on 2011-07-11 grego Said:

Your glaring ignorance of history aside, MTH never tried to "bridge" anything beyond maybe the spirit of Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard. It seems to me that you were then, as now mired in what many Rock critics label "important" music. To actually propose that an artist's presence on the chart somehow lessens that "importance" puts you firmly in league with all the other soul-sucking ass-faced parasites, (there are exceptions, of course) commonly known as the "The Music Press" who see themselves as a cut above those poor unwashed souls who actually LISTEN to something without worrying what some self-important, self proclaimed arbiter of "all that is relevant" thinks.
Not Rated

Review:

on 2011-07-11 CharlesMartel Said:

By the time glam hit the scene, I was already into rock music in a big way. Given the dichotomy which existed in the British music scene in the early seventies between album music, which was regarded as serious and superior by devotees, and chart music which was regarded as flippant and banal in comparison, glam never really got a hold of me in the way it did for some of my contemporaries. Glam was just chart music - all show and no real substance. That may seem unfair now, but at the time it was perfectly logical. Many of my contemporaries got their musical start with glam - I did not.

Mott the Hoople made an attempt to bridge that gap, but never really succeeded. The dichotomy was too strong and almost caused the band to split in the face of unrelenting commercial apathy. What saved them was "All the Young Dudes" which Bowie could have recorded himself, but instead lent to Ian Hunter. It became Mott the Hoople's most enduring success. It also became, along with Bowie himself, the almost acceptable face of chart music. I say almost. No matter how close any band came to acceptability, I was too deeply mired in the dichotomy and would never consider parting with my pitifully small amounts of cash to but a chart record. Looking back, that may seem strange, but at the time it seemed the sensible thing to do  mostly. Sometimes I spent my pitifully small amounts of cash on bollocks like "Tales from Topographic Oceans" and at times like those questioned the musical direction I seemed to be taking.
Rating: 6/10