Mott the Hoople – Brain Capers (Featuring the Brain Caper Kids) 1971

3,731

5 Stars

Brain Capers featuring the Brain Capers Kids. Artwork by Bizarre Damage. Originally the album was going to be called ACDC; this was then dumped. (I mean, how could anything titled AC/DC be successful?)

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Definitely one of the wackiest albums ever recorded. Every track is an absolute corker. The whole album was put onto tape in five days of madness at Advisions studios in London.

For these sessions, Guy Stevens, the band’s original mentor, was brought back after not being at the controls for the band’s previous album “Wildlife” (which the band themselves had already dubbed ‘mildlife’). Guy arrived at the studio with engineer Andy Johns, who was feeling no pain having just come away from the Rolling Stones. Armed with a case of Vino Calapso and dressed as Zoro with cape, mask and sword, he insisted the tracks were all laid down in one take.

*Mott the Hoople did manage one performance on Top of the Pops, playing*
*Midnight Lady, their single released at the*
*time, but not on the album. That didn’t chart either.*

Brain Capers (featuring the Brain Caper Kids), as the album became known, had an amazing atmosphere with last gasp energy capturing Mott in a wild and manic mood, predating punk rock. The overall feel of Brain Capers was barely controlled chaos, but it remains a brilliant and crucial album.

Once described as the great lost hard rock LP of all times, the record drew a line in the sand between the sixties and seventies music as it was recorded in 1971, six months before Bowie gave Mott ‘All The Young Dudes.’ Revealing almost everything called rock and the subsequent punk movement six years later, it was nothing short of fraudulent after just one listen to this album. You can clearly hear where The Sex Pistols and The Damned got their influences.

Opening track ‘Death May Be Your Santa Claus’ is a pounding rocker with fearsome guitars, wailing organ, a catchy hook, and carrying a trademark message of defiance.

*At the time of Brain Capers, Mott the Hoople was still popular on the*
*British Summer Festival circuit. Playing in the*
*middle of the bill and always going down a storm.*
*The references to Mott the Hoople in the film*
*Still Crazy are hysterical.*

Tracks two and three were imaginative and tasteful cover versions of the Dion Dimuccis auto biographical anti-drug song ‘Your Own Backyard’ and the Young Blood’s neglected classic ‘Darkness Darkness’ featuring Mick Ralphs on vocals and containing some excellent guitar. Mott had the panache to re-interpret other writers’ material with feeling and understanding.

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‘The Journey,’ a sad, introspective masterful ballad some eight minutes long, was Mott’s equivalent of Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ building to a dramatic conclusion. ‘The Journey’ started life as a poem before becoming the central piece of Mott’s stage act, demonstrating Hunter is a writer who has made a major contribution to rock music. The song was also a personal favorite of Verden Allen, whose keyboard playing excelled throughout Brain Capers, most notably on this opus.

*Mick Ralphs, Mott the Hoople’s lead guitarist. A musician worth his place in*
*the highest company. In later life, of course,*
*he would form Bad Company with Paul Rodgers*
*and play with Dave Gilmour’s solo band on the road.*

‘Sweet Angeline’ is a brilliant all-out rocker with Hunter adopting Dylanesque vocals and is still in his solo live set today.

‘Second Love’ was Verden Allen’s first song recorded by Mott the Hoople and fair plucks at the old heartstrings.

The penultimate track ‘The Moon Upstairs’ is one of Mott’s most powerful tracks ever recorded. The song was unquestionably six years ahead of its time, being frightening New Wave fuzz tone premonitions that musically and lyrically rendered late seventies Punk Rock tone clumsy and lacking in any real substance.

Brain Capers’ coda was a two-minute instrumental name ‘The Wheel Of The Quivering Meat Conception,’ which actually was nothing more than the climax to a frantic jam the band had at the climax of the recording of one of the takes for The Journey. A Bit of a throwaway, really, but it did get the album’s length up to over 38 minutes. It’s also a fine way to close out events.

**Twelve months before glam rock struck, Mott the Hoople were just a bunch of road warriors.**

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The album was released with high expectations, especially from their Record Company Island. They had nearly burnt the studio up to high jinx during the recording, so the money had to come back somehow. Sadly, Brain Capers bombed spectacularly, not even putting a dent in the album charts anywhere in the world. But the Hott Mott (Mott the Hoople’s fan club members) raved about it. Sadly at the time not enough of them. These days it’s held up as a classic, a precursor to the Punk Rock Revolution.

Mott the Hoople dedicated Brain Capers to James Dean.