas, going: “When are these silly bastards going to get it?” I told him America was a big place, and they’d have to go round a couple of times. That’s what they did, and of course he did become that huge star.

Keith Moon and Frank Zappa

Keith had seen Mott at the [Hollywood] Palladium, and he rang me the following morning and said: “Do you want to go out tonight?” He met me in this little Volkswagen – Keith and this lady in the front, me and a rabbit hutch in the back, for some reason. We were going to someone else’s house, but they weren’t in, so he said: “We’ll go to Frank Zappa’s.”

So we wound up at Zappa’s house. Zappa was an absolute gentleman. He said: “I’ve got this stuff on two-inch tape downstairs, do you want to hear it?” Apparently once you got trapped by Frank you could be there for hours listening to stuff with no vocals, no melody. But I didn’t know this.

So I’m sitting there listening to people jamming. After forty-five minutes, Zappa said: “What do you think?” I said: [politely] “Great.” So he put another one on. Keith knew what was going on – he’d made himself scarce in another part of the house. Keith and Zappa both had reputations as being mad, but they were both gentlemen.

Bob Dylan

I remember one time, me and Mick Ronson had gone to something Bowie and [Bowie’s manager] Tony Defries were having in this club in Downtown New York. There was a restaurant, with a tunnel through to the club at the back. I said: “I don’t want to go through there, let’s stay in the restaurant.”

So we’re sitting there, and in walks Bob Dylan and [folk singer] Bobby Neuwirth. They sit down about two tables from us, and Bob takes out his guitar and plays the whole of [his 1976 album] Desire, and he’s overacting certain bits for fun. People are flying in to see what’s happening, and we’re just sitting there. We ended up going through to the club part, and all these people got up and started jamming. That was the night the Rolling Thunder Revue was born.

I met Dylan a couple of other times. One time, we were walking down the street and he had one foot on the pavement and one on the street going: “Mott The Hoople! Mott The Hoople!” There’d been a review in Rolling Stone where they said we were better than him. I thought he hated us, but it turned out he dug us.

And I met him after a Stones gig at Madison Square Garden in 1975. They weren’t on top form that night. He asked me what I thought of them, and I said: “It wasn’t their best evening.” And he went: “Nah, apathy for the devil.” I thought: “I’m having that for a title.” So I went off an wrote a song called Apathy For The Devil [which appeared on 1976’s All American Alien Boy].

Jaco Pastorius

He was wonderful. He was on All American Alien Boy. I met him through Bobby Colomby from Blood, Sweat And Tears. Bobby had brought him up from Florida and was inviting all these jazz guys to come round and watch him play. Jaco was like: “I don’t like this, I feel like a performing monkey.” So I said: “I’m making a record, do you want to come and live with me?”

He had a huge ego, but it was a positive one. He wanted to be the best bass player in the world, and he’d practise for eight hours a day at my house, which was amazing but annoying. He used to go to the top of a nearby hill and think a lot. Later on I think he replaced that with a lot of stuff that he shouldn’t have done. [Metallica bassist] Rob Trujillo played on the first Defiance record. He said: “Oh, by the way, I used Jaco’s bass.” That was a nice little story.

Mick Jones (The Clash)

He used to follow Mott when he was a kid. He was always well dressed, he stood out. In the mid-seventies I remember someone from [Hunter’s label] CBS taking me to the studio to listen to this band they wanted me to hear. It was The Clash before anyone knew who they were. I go in, and they’re there. I’m standing there thinking: “What am I doing here?”

So they play me this track. They asked me what I think and I say: “It’s great.” And then one them says: “It’s the blessing.” That’s when I realised it was the same guy who followed Mott. For some reason the punks loved Mott. I remember going to a club in London with Mick [Ronson], and they chased him out of there. I was alright, I got away with it.

John Lydon

I was on a plane once and I got a tap on the shoulder. It was John Lydon. The guy next to me swapped seats, and John sat down and we spent the next three hours talking. He’d taken over Number 1 Gunter Grove, which is where Bowie and Defries had their offices. He didn’t know. It was when Mick Ronson was unwell [with cancer]. Mick was a big PiL fan, so I said to John: “Come and see Mick.” He said: “I can’t do that. I’ll just end up saying something fucking stupid.”

John Cale & Lou Reed

I met John through [Mountain drummer] Corky Laing. John had some studio time, but whatever he was doing fell through. The next thing, me, Corky and Mick Ronson are sitting in the studio with John, just jamming for two or three days. He was great, but he wouldn’t play anything he was good at; he wouldn’t play the cello or piano.

I met [Cale’s former Velvet Underground bandmate] Lou Reed once. David [Bowie] wanted Mott to do Sweet Jane on the Dudes album. I had no idea what the song was about – I wasn’t from Long Island, I wasn’t hanging out with the Warhol crowd. So David brought Lou round to sing it. I still didn’t know what it was about. He wasn’t exactly the most exciting person in the world to hang out with at that time.

Joe Elliott

Joe’s a force of nature. In Mott, we used to let people in the back of the venue if they had no money. That’s what happened with Joe. He told me it was in Doncaster. I don’t know whether he’d paid or not, but he’d basically barged his way into the dressing room.

Years later, my manager got a call from their label indicating they wanted to meet me. I’d met someone like that before, I forget who it was, and I hadn’t liked it, so I didn’t want to do it. But when I did eventually meet Joe he was fantastic. He knows more about Mott than I do. You just have to sit back and listen to him.

Barry Manilow

He covered [Hunter’s 1979 song] Ships. That was down to [music mogul] Clive Davis. When musicians came to see him who didn’t write all their own songs, he had a habit of playing songs that they might like while they were having a meeting, to see if they picked up on it. That’s what happened with Ships. Apparently Manilow’s father had passed away not long before, so he asked Clive Davis what it was.

I never met Manilow, but we talked on the phone. He wanted me to change the song’s middle eight. He said: “My audience is composed entirely of idiots, they will not get it.” I gave it a go, but I couldn’t do it. Once a song is done, it’s finished. Then his management came for a piece of it. My management said no way. And it still went Top 10.

Ian Hunter’s album Defiance Part 2: Fiction is out now via Sun.