Ian Hunter—Still Defiant

Stuck in the whirlwind of the pandemic in 2020, Ian Hunter started chipping away at his next album. With studios and venues and a majority of the world indefinitely shut down, Hunter continued writing in the basement of his Connecticut home. Before long, Slash wanted to get in on it. Soon after, Ringo Starr, Jeff Beck, Todd Rundgren, Mike Campbell, and a roll call of others also signed on to work on Hunter’s album.

A missive to the naysayers who claim that at 83 (he’ll be 84 on June 3), Hunter is beyond his years in rock ’n’ roll, Defiance Part I was also his musical respite from the turmoil of world events. “Everybody was fed up with COVID and the Ukrainian situation, and I didn’t want to make matters worse,” says Hunter. “I tried to keep this light, and deliberately on the cheerful side. Why add to the misery?”

By the summer of 2019, Hunter had finished a run of shows with The Rant Band, who had joined him on his previous three albums from the 2012 release When I’m President through Fingers Crossed in 2016. 

As he began working on the new songs, his manager Mike Kobayashi and friend and rock photographer Ross Halfin had a musical intervention and suggested that the recordings make the rounds among some famous friends.

Piecing together working demos with longtime collaborator and producer Andy York, who added light drums to Hunter’s piano and vocals, a collection of songs fit for nearly two albums began formulating, along with a quickly expanding list of collaborators.

“A friend of mine said, ‘Slash would like to do something,’ and then there was Billy [Gibbons] from ZZ Top, and it grew,” shares Hunter. “It was pretty amazing. It was one after the other.”

To Hunter’s surprise, all of his demos returned as nearly finished tracks that sounded better than he had anticipated. “I had a smile on my face when it [‘Bed of Roses’] came back from Ringo [Starr], and then Mike Campbell took it up a step,” Hunter says. “[Campbell’s] brilliant with any song he ever touches, and it just went on and on and on and on.” 

The bigger surprise for Hunter was when Stone Temple Pilots founding members guitarist Dean DeLeo, bassist Robert DeLeo, and drummer Eric Kretz signed on for blues-rock “Pavlov’s Dog,” a track Hunter likens to something off the Rolling Stones’ 1972 album Exile on Main Street.

Named after the Russian psychologist and physiologist Ivan Pavlov’s early 20th-century studies of conditioning using canines, “Pavlov’s Dog” has Hunter singing more about interpersonal un-conditioning on the track. “My wife said ‘Pavlov’s Dog’ one day, by chance,” shares Hunter. “I looked it up and said, ‘I can’t write a song about dogs that sniff people at the airports.’”

More surprises rolled in, including one of three tracks the late Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins contributed to Part I, on the more stripped ballad “Angel.”

“Taylor put drums on it, and then it came back with harmonies and guitar,” says Hunter of the drummer’s above-and-beyond contribution to “Angel,” along with songs “Kiss N’ Make Up” and the closing rocker “This Is What I’m Here For.” 

“It’s the weirdest thing,” adds Hunter, reflecting on Hawkins’ death on March 25, 2022, at the age of 50. “He was a lovely, lovely man. I only knew him briefly, but his knowledge of music. … He reminded me of Joe Elliott, an encyclopedia of music, and so enthusiastic.”

“Angel” is one of two more sentimental sojourns on Defiance Part I, the first running earlier on “No Hard Feelings.” I’m gonna make a man out of you if it’s the last thing I ever do sings Hunter in the refrain. The piano-tipped track traces around stinging words and forgiveness. Centered around Hunter’s relationship with his late father, the song also features Johnny Depp and Jeff Beck on guitar. 

“Johnny [Depp] gets maligned as a musician,” says Hunter. “He’s clever. All that slide [guitar] stuff he does. He creates an aura, and then Jeff [Beck] comes straight into it. It’s such a buzz.”

Beck, who died on January 10, 2023, at 78, also made his final studio recording for Hunter on a separate track, which will appear on Defiance Part II. “His manager told my manager it’s the best track he ever played in the studio,” shares Hunter.

Campbell joins Hunter on the moodier blues of “Guernica,” inspired by Pablo Picasso’s oil painting based on Hitler’s bombing of the civilian-filled village of the same name in northern Spain in April 1937. The more spirited “I Hate Hate” finds Hunter taking a neutral stance on the current social and political conditions. 

“I can’t watch TV,” Hunter admits. “I can’t read the newspaper. ‘I Hate Hate’ is very simple and straight to the point. It’s not flouncy. It’s not fancy. It’s direct. I like the line I hate hate ‘cus it’s out of date. I’m not really insulting anybody in particular.”

Revealing the lighter batch of tracks on the first installment of Defiance, Hunter insists that Part II will get “slightly” more political, but not preachy. 

“I’m right down the middle, dead center, and I wish more people were like that,” shares Hunter of his political position. “The eagle’s got two wings. If one falls off, the eagle falls down, and that’s what America is. It’s got two sides to it, and one side needs the other side. The left needs the right, and the right needs the left.”

This patriotic duality stretches further back for Hunter. Born and raised in the Midlands of England, Hunter briefly lived in Scotland with the family of his father, who worked for the British intelligence agency MI5. It was an experience that left him feeling equally English and Scottish. 

