Hanterhir... 'The Saving of Cadan' revisited

One for my Hawkwind fandom friends...

I’ve been loving the amount of, well, yes, love, coming from the assembled ranks of Hawkwind fandom for my favourite local band, Hanterhir, who since supporting Hawkwind down here at Hall for Cornwall a couple of years back have been awarded several well-received additional support slots with the Hawks over the course of this year’s dates. I’ve missed all of those gigs - don’t even ask about the nightmare traffic on the road to Frome recently - but it’s got me thinking that perhaps readers to this Substack might appreciate a winding back to 2018 and a piece I wrote about the band for RnR magazine around the time of their epic 5-sided LP The Saving of Cadan, based on a made-up bit of Cornish ‘mythology’ from my hometown of Redruth.

Picture: Hanterhir at Penzance Acorn, November 2024

Here’s what I wrote back then… the band have very much moved on since then but it’s a snapshot of their history - and the internal banter that’s certainly still part of a Hanterhir gig:

Redruth is an old Cornish mining town; bustling in former times, it’s been declining since the 1980s. It lost its Woolworths twenty years before anywhere else. In its faded architecture there’s handsome evidence of past glories, but it battles with poverty and above average unemployment. Your writer tells you this with honesty; he lives there.

It, and its surrounding area, is also home to Hanterhir, a psych-folk-rock ensemble who’ve been rapidly gaining recognition with their gloriously expansive album The Saving of Cadan, released on locally-run national, Easy Action, as a 5-sided vinyl LP, and a double CD, to uniformly positive reviews. A compellingly dense experience, rooting itself in the wildness of Cornwall with its hauntingly decaying mine stacks and rolling Atlantic storms, it tells of Morwenna, cursed to become the evil spirit of the lake at local landmark Carn Marth by the mother of a boy who’d fallen in love with her and then killed himself. Cadan, the album’s story continues, went to the lake to throw himself in, but because he gave himself to the waters was saved. On certain nights, it’s said, Cadan becomes the lake’s spirit and Morwenna is set free to experience modern life.

Ben Harris is Hanterhir’s founder, and along with drummer Jason Brown and bassist Grant Kellow representing the wider membership (eight members and guests are credited on the album), he explains the origins of the band, who sing in both English and Cornish. “I used to play in a band with Jason and the original Hanterhir bass player, Whitford. We were Fire Of Cairo, we were Tack Tack, all sorts of things, but we were turning down gigs because Jason was doing other things. I quite hated Jason for that! So, I was going to start a band, Hanterhir, which was going to be me and anyone who wanted to come along, and if people sometimes couldn’t turn-up, that was okay, we could still carry on.”

That’s been the format ever since, a revolving cast of players, so that you never really know in advance who the band will be. “Normally the minimum is the three of us,” says Grant, indicating himself and the other two interviewees. It seems to pay dividends for them, and across the past ten years Hanterhir – the name combines hanter (half) and hir (long), a pun on the one-time Northampton red-light district of Semilong, that Ben liked as a double entendre and potential band name from his student days – have really made an impression on the local scene.

“I think we’ve appealed to people who have experience of music. When you’re a kid you tend to focus on one style and as you get older that widens and you realise that was influenced by them… and I think that’s the people we appeal to.” Grant nods. “People are still surprised when they come and see us. ‘Didn’t expect to see a band like you down here.’”

Their sense of Cornish identity is embedded in their recordings, and in the album’s visual imagery as created by Penzance artist Laurie Hughes. “The band feels Cornish; whether we are singing in English or Cornish, that’s irrelevant,” Ben insists. “I mean, most of the population of Cornwall doesn’t speak Cornish so it would be a bit arrogant just to sing in Cornish, nobody is going to understand you. But the bands I’ve always loved are those who sound like where they are from. We’re not from the beach. There’s no point in singing about lovely waves and golden sands. We’re from Redruth and it’s got to sound like that.”

The Saving Of Cadan became a hugely ambitious project, recorded, lost, recorded again. “Originally it was going to be ten songs on a ten inch, played by ten people and with ten copies pressed,” says Jason. “But I’m a big Who fan and about four years ago I said, ‘why don’t we write a rock opera?’” Ben remembers it differently. “That’s not strictly true is it? It was more like every time we got three or four tracks to blend smoothly you’d go, ‘Ho ho! Rock Opera!’”

Jason presses on. “It’s born through love. I don’t know any local bands that have done one. It was a chance to go back and listen to Tommy and Quadrophenia.” Ben, in mock downcast demeanour, looks plaintive. “I had to listen to both of them, repeatedly.” Jason, not having that, “You loved it, really!” When did they realise the concept was properly coming together? “There was a fisherman’s riff, a fantastic riff; it’s in the album as a recurring theme. We were working out the story and we found that to go with it. ‘We can actually write this. There’s a story there.’”

