Ian Hunter played the Wells-Kennedy pipe organ on Cheapskate Rainbow.
Ian Hunter. What a privilege to have this man on the record. We go way, way back… back to the first day I set foot in secondary school, where he was the feisty head of the music department. I didn’t imagine then that we would ever see eye to eye, never mind become friends. He has been a guru of sorts to me, an inspiration as a person…
My music teacher in primary school, Mrs. Tennant, had told me, using these exact words, etched on my mind, that Mr. Hunter was ‘red hot on theory’, in an effort to encourage me to ‘keep up the good work’ – there was great promise for my advance through the music hierarchy of Bangor Grammar School. However, I was far from hot, soon discovering that music and academia don’t breed a happy mixture and decided to give music a miss as soon as possible, which was in second year.
I didn’t get back into it until I got an electric guitar at 15. Just after that, Ian, who was always very classically-orientated, took the leap and bought an Atari ST with Notator for the music department, pretty advanced music software for the time. He was very receptive to my enthusiasm, and let me take it home during school holidays, where I would stay up for days and nights on end writing stuff. I told him that computers were the way to schoolboys hearts, and that he could do something really good if he bought a few more with the budget, but again, the answer clearly etched in my mind, was ‘But Stephen, we need to buy a tuba’.
In ’91 it was the Year Of The Dog – not in Chinese calendar terms but myself and a few other guys formed a band, Spontaneous Dog. No kidding. To cut a long story short we entered the Panasonic Audio Rockschool Competition, after persuasion from Mr. H. After winning the regional final (outrageous celebrations) we travelled over to Bradford for the Nationals, accompanied by the cool and quietly supportive head of Mr. Hunter. He was brilliant at the time, very genuine and I saw something in him that changed my opinion from one of manipulative tolerance to real admiration. So I joined his choir, the Gryphon Consort.
A ruthless taskmaster he was! But the music was stunning. What would life be like had I never heard ‘Faire is the Heaven’ by William Harris, or ‘Lo The Full Final Sacrifice’ by Gerald Finzi? I went to St. Pauls for a week of singing Evensong with Ian and the choir. I shall never forget being in there alone at night, music drifting around that glorious emptiness, a truly heavenly joy. After the week of singing we headed for Cambridge, to catch the final evensongs of the year at King’s and St. John’s college, the perfect encapsulation of the English summer evening, unchanging through centuries, time losing itself in the amber glow falling on cathedral doors, thrown open to the birdsong, the late light on the river…
On to 1996. Ian Hunter, still head of the music department, bought an Apple Mac and Logic 2.6 – again, great software for the time. He was beginning to get into computers himself by then, and I could see the floodgates open. By the time he retired from teaching, the school had a completely custom-fitted studio complete with 26 workstations… when I walked in and saw it I nearly cried – for one man to achieve all this was fantastic. The room with the computers is always completely packed… lots of music being made, and that’s Ian Hunter for you. He will leave music in his wake.
So, I asked him to play pipe organ on one of the tracks, Cheapskate Rainbow. His brother Peter had a lovely little pipe organ (very ‘Bagpuss’, I know) in his house in Holywood, County Down. A Wells-Kennedy, 1976. Beautiful sounding little instrument – I had originally thought we’d be recording it in a church, but the irony of the smallness of this organ was perfect for the album philosophy.
Ian doesn’t play by ear, so I had to score the piece out. We argued the toss over a proper cadence at the end. He won. He played exactly what I wanted – I was delighted, we all had a cup of tea, Ian drove home, and I drove back up to Homestead studio to give Mudd his mics back. The result will be online soon… God bless ya, Mr. Hunter – now drifting towards a life as an ex-pat on the sunshine coast of Spain.