JAMES HUNTER AND HIS BAND
The Jazz Café, Camden, London, August 1st 2007

Summer’s come to London – or to be more accurate London’s gone in search of the summer. The place feels deserted – empty early morning streets, desolate school playgrounds, spare seats on the trains. This seasonal exodus is the only reason I can think of to explain the fact that the Jazz Café is only about two thirds full for this first of two nights of the superb James Hunter and his band. Hunter’s album. ‘People Gonna Talk’, was one of the highlights of 2006, and it earned him a Grammy nomination for Best Blues Album. It also topped the Billboard charts in the US. It’s a brilliantly constructed piece of 1960s style R&B – think Sam Cooke and you wouldn’t be too far from the spot – recorded at Liam Watson’s Toe Rag Studios, which specialises in using analogue recording equipment (Watson also hosted the White Stripes for Elephant). The result for Hunter is perfect – too perfect for some, who accuse him of being a nostalgic imitator with little original talent. Not fair I would say – there’s a real contemporary verve about the record and the songs, all original compositions, are witty and pleasingly lyrical (“Strike me dead if I don’t love you, and I’d be damned if I do”).

Hunter’s been around for years – he’s 43 so fame has taken some time to arrive, a reward for persistence. One of his former incarnations was as ‘Howling Wilf and the Veejays’, and he was also well known on the busking scene in London before the early nineties when he was taken under the wing of Van Morrison, with whom he performed for a number of years. Having got his band together the album emerged as a result of their playing at a private party thrown by a friend in New York. Fortune, it is said, favours the brave.