The day before I heard Ian Hunter was in town I was reading The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll and gaping at its "rare picture" of Hunter without his glasses on. Rare indeed. He's not wearing shades, his fingers are full of rings, his hair is neatly groomed and he's posed, best cheesecake, on a bed. What are the punks gonna make of this new, purring, Hunter? He's always been exempt from their superstar rap, too common to be convincing as a show-biz scam, but what of this new model?

"Yeah," he grunted, "I saw it. Bloody David Byron, wasn't it? Trust 'em to get something wrong."

And now I looked, he hadn't changed. Dark glasses blocking questions, tangled hair, leather jerkin, thinner than last time I saw him. The Clash would still be cool in the rdom with him, still awed a little. If all those superstars have ridden their kids' riches to lives of comfortable and irrelevant flash, Hunter has not forgotten whose money he's spending, has never lost his own edge of anger and frustration and boredom.

He was in London to mix his new album. It's been a couple of years since he was last on tour, a year or more since All American Alien Boy came out to good reviews and "nil buzz". Hunter himself seems down on that album now, but at the time it was necessary narcissism. He was still suffering the effects of the years when Mott the Hoople was Britain's most lovingly provincial gigger: "I wanted off. I'm a rock 'n' roller but it was becoming banal to me. I was six years on the road and I'm not a fucking idiot. All my life I'd been poverty-stricken and now I had some money and decided to take a couple of years off to spend it." He was bored.

You've^ gotta move for your creative buds and once you begin there's no end

But doing nothing gets boring too. After a year of it* "I'd discovered fuck all and my career was slipping," and Hunter needed a band to irritate, a producer to needle. The band he's got is The Overnight Angels: Pete Oxendale on keyboards, Rob Rawlinson on bass, Dennis Elliot on drums, and Earl Slick, guitar. Hunter knew exactly what he wanted and knew especially fhe guitarist he needed—someone to work with and not against, someone like the pre-Bad Company Mick Ralphs, someone like the post-Bowie Mick Ronson, someone not like Ariel Bender—and when Slick called from LA—"You wanna guitar player?"—Hunter wasn't hopeful, and when he checked up on Slick's own album' he "nearly died" it was so much what he didn't want. But Slick flew himself to New York and turned out to be, miraculously, just right: "He calls me boss." If Hunter's not exactly a docile band leader, he still isn't a David Bowie for temperament: "David goes there all the time, I only go there at weekends."

For producer the band have got Queen-man Roy Thorpas Baker, a choice that reflects Hunter's good friendship with Queen since they did their first ever British tour as Mott the Hoople's support. Queen were in LA when Hunter was working there on the final cut of All American, an album he produced himself. He'd already decided: "I wasn't going to do it this next time round. I'd stop being silly and let someone better do it." And when he met Baker at a Queen party and got drunk with him and found an ego as big as his own then there were no more questions.

Making Overnight Angels hasn't been all joy, though. The hassles and accidents that surrounded its recording in Canada culminated in that early morning naked dash out of a fire and into the snow and »"it wasn't funny, even if you got a good laugh reading it up in NME. We nearly fucking died." Everyone suffered shock and Baker's still got frostbitten fingers. The album's behind schedule and these Condon mixing sessions turned out to be the time too for Hunter to add the vocals. There was nothing ready for me to hear, just the buzz of possibility as Hunter boasted "I'm singing the best I've ever sung," and described the album as a band album again, very electric, very rock 'n' roll.

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The songs, he promises, aren't as "heavy" as on AAA Boy, but the titles are intriguing enough: "Justice of the Peace," "Ballad of Little Star"—and once he starts talking about his ideas Hunter can't help being excited about his responses to American radio, to American show-biz. There's no way that his lyrics, whatever else may be wrong with 'em, are going to be routine middle-aged rock 'n' roll tedious.

The next stage is the road. The Overnight Angels should be playing round the US by June (though drummer Elliot is now with Foreigner and has yet to be replaced) and Hunter is already tense with the urge to move: "You've gotta move for your creative buds and once you begin there's no end to it. To move around all over the place, that's always been my ambition." Hunter went to America because he was bored with England and now he's bored with America. He's not about to return, though. He's glad about the punks, glad that apathy still comes out as rock 'n' roll, but he's notn much interested. They're for the kids and he's got his own frustrations to worry about. Like what can he do about the fact that he's still happily married? Half his songwriting possibilities gone, just like that, no affairs to brood on, no tantrums—there's a limit to the number of songs you can write Celebrating your wife.

Hunter gets bored at home and he gets bored on the road and he's one rock star who does still know what it's like on a Sunday afternoon with nothing to do. He gets bored with interviews too and so do I.

"So what else you been doing?" "Nothing."

"What music have you been listening to?" "Nothing."

"What've you been to see?" "Nothing. There's nothing to do in New York. Hey, what are these boring questions?"

Nothing. Just nice to see you working and I'm looking forward to the record. Ian Hunter, despite that picture in the Rolling Stone book, still isn't just another rock star,