Night of the Hunter

By his own admission, Obi Hunter (full name Owen Hunter O’Brien) does not comfortably fit the stereotype of the archetypal singer-songwriter. And it’s not just that in his civvies this Cork-bred man is a card-carrying businessman with his own successful plumbing operation employing twenty-five people.

His previous incarnation as The Bulbs having gone down the drain after one ill-fated album, Hunter is back with a fresh attitude and a sparkling new album Rising Sun produced by the legendary Declan Sinnott. But he still feels himself something of an outsider.

So what’s wrong with musicians, Obi?

“There’s an accepted view among musicians which is pro-Gerry Adams, anti-American, you’re a pacifist, you’re a populist, you might support the Simon Community and it’s what I see as a stereotype. I think it’s a safe philosophy and it’s almost intimidating to encounter that. You daren’t stand up to any of that, or ask questions, even if you might buy into some or even most of it.”

But do you disagree with all of those stand-points?

“The point is that you daren’t question the creed, as it were, whether you agree or not. I’m very much pro-abortion, for instance. We should have abortion clinics in every town in Ireland, but I might not necessarily support the current anti-war view which holds that retribution or revenge isn’t justified for the twin towers attacks. It seems that you’re automatically expected, to be, say, anti-American. So I might fit part of the stereotype but not all of it.”

On Rising Sun Hunter covers a wide range of issues, from suicide in the title track to loneliness and the mutually destructive relationship between poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. ‘Sylvia’ is a love song from him to her. Explain the fascination with those poets, Obi.

“She had said ‘he’s a genius and I’m his wife’ so I started the song by reversing it to become ‘she’s a genius, she’s my wife’. I feel more in touch with her heart than with his. Her writing is spectacular, it’s dangerous. I wanted him to see her this way. ‘Deadly as a cobra crawls’ is one of her lines I’ve used because I thought it was so savage, so severe. She was so much on the edge of suicide. Those extremes of expression and experience are far more interesting to me.”

To what extent is that reflected in Hunter’s own head?

“Over the years I’ve had extreme black and white views which I’ve since tempered because I wasn’t able to live with them. The Bulbs album was called Saints And Demons. I saw people as one or the other. For example, I had a strong intolerance for drunkenness because alcohol fucked up relationships on me. It was in my family. It was all over my fucking life. But my intolerance was often over the top, or like a wall I put up. Even today I can leave a pub early rather than be around it.”

Religion is another topic he has extreme views on.

“There is no God. All organised religion is shite, it’s destructive and caused all the wars in the world. It fucked up sexuality in Ireland. I’m now a raving atheist to a large degree, yet I’ve been in a relationship recently with a woman belonging to a fundamental religion. The song on the album ‘Mary Magdalene’ is about that. When she stops beating the Bible I can love her but when she gets up on her cross I have to get out.”

What about your own early religious upbringing?

“I was an altar-boy at six or seven, and I can’t even remember whether the priests were at me or not. I’ve thought about it but I’ve got such a dim recollection of it all. But I don’t think I ever got over the guilt of my own sexuality until an few years ago and I’m forty-eight now. That’s how religion fucks you up. There’s this permanent post-coital depression and an up-the-skirt squinting attitude to woman, the voyeurism that comes with that guilt. I felt that my entire sexuality was distorted and disconnected from my emotions.”

Obi also has strong views on pornography and our attitude to the miseries of others.

“It’s particularly relevant now with the world wide web. I saw some awful clips with a guy on television lining up this girl for the camera crew for a porn video and it became highly abusive very early on. I admit I may enjoy watching them, but to do so I have to ignore the unpleasant human side of it. But maybe we have to learn to block some things out because the whole world is so awful. In dealing with my own children I had to block out concerns of world poverty and so on and I’m not sure if I’ve let it back in yet. There’s so much going on that we seem to be able to turn away from and do nothing. Sometimes a chink of light gets through to my soul, but I don’t think it happens often enough”.

Obi Hunter is quite clearly a man who struggles with his own inner demons and maybe even wins a few of the scraps. And some of those encounters have seeped into his art. Check out his album and maybe a chink of light will penetrate your soul too.

Obi Hunter’s album Rising Sun is out now on his own label. He has his own website at www.obihunter.com