Chris Hunter was born in Cumbria on 17th March 1979, and spent his early years in a small town on the edge of the Lake District, stealing bones from a dog in a shared back garden while his mum and dad listened to Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, and Fairport Convention inside.
Whether or not any of that has anything to do with this album is hard to say. Perhaps he picked up something from the dog bones that infected his brain, or maybe he missed the mountains after moving away and started putting them in songs, along with other things that are less easy to find in Kent, like haunted slate mines and untameable narwhals.
Who knows?
And then again, do they even have narwhals in Cumbria? You’d have to ask his Uncle Geoff, who nearly drowned after capsizing his Inuit-style kayak five miles off the Cumbrian coast a few years before. And if you did he would give you a firm, clear answer… that it’s highly possible.
Anyway, enough nonsense - the songs have enough of that! Most of them are pretty new, written in the last couple of years or so, and are filled with plenty enough real life and three chord guitar to satisfy most fans of old-school, achy-breaky-heart country-rock. It’s just that now and then the country-rock truck swerves off road, narrowly misses a mythical swan and ends up upside-down in an ancient burial ground. If that’s ok with you, listen on….
