Ian Hunter Is Back and Ready for the Big Time : Rock ‘n’ Roll: The Mott the Hoople veteran and his longtime sidekick, Mick Ronson, begin a Southland tour tonight in San Diego.

Back in the early ‘80s, Ian Hunter was more like landed gentry than the street-rocker he had been in his younger days. He was living in the country in Upstate New York, breeding German shepherds--and watching his music go down the tubes.

“I just don’t think there’s any energy in the air,” Hunter said this week from a tour stop in Dallas. He and guitarist Mick Ronson bring their band to the Southland for a series of dates starting tonight at the Bacchanal in San Diego.

“It must be in the air,” said the veteran rocker, whose erratic solo career has yet to eclipse his tenure with the storied British band Mott the Hoople.

“In the city there’s more energy in the air. See, when I was in Mott, I’d always written the songs in a little apartment in London, and it just seems to work better. I moved into Manhattan around ‘86, and then I wrote ‘Big Time,’ and I thought, ‘Well, that’s the first decent song that I can put on a record.’ ”

Hunter’s urban renewal plan has led to his re-teaming with longtime sidekick Ronson, and to their record deal with PolyGram, which recently released their album “Y U I Orta,” Hunter’s first record in six years. Perhaps more important, it revived the spirit of this classic rock ‘n’ roller.

With his red ringlets and ever-present shades, the Englishman cut a Dickensian figure as he led the star-crossed Mott the Hoople through the late-’60s/early-’70s rock crusades.

The band, cynical and softhearted, hard-bitten and romantic, supplied much-needed urgency and challenge to a largely sterile scene. In the personnel department, its internal workings were a study in contradictions, a prototype for the conflicting forces and thrilling instability that would later make bands like the Clash, the Replacements and Guns N’ Roses so fascinating.

In the end, Mott ended up with the respect of the punk generation that rejected so many of the group’s contemporaries.

“They were all-encompassing,” Hunter said, reflecting on his old band’s appeal. “They had their heavy-metal side, what’s called heavy metal now. We never called it that then. They had their kind of glam side and they had their punk side. If you listen to ‘Brain Capers,’ if you listen to ‘Moon Upstairs,’ it’s kinda like listening to the Pistols before it ever happened.

“We were genuine. I knew what I was talking about when I did lyrics ‘cause I’d been in the factories. I was straight out of ‘em. Had a lot to talk about. Mick Ralphs was a tasty guitar player at a time when there weren’t too many tasty guitar players around.

“It was a combination of assets. I don’t think as a band it was that great musically. It just seemed to have a lot of things going for it.”

Though David Bowie stepped in to save the band’s career when he wrote and produced the 1972 hit “All the Young Dudes,” Hunter left in 1975 and Mott petered out shortly thereafter.

A decade later, Hunter feels renewed, but old patterns die hard. Consider his luck at two record companies: He signed with Columbia Records in 1983 largely because Mott’s old label liaison Dick Asher was president of the company. A month later, Asher was fired, and Hunter’s album “All of the Good Ones Are Taken” drifted into failure.

This year, Hunter went with PolyGram because Asher was that label’s president . . . and two months later Asher was gone.

“It’s most annoyin’,” Hunter said, “ ‘cause he happens to be an excellent record guy. He’s not necessarily a great corporate man. . . . It’s a difficult situation when a record company loses a president, because they’re in a state of flux, a lot of people are wondering what’s gonna happen. It couldn’t have happened at a worse time. But hopefully the album’ll be strong enough to outdistance it. We’ll have to see. It was a bad piece of luck, there’s no doubt about it.”

Meantime, Hunter is concentrating on the road work at hand, and swears that after 20 years in the game he feels more sure than ever about what he’s doing.

“Especially if people keep on churning out the crap they’re churning out,” he said. “I mean, one of the reasons I came back was ‘cause I lay on the bed and watched MTV and moaned at everything I saw, ‘til my wife turned around and said, ‘Well why don’t you go out and do something about it instead of just moaning?’

“I mean, there’s nothin’ out there like me. Maybe there shouldn’t be, but I just feel there should be.”