Eighty-four years young in June, the indefatigable Ian Hunter is about to release the first of two new albums. A star-studded affair – including Jeff Beck’s final studio performance – it demonstrates how brightly the “true spirit of rock’n’roll” still burns within the former Mott The Hoople frontman.
For someone whose world was irrevocably changed by Gene Vincent and Jerry Lee Lewis, it’s little wonder that Ian Hunter has spent most of his life in America. One place in the States, however, that doesn’t exactly throb with the danger and subversion of his beloved rock’n’roll is rural Connecticut.
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Hunter moved to the United States in 1975, just after his exit from Mott The Hoople, assisted by his American wife Trudi and propelled by Britain’s income tax rate. He wasn’t the only one. “Robert Plant was carried out of Britain on a stretcher. The Stones were living in Jamaica. We didn’t have any money, then when the money started coming in they took it all back. There was no way in hell, apart from winning the pools, that anything was gonna work [in the UK] for a working-class chap.”
The tedium of locked-down…
