Even amid the glittering extravagance of the glam rock era, Peter Overend Watts, who has died of throat cancer aged 69, managed to stand out from the crowd. As bass player with Mott the Hoople, Watts was a lean and lanky figure, adorned with long, luxuriant hair and prone to performing in stack-heeled thigh-high boots and assorted androgynous costumes. Watts explained his hair care secrets thus: “I started off using Ford silver car paint on my hair and went on to Rolls-Royce silver. Crazy, but image is everything.”

Watts and Mott the Hoople reached their apogee with their 1972 single All the Young Dudes, a No 3 hit in the UK in the summer of that year and the song that brought the group back from oblivion. They had split up that March, feeling that their career was going nowhere. Watts had heard that David Bowie was forming a new backing band and called to ask if he could audition. However, Bowie was appalled at the idea of Mott breaking up, and instead offered to supply them with a song. This was All the Young Dudes, and it stands as one of the defining anthems of its era.

The song launched Mott into their period of greatest success. The Bowie-produced All the Young Dudes album reached 21 in the British chart, while Mott (1973) went to No 7 in Britain and 35 in the US, and yielded the UK singles Honaloochie Boogie and the Top 10 hit All the Way from Memphis. The Hoople (1974) cracked the US Top 30 album chart and went to 11 in the UK, and contained the hits Roll Away the Stone (No 8 in the UK) and The Golden Age of Rock’n’Roll. However, the group was now suffering a series of personnel changes, and when the vocalist, Ian Hunter, quit to form a duo with Mick Ronson, the golden age of Mott was over.

Born in Yardley, Birmingham, Peter was the son of Joan and Ron Watts. The family moved to Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire, when he was 13. Smitten by the twang of Hank Marvin’s guitar-playing with the Shadows, he began learning on his father’s acoustic guitar, and was given a Hofner Colorama 2 electric guitar for Christmas 1961. While attending Ross grammar school, he met Dale Griffin (later nicknamed Buffin), who became a lifelong friend and eventually Mott the Hoople’s drummer.

Prior to that, the pair played in several bands, including the Anchors and the Soulents, while Watts trained to be an architect during the day. By the end of 1965, Watts (now playing bass) had opted to become a full-time musician and was touring Europe with the Buddies, which did not include Griffin but did feature Mott’s future guitarist Mick Ralphs. Watts, Ralphs and Griffin were all members of the Doc Thomas Group, who made an album in Turin, Italy, released in 1967. This outfit morphed into Shakedown Sound and then Silence. They moved to London in 1969 and, after replacing singer Stan Tippins with Hunter, secured a deal with the producer Guy Stevens and Island Records.

They named themselves Mott the Hoople after a novel by Willard Manus, at the suggestion of Stevens, who had read the book while in prison for a drug offence. It was also Stevens who urged Watts to use his unusual middle name, Overend, an ancient family name that originated in Westmorland.

The band recorded four albums between 1969 and 1971, which brought no great commercial success but helped them build a healthy live following. Their debut album, Mott the Hoople (1969), reached 66 on the UK charts and went some way to achieving Stevens’s objective of creating a mix of the sounds of Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones. Mad Shadows (1970) and Wildlife (1971) both sneaked into the UK top 50, but Brain Capers (late 1971) failed to chart. The group’s disillusionment boiled over when they found themselves obliged to play a gig at a former petrol station in Switzerland in 1972. “I decided that if this was rock’n’roll, they could keep it,” recalled Hunter.

After Hunter’s later departure with Ronson at the end of 1974, Watts, Griffin and organist Morgan Fisher formed Mott, adding the vocalist Nigel Benjamin and the guitarist Ray Major. Watts stepped to the fore as the main songwriter, but a pair of albums for CBS failed to ignite the charts. They regrouped as British Lions, featuring John Fiddler from Medicine Head, and toured the UK and the US, but disintegrated when their record company declined to release their second album, Trouble With Women (it belatedly appeared in 1980 on Cherry Red records).

Watts and Griffin then moved into music production with their company Grimtone Productions, which enjoyed successes with the Cult, Hanoi Rocks and Department S’s 1980 hit Is Vic There? Watts then abandoned the music industry and, after opening an antique shop in west London, became the proprietor of the Dinosaw Market in Hereford, selling antiquities, specialist clothing, LPs and rare musical instruments.

In 2003 he gave up the Dinosaw Market after 15 years, devoting himself instead to carp fishing and long hiking trips. He spent much of his time at a croft in the Scottish isles.

In 2009 he joined the original members of Mott the Hoople for a series of five 40th-anniversary concerts at the Hammersmith Apollo in London. They reunited for further dates in 2013, culminating in a show at the O2 Arena, London. Also in 2013, Watts published his facetiously titled book The Man Who Hated Walking (Wymer UK), an account of his trek along the 630-mile South West Coast Path.

He is survived by his sister, Jane.

• Peter Overend Watts, musician and songwriter, born 13 May 1948; died 22 January 2017