I an Hunter’s first brush with celebrity came in the early 1960s when he met Freddie Fingers Lee, formerly the keyboard player with Screaming Lord Sutch And The Savages. “Sutch wasn’t employing him, cos he’d fallen off stage in Liverpool with a piano,” Hunter says now. “He was back doing steel erecting, and I just happened to meet him in the pub. He wasn’t famous in the eyes of the rest of the world, but to me he was really famous.”
That fateful meeting led to Hunter and Lee starting a band. Since then the singer’s journey - first with Mott The Hoople and subsequently as a solo artist – has seen him cross paths with pretty much any rock star worthy of the epithet. His two most recent albums, 2023’s Defiance Pt 1 and its new sequel Defiance Pt 2, feature an all-star guest list including Ringo Starr, Jeff Beck, Slash and members of Def Leppard, Metallica and Pearl Jam.
“It’s funny,” says the 83-year-old Hunter, “every time I meet someone who’s supposed to be crazy, they’re not.” And he’s met a lot of people, including…
MICK RONSON
I met Mick when he record. He came in and did a Randy Newman-style arrangement on the last track, . He wrote it out on a cigarette packet, which impressed me.
