Musician dismayed by England
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
By Ed Masley, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Buckingham Palace may be overrun with rock stars lately, but you can't accuse Miles Hunt of angling for a tea date with the Queen on The Wonder Stuff's reunion effort.
Ever the contrarian, he's titled it "Escape From Rubbish Island" and kicked it off with a suitably anti-patriotic title track in which he memorably sneers, "Just get me off this sinking ship."
He's careful to point out, though, that it isn't England he dislikes. It's London. And the Labour government he helped elect.
"It was the first time I felt that my vote had been heard," he says, while driving through the Arizona desert on a tour that will bring the band here tomorrow. "And what actually transpired is that they're worse than the [expletive] Tories. In every way possible. It's good that they call it New Labour because they certainly ain't the Labour I was brought up understanding."
And it's left its impact on the British people.
Hunt recalls a recent holiday in Dublin, where a friend asked, "Are you having a good time?"
With a laugh, Hunt explains, "I was drunk for three days and having a wonderful time. So I said, 'I certainly am.' And he said, 'Do you know why?' I said, 'Probably all the Guinness I've been drinking?' He goes, 'Well, that might have something to do with it. But in Ireland, when you walk down the street and you see any man or woman, they've got a song or poem in their hearts and in their souls. You [expletives] in England used to have that but somehow you forgot.' "
They haven't forgotten the Beatles, though. And Hunt wishes they would. "Four decades on," the title track laments, "and yet the Beatles rule."
It's backward-looking, Hunt complains.
When The Wonder Stuff, a '90s band that may be best remembered here for an album called "Never Loved Elvis," reunited in the year 2000, no one in the band was thinking album. Not at first.
"But after those shows went so well," says Hunt, "it would be something that would come up in conversation pretty regularly ..."
It only took so long, he says, because of tension in the ranks.
"The members that left at the end of 2003," he says, "were much more keen that we would put out an album that sold. That was their criteria for it being a good album, that it would sell a lot and have hit singles. And I don't think me and [guitarist] Malc [Treece] could give a [expletive] about that. So it took for the other guys to clear out first to get down to actually making a record of new material because we just couldn't agree on anything with those guys."
As to how he manages to sound as angry as he did on his earlier records after all these years:
"Because I'm an agitator," he says. "And I'm irritable. Much to the chagrin of my family and my poor friends that have to hang around me. They're all waiting for me to mellow out, and it just seems to be getting worse."
And someone has to be the agitator.
As Hunt laments, "There's no youth culture in England anymore, other than kids dressing up as little Americans, listening to Fred Durst and riding around on skateboards. We'd have battles in the streets because one kid was a mod, one was a punk, one was a rude boy, one was a rocker. Now, there's just Nintendo and Fred Durst. And unfortunately, they've left this awful trail of bands influenced by them."
His main complaint with the new generation of bands is their "boring rock 'n' roll behavior -- dating models, marrying actresses, only hanging out with other famous people, house in the Hollywood Hills. Boring, boring, boring, predictable. It's 1975 again. Rod Stewart and Led Zeppelin shoveling as much coke as they can up their noses and only hanging out with other famous people. That's why punk rock had to happen. To get rid of that. And all these dreary, dreary British bands have dragged time back."
