“There was another side to him” Ian Hunter on what Mick Ronson was really like
Mott the Hoople frontman Ian Hunter has opened up about late guitarist Mick Ronson in a new interview.
Speaking to Classic Rock, Hunter says that he first met Ronson when he replaced his friend, Miller Anderson, in the band The Voice, before meeting him again when Mott the Hoople recorded the 1972 album All The Young Dudes, which Ronson and his longtime collaborator David Bowie arranged and produced.
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Hunter recalls, “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.”
Hunter and Ronson worked together on and off over the course of 17 years, and he describes their working relationship as “complex”, explaining, “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.”
Ronson was Bowie’s guitarist in the Spiders from Mars, and the pair produced Lou Reed’s Transformer, too. He also worked with John Cougar Mellencamp on Jack & Diane, and toured with the likes of Van Morrison and Bob Dylan in an impressive career, before his death from liver cancer in 1993 at the age of 46.
Next year, 50 sculptures of giant rats are set to appear in Ronson’s native Hull in tribute to the iconic guitarist, a nod to his first band, The Rats. The exhibit, The Mischief of Rats, will be open from May until August next year, before the sculptures get auctioned off in September in a bid to raise up to £250,000 for local charity The Daisy Appeal, which works to fight cancer, dementia, and heart disease.
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