Ben Marshall: I was told a story that on Christmas Day 1972 David Bowie rang you, demanding your presence, which necessitated you driving jetlagged from Heathrow to the West Midlands, only to arrive and be told that David had had a bit of an episode and you weren’t really needed. Any truth to that?

Ian Hunter: Absolute nonsense. To begin with, it wasn’t Christmas Day. It was Boxing Day. Bowie rang up a mate of mine and told him he had this great idea and that he wanted to tell me all about it. I’d just come back from the US, so I was jetlagged, but I didn’t drive up to the West Midlands, it was somewhere in the West Country. So we turn up waiting to hear The Idea, and Bowie keeps sloping off to the bathroom, goes in one person and comes out another. I had no idea what was happening, I just sat there like a bricklayer’s labourer, totally bloody clueless. He never got round to telling me about the world’s greatest idea.

Uncut #157, June 2010