Old Fogey of the Year, part 2 - Ian Hunter

Ian Hunter, who will be 78 years old next summer, was older than his audience from the start. I don't think this was very well known at the time, but Hunter was already 33 when "All the Young Dudes" finally made him and Mott the Hoople famous. Only Pete Townshend has been as fascinated by the relationship between a band and its fans as Hunter. But Townshend and the Who - in the early days anyway - saw themselves as representative of their audience, still part of them somehow. The Who just happened to be the ones on the stage. Hunter always seemed aware of a certain detachment - he never shared that same sense of identity and it actually made him more grateful and more appreciative of the fact that he had an audience at all. No one but Ian Hunter could have written "Saturday Gigs."

'73 was a jamboree
We were the dudes and the dudes were we
Did you see the suits and the platform boots
Oh dear, oh God, oh my

After Mott's breakup, Hunter's solo career, in partnership with Mick Ronson, got off to
a rousing start but soon began to falter. All sorts of business entanglements made it difficult to maintain his partnership with Ronson. And just like Mott, Hunter had trouble getting a hit, which in turn led to problems with his record companies. Along the way Ronson, at age 46, died of cancer in 1993. Hunter himself turned 60 in 1999 - it had been twenty years since he'd made a record worth listening to more than once. There was nothing to suggest that his richest period of music in forty years was ahead of him. But it was.

There are several reasons why Hunter has aged much better than his contemporaries. His perspective was never the same as the kids in the audience. He knew that from the start, and always wrote more about the world he saw than about himself. He hasn't had to remake himself and his purpose as a writer. The new album includes a lovely and affectionate remembrance of his old chum David Bowie - it also has songs about sailors pressed into naval service, Ovid's god of dreams and sleep, and the Fielding Brothers of 18th century London. As a singer - well, Hunter never really had much of a singing voice to start with. There was never much to lose. Hunter wasn't really a singer at all - he just had this kind of distinctive noise that he made with his throat. He can still make that noise, and so he still sounds like Ian Hunter. Finally, Hunter's always needed a really good guitar player to serve as his musical partner. Mick Ralphs and Mick Ronson set that bar pretty high, but with the James Maslin in the Rant Band he's found another.