Story of the song: All the Young Dudes by David Bowie

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In a conversation with the American beat writer William S Burroughs, printed in Rolling Stone magazine in 1974, David Bowie reveals how his song made famous by Mott the Hoople was originally intended for his 1972 album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

Bowie is asked to explain his Ziggy persona. “The time is five years to go before the end of the Earth. It has been announced that the world will end because of lack of natural resources,” he tells the croaking novelist. “Ziggy was in a rock’n’roll band, and the kids no longer want rock’n’roll. There’s no electricity to play it, Ziggy’s adviser tells him to collect news and sing it... ‘All the Young Dudes’ is a song about this news. It’s no hymn to the youth, as people thought. It is completely the opposite.”

Two years earlier, as Ziggy Stardust was taking shape, Bowie received a call from Mott the Hoople’s Pete Watts. With four fair-to-middling heavy-rock albums behind them, Mott had all but fizzled out and the bassist was looking for work. Bowie wasn’t hiring but he liked the band, so instead he offered them a lifeline – “Suffragette City”, a rocker slated for Ziggy Stardust. To his surprise, they turned it down. Within days, Mott the Hoople were sitting in Bowie’s management office listening to a new song, “All the Young Dudes”.