IAN HUNTER

He's older than rock'n'roll itself, and back with an all-star cast on his new album on Sun Records. Here he talks to CR about working with Jeff Beck and Taylor Hawkins, punk rock, Alex Harvey, David Bowie, and sex and drugs in the 7Os. This is what he’s here for.

- Scott Rowley

“The whole thing’s been a fluke,” says Ian Hunter, “a lovely fluke.”

Back in 2019, even Ian Hunter thought that he was finished. He had released his last solo album, Fingers Crossed, in 2016. That same year saw the release of Stranded In Reality, a 30-CD boxset of his solo material that felt like a whopping great full stop to an amazing career. UK and US tours with Mott The Hoople in 2019 seemed to take things full circle.

To mark his 80th birthday, he did five nights at The Winery in New York City, playing through his back catalogue.

“I thought that was it,” he admits. But Ian Hunter underestimated himself. Def Leppard manager Mike Kobayashi came to The Winery shows and offered to manage him. So there he was: 80 years old with a new manager – a guy who manages one of the biggest rock bands in the world.

Then in 2020, Covid hit, he says: “And me and a million others went downstairs into the basement and started writing songs. Because there was nothing else to do.”

Three years later, Hunter has a new record deal – with Sun Records, no less, the label that inspired him to get involved in rock’n’roll in the first place – and we have Defiance Part 1, ten new songs featuring a Who’s Who of rock, including some of the last recordings from Jeff Beck and Taylor Hawkins, as well as input from Slash, Billy Gibbons, Ringo Starr, Joe Elliott, Metallica’s Robert Trujillo, Heartbreaker Mike Campbell, Todd Rungren, Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, Dean and Robert DeLeo of Stone Temple Pilots, Aerosmith’s Brad Whitford, movie star musos Johnny Depp and Billy Bob Thornton and more.