Ian Hunter - Defiance Part 2: Fiction (2024)

Country: UK
Style: Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 19 Apr 2025
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You'd never know from this album that Ian Hunter is eighty-five frickin' years old, especially with a song as absolutely killer as People to open up. Damn, that's a catchy "na na" chant to kick off a new album, as if we're back in 1974 and Mott the Hoople is still in business. Hunter certainly is, spitting out cynical lyrics with glorious intonation that land tellingly. I found myself singing along with this song on my very first time through and all the more on further listens. It's about everyone being a consumer of marketing. "We know what people want," claim the marketroids. "No you don't!" we chant in response. This is a fantastic song to start but it's also easily the standout track.

Much of the rest of the album follows the precedent of the title track, which is a singer-songwriter song in the old style. It feels notably weaker than People initially, but it grows as it goes, getting under the skin before it's done. Arguably the quality of the songs will depend on this factor. Those that get under our skin are the strong ones that will grow with repeats until we wonder why we'd doubted them to begin with. Those that don't will feel weaker and lessen the album overall. What seems particularly important is that that's going to be a personal thing. I can absolutely imagine that the songs that don't get under my skin may well get under yours.

Hunter's voice is as recognisable as ever and, while his voice may be a little rougher now than the rough it's always been, it's still glorious and his delivery is just as fantastic as it's ever been. He's feeling these lyrics and passing that feeling on to us without any trouble at all. What's more, few songs are worthy of comparisons because they generally feel like Ian Hunter songs. He sounds like Bob Dylan on a lot of What Would I Do without You, a song on which Lucinda Williams joins in and her voice has changed considerably since I last heard it. Otherwise, the delivery on This Ain't Rock and Roll sounds like a Steve Earle story song, but that's about it. Everything else is Hunter.

I can't get much further in this review without pointing out that this is the sequel to Defiance Part 1, which came out in 2023 and which I haven't heard. Like that album, this one features a core set of musicians but also a heck of a lot of guests. I wasn't remotely surprised to find that Joe Elliott is there on backing vocals, as he's worshipped Hunter for decades, but he's not particularly obvious. He's on People, along with both Robin Zander and Rick Nielsen of Cheap Trick. Brian May heavies up Precious, Jeff Beck and Johnny Depp both contribute guitars to The 3rd Rail and the late Taylor Hawkins plays drums on four tracks, including Hope, with Williams and Billy Bob Thornton helping out with the vocals.

I appreciated many of these contributions, but none are blatant, Williams's voice on What Would I Do without You being easily the most obvious. Whatever these luminaries contribute, Hunter's voice and lyrics remain in the spotlight. Of course we're supposed to listen to the lyrics on singer-songwriter songs but that doesn't mean that we always do. We do here, even if we don't know what Hunter's singing about. The 3rd Rail, for instance, is a notably sad song that I have to assume refers to a news story back home that I must have missed, having hopped the pond a couple of decades ago.

The most obviously Ian Hunter songs are People, with its Mott the Hoople glam rock drive, along with This Ain't Rock and Roll and Everybody's Crazy But Me, with its simple but very effective riff in the time honoured Keith Richards style. The former seems pretty straight forward, dissing on modern music, but I wonder if it actually is. After all, disses on modern music aren't remotely new and I wonder if Hunter is cleverly nodding to the fact that, a century ago, someone was probably complaining about how the work songs mentioned in the first verse simply aren't like they were back in the old country. The latter is neatly sardonic, as we expect from Hunter.

Amidst all the singer-songwriter material, Precious and Kettle of Fish are heavier songs, courtesy of Brian May on the former and Rick Nielson returning on the latter. I like the variety of intensity and it feels like Hunter does too. He relishes telling stories in songs like The 3rd Rail and Hope but he really gets his teeth into hooks on songs like People and Precious. When he starts Everybody's Crazy But Me with a characterful "'allo, 'allo, 'allo", we struggle to believe it's over half a century since Mott the Hoople split. Talking of openings, People begins with "It's the gospel according to whichever channel you're listening to", which is almost as great a beginning as the "na na" chant before it.

What that means is that some of this is immediate, most obviously People, but none of it is tough to get through. With repeat listens, everything grows and some of it considerably. There's a lot in play here and it's well worth trying to figure out what Hunter's singing about, even on songs that outwardly seem straightforward like This Ain't Rock and Roll. And that in turn means that I really need to take a listen to Defiance Part 1. I grabbed a copy in 2013 but never got to it. Obviously that was a mistake.