The added challenge is in their use of the Cornish language, as Ben explains. “There are different styles: Late Cornish, Middle Cornish, SWF [Standard Written Form]. I’d write down what I was trying to sing and then go and see a guy, Clive Baker, who spoke the oldest form, and he’d translate. Then I’d have to rewrite, because we’d have too many syllables or the words didn’t fit. We’d hash it out. I actually made up a Cornish word. On ‘Song Of The Lady’ I’d been writing down what Clive was telling me, which was Lemmyn Lowen of-vy, and somehow I’d written down ‘to me’, but I’d written it so badly it looked like tomre, so now it’s become Lemmyn tomre Lowen of-vy and I’ve created a Cornish word!”

When we talk about bands using local language or dialects, it often follows that what they play is some sort of reflection of an area’s traditional music and that’s not quite the case with Hanterhir, though legacy and history are important to them. “My ‘traditional’ music was that Dad loved The Animals, The Rolling Stones, Dexy’s Midnight Runners, Ian Dury,” says Ben, “I had that around me growing up, but also Radio Cornwall and going to Methodist chapel when I was a kid. That was my tradition.” Cornwall’s particular strand of Wesleyan Methodism is very much a part of the local identity, and Hanterhir’s music possesses something of its stoicism and stridency.

“It’s probably been battered into me somewhere down the line,” Ben concedes. “It’s on a previous album, Agapus, on ‘Om Gonfort’, Hanterhir are ready, are the Cornish ready? Not this album so much, because the Cornish represents the girl singing, apart from when the bloke becomes the spirit, but on the other ones, the songs in Cornish are more…” He ponders what he’s trying to say. Grant: “A social statement of protest?” Ben, reluctantly, “Something close to that, yes.”

How do they top this magnificent beast of an album? “There’s about seven songs in progress,” says Ben, eliciting Jason’s inevitable retort of “Could be a rock opera!” They think it’ll all be a little more concise next time, while continuing the dual language. “There’ll be more of Lou [Lou Peixinha, who plays flute on The Saving of Cadan], not just flute, but violin as well, and clarinet, so it might be a little more melodic, I’m not sure.” [Nyns Eus Denvedth Bys Trest appeared in 2022 and includes one of my very favourite Hanterhir songs, ‘Honey Bees’.]

They’re a likeably phlegmatic bunch, without a particular game plan, but enjoying the moment. “Easy Action are talking about releasing separate English and Cornish albums, keeping the momentum going, which is really good for us,” Ben considers. “Freddie Mercury once said that if something is worth doing, it’s worth overdoing and I completely agree with that.”

Photo: Hanterhir at Redruth Wesley Methodist Chapel, December 2024

And to round that off, this is what I had to say about The Saving of Cadan in Record Collector the same year:

Hanterhir - The Saving of Cadan

*****

Triple action from Cornwall.

Firstly, though this also comes in a double CD edition, let’s be unabashedly enthusiastic about that version’s big brother, Cornish space/folk rockers Hanterhir’s 5-sided 3-LP. Encased in a gatefold of proper heft, with warmly autumnal artwork inside and out, it feels like something of a bygone age where things had real weight and feel. It’s bleddy ‘ansum, as we say down here.

They’ve been around since 2007 in some form, line-ups changing as time flowed, and the glory of this operatic salvo has been four years in the making, a cacophony of Celtic wildness, granite and storms roaring across the grooves, sung and declaimed in English and Cornish in an overwhelming Atlantic tsunami of sound.

Has there been a greater, denser, crescendo than this one since – just got to say it – Space Ritual? The banshee wail of saxophone screams and the maelstrom of guitars insist that there hasn’t. It comes from the edge of the land, Worlds Apart as one song says, that sense of separation which says this album couldn’t have sprung from anywhere else. It has a ruggedness, a sense of anthem, and a singlemindedness, and so it’s a relentless, banners flying, rally call. Magnificent. Ian Abrahams

And how I wrote about the two-at-once Cornish and English sets that followed as a collection of then Hanterhir output to date, for RnR the following year.

HANTERHIR

Songs We Learned In Cornish

****

Our Hour

****

(EASY ACTION) www.hanterhir.com

How do you follow an immensely well-received tour de force, which Hanterhir’s five-sided vinyl folk-psych epic The Saving of Cadan certainly was last year? Perhaps by taking stock of your ten years so far? And if you do that, will it seem somehow slight in the face of that plethora outpouring? Then counter that with not one, but two anthology albums.

Songs We Learned In Cornish is rooted in their West Cornwall homeland, the gorse and granite of Carn Marth, the traditional St. Day Feast, the gradually in revival Cornish language that they often utilise. It’s not the land of Rick Stein, the gentrified estuary at Rock (‘Kensington-on-Sea’), or any of the things that have endowed the Duchy with an upmarket trendiness. Instead it’s the rawness of its heartland that Hanterhir capture in their music, and so this one from the pair is inhabited by a hauntingly wild expanse of Celtic separateness.

That’s not to say that sense of location doesn’t permeate right through the muscular rock of its sibling, as founder Ben Harris says. “One of the things I wanted Hanterhir to portray was that Cornwall has this whole non-English identity.” The tunes of Our Hour are often built on a huge sound that could have a line drawn to it from the other end of the British Isles, in the Big Music of the early Waterboys, but with Atlantic gales gusting it onward. But, really, Hanterhir are not much like anything else at the moment and that’s their strength.