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By October of 1974 Mott the Hoople had four hit albums in America and completed a very successful tour – including a week-long ‘residency’ at Madison Square Garden – where every concert was sold out. But it was taking a toll on Mott frontman, Ian Hunter: he was under enormous pressure to write songs as well as constantly touring. He was signing the papers to buy his house at Chappaqua, New York, and 45 minutes later was lying in a hospital bed.
It took 55 hours on a drip to return his hydration level to normal and the doctor told him to stop doing what he was doing or be dead in a year. Hunter decided to leave the band.
The weight that was suddenly lifted off him meant he recovered quickly. He then wrote ten great songs fairly quickly and in January 1975 recorded his solo album Ian Hunter.
Ever since there’s been a weird suspicion: what if that was Mott the Hoople’s 1975 album and Hunter’s subsequent solo albums were also ‘Mott the Hoople’ albums…as if the band had continued. I have raised this with Ian Hunter and he told me it was never going to happen. His stress levels and ill health were so bad in 1974, that there is no way that sort of ‘alternative history’ could ever have occurred: it’s a fantasy.
Similar fantasies are being trotted out on the election trail by Labour and the media.
According to them, New Zealand in 2017 was a dystopian backwater – full of starving children and Maori wearing yellow stars – experiencing some kind of economic depression. New Zealand’s greatest-ever leader, Jacinda Ardern, was unanimously elected, threw a bit of pixie dust around and all the problems were solved. Then the bubonic plague broke out: she cured that too. But an ungrateful nation of hate-filled racists forced her out. And now they’re doing the same to the second best-ever leader, Chris Hipkins and you – you – are so nasty, mean spirited, selfish and morally repugnant that you aren’t rushing to re-elect him!
In Labour’s fantasy world we now we live in a country with a booming economy and unprecedented levels of prosperity. No one is hungry, no one is struggling; hospitals and schools have never been in better shape and neither have race relations. We now have a common language and culture (except for a few racists). All is rosy in the garden and half the world wants to move here. So you need to be ashamed of yourself for daring to believe those lying eyes of yours.
It really is so utterly ridiculous. Even Quentin Tarantino in Inglourious Basterds or The Hateful Eight doesn’t try to pretend it’s a ‘real’ history based on any sort of ‘fact’. But a fantasy of New Zealand 2017–23, as according to Labour and a dutiful media, is being endlessly passed off as real. Start the clock on when school children will be taught this nonsense that nobody remembers.