During his earlier years, Hunter remembers hunting for music and finding “original rock ’n’ roll,” in the fire of Jerry Lee Lewis and other kindred spirits within the era. “The Liverpool guys and the London guys were getting [music] right off the ships,” says Hunter. “I lived inland, in the Midlands, and we didn’t get it until much, much later.”

Hunter would often travel to Soho in London to get his music fix at the long-defunct coffeehouse called 2i’s. “It was the first place I ever saw people play,” shares Hunter. “We were so far behind.”

By the time Hunter joined Mott the Hoople in 1969, he was nearly 30 and had already played in a number of bands, including The Apex Group in the late 1950s and Hurricane Henry and The Shriekers by the mid-‘60s. His experience is something he says benefitted Mott’s songbook. “It was good because I had lyrics,” says Hunter. “A lot of bands came right out of school and hit it straight away at 19 or 20. When I joined Mott, I was 29. I’d already lived and been through a lot of stuff, so there was a lot of stuff to write about.”

Songwriting has always come by chance for Hunter, but not as regularly as he would like. “Nobody’s that lucky,” says Hunter of a constant writing routine or flow. “Well, maybe [Bob] Dylan.”

There were periods within the 1980s and ’90s when Hunter even suffered a writing drought. “I’ve had years when I couldn’t write anything, so you really appreciate it when it comes,” he reveals.

“I started again when I was 50,” adds Hunter of his 1989 release YUI Orta, which was a comeback of sorts for him and his longtime friend and collaborator Mick Ronson, who had also contemplated quitting music prior to working on the album. “That’s not a good age to be starting, but when it came, it came,” he adds of that period. “When it didn’t, it didn’t. Fortunately, I had two or three songs that were big, so I was able to survive financially.” 

Shortly after the release of YUI Orta, Ronson, who worked on a majority of Hunter’s solo albums, was diagnosed with liver cancer, and died in 1993.

There’s never been a pattern to follow when writing, says Hunter. “I’ve gone without writing for a year or more, then all of a sudden, just when you hate yourself the most, the songs come out,” he jokes. “I remember with my first album [Ian Hunter], a song called ‘I Get So Excited.’ It was a last-minute track because we needed another song. I can’t stand that track, but there it is. It was fabricated. It was put together, and Mick Ronson saved it.”

Instead, Hunter prefers songs to come naturally, which he says happened on Defiance. “They just sort of fell into place,” he says. “We never sat down and discussed it. It just sort of happened, and it feels right. It feels complete.” 

Prior to Mott the Hoople, Hunter got his first taste for words writing poetry as a kid. “I took one to school called ‘The Floods Roll On,’ and this guy, he got very angry and accused me of stealing his words,” says Hunter of the early accusation, which he documented in his 1996 song “23A, Swan Hill.”

The ordeal led him to contemplate writing something beyond poems. “It was kind of reverse psychology,” he says. “I was like, ‘Whoa, he thinks I come off as a real poet?’ That’s when I thought maybe I’ve got a shot. It got me through graduate school and English grammar. I was lousy.”

Hunter now believes he’s a bit wiser with his words, compared to back then and in the Mott days. “With Mott, it was seven albums in five years,” says Hunter. “You didn’t have a chance to think about it, but it was great fun. When you weren’t making the records, you were touring. It was non-stop, and I didn’t know how it worked.”

When Hunter joined Mott, guitarist Mick Ralphs was writing along with bassist Pete Overend Watts, who he says became more engaged by women than songwriting. “So by default, I did it,” says Hunter. “We didn’t know anything about publishing. We didn’t know if that’s where the money was. It’s a little fluky, the whole thing. I never thought I was gonna wind up like this.”

Along with their iconic, glam-rock pounces of “All the Way From Memphis” and “The Golden Age of Rock ’n’ Roll,” Mott the Hoople left behind a musical imprint shaping bands the likes of Queen, Def Leppard, and Mötley Crüe.

Never slighting what he created with Mott, Hunter says they were a mishmash band driven by spirit. “We were not great as a band,” says Hunter. “I mean, Mick [Ralphs] was a great player, and the organist Verden Allen. We were pretty rough, but everybody meant it. We didn’t give a shit about money.”

He adds, “The thing about Mott the Hoople was that it was the spirit of rock ’n’ roll. We weren’t that great, but it was a spirit. It wasn’t a business proposition. It was a spirit and all the ups and downs that go with that part of a band.”

Rock ’n’ roll has always been Hunter’s backdrop and where he returns. “I’ve always had that rock ’n’ roll background,” he says. “I’ve never really wanted to move out of rock ’n’ roll. The music that I love and that made me want to write is rock ’n’ roll—the original rock ’n’ roll. I’m not interested in any of the outtakes of rock ’n’ roll. I’m interested in the basic rock ’n’ roll because that’s what got me off—Jerry Lee [Lewis], Fats Domino—all those original greats.”

Returning to the original impetus for Defiance, Hunter is proof that octogenarians can still rock ’n’ roll. 

“It’s for the bunch of average people out there going, ‘He’s too old; he shouldn’t do it anymore,’” laughs Hunter. “I guess I shouldn’t be doing it, so that’s why I’m doing it.”

Photo by Ross Halfin