How long has it been since Ian Hunter gigged in Austin?
“I really don’t know,” puzzles the singer after a hefty pause. “It has to have been with Mott the Hoople.”
That would have been some 30 years ago, then, when Mott the Hoople still stalked the rock & roll landscape in high-heeled glam sneakers. Since that era, the group’s frontman has released seven solo albums and had his songs recorded by everyone from Great White and Barry Manilow to ATX’s Alejandro Escovedo.
In fact, we can probably thank Escovedo, a lifelong Mott the Hoople fan, for Hunter’s trip to Texas, since the Connecticut resident was part and parcel of the stellar cast on last year’s Escovedo tribute, Por Vida.
“I knew that he’d covered a couple of my songs,” explains Hunter. “He always seemed very faithful to my music.”
Now the pair will be sharing a bill together on the big stage at Auditorium Shores. Hunter, for his part, is out in support of a new DVD and its audio counterpart, Strings Attached (Sanctuary). Recorded in Olso, Norway, three years ago, Strings Attached finds Hunter accompanied by a symphony orchestra on most of his beloved songs. He credits the folks at Universal Records in Norway.
“They seemed to think some of my songs lend themselves to European composers of yesteryear,” he relates, “and they wanted to have a bash at fiddling with my songs, making them different. That appealed to me. I’ve been hearing them the right way around for so long that I was interested in hearing them done differently. I wanted to see how someone else would approach it.
“The guy that arranged the songs on the DVD had no knowledge of my music whatsoever. He was given a cappella vocal, and he just took it from there. The whole idea was just to take them from the roots up. They worked hard on it, and I enjoyed every minute.”
This article appears in March 18 • 2005.