REVIEW: Miles Hunt—Things Can Change (2022)

Wonder Stuff man's "final" record, that's not actually his last album, the big fibber.

For a solid seven years or so, The Wonder Stuff were serial chart-troublers. Bona-fide pop stars, bashing out hit albums galore, and scoring a No.1 hit with Vic Reeves in the process. Imagine a young guitar band scoring that kind of success these days. You wouldn’t hear the end of it.

And yet in the past 30 years or so, it feels like their incredible success did not carry forward through the generations in the way much less commercially successful bands managed (Pixies, Slowdive to name a few). My suspicion is the cow-sized mega (novelty) hits counted against them, and now all most people know about them are songs that don’t represent their awesome body of work at all.

Not that the reliably truculent Miles Hunt gives the slightest shit about that. I dare say his royalty earnings down the decades have afforded him the opportunity to continue making exactly the kind of music on his terms, without having to deal with the annoyances of the music industry.

After the Stuffies split in ‘94, he had a complete left turn, and made some of the darkest and viscerally angry music of his career, with the excellent Vent 414, with the legendary engineer Steve Albini on the dials. After that, he really went grass roots again.

I remember seeing him doing many tiny gigs in the late 90s: The Borderline. The Mean Fiddler. All these little haunts around London with tons of brilliant spiky new songs. These eventually found their way onto low key albums, like the awesome Hairy On The Inside, but there was always this feeling he was still at the top of his game, even if he’d given the industry the finger.

The albums have, unsurprisingly, kept on coming, in one configuration or another. How many albums are we talking now? It’s a confusing discography, punctuated by tons of live things, collaborations, and whatnot. Here goes, deep breath: 4, maybe 5 og Wonder Stuff LPs (including that official bootleg one), 1 Vent 414, 3 Miles & Erica, 5 post-reformation Wonder Stuff, and this is, I think, his third actual solo studio album. What’s that? 17? Not bad. Another one is on the way as well, as 30 years later he’s reviving Vent 414 for a round 2, so that’s very intriguing indeed.

But back up a minute. Didn’t he say Things Can Change was his "final” album, as if he’d said enough. Technicalities and all that. He clearly got restless enough to find more to say since this was released. Certainly on the evidence of this breezy record, he’s nowhere near the finish line. Self-released in October 2022 (and his first new ‘solo’ album in 20 years), he roped in the likes of Billy Duffy to give it some stardust, and it’s one of the most assured albums of his latter day under-the-radar career.

I Used To Want It All sets the tone, with classic Miles Hunt delivery. “My plans are in the wind. I got tired of everything,” he reflects, having isolated himself more by choice in 2020. As usual, he has a way of delivering it with a positive melodic attack. Similar deal on And She Gives.

I’ve always enjoyed the way Miles bothers to provide little song notes with the lyrics—something he’s been doing since the Stuffies days. Things Can Change, he admits, was his “lockdown song”. Actually, there are a few, including In My Sights, written “across the wires” with his lifelong pal Luke Johnson.

There are great little moments all over the record, like the start of side 2: A Picture By a Stranger, a song about a time he was wandering in Manhatten and a stranger came up and snapped a photo of him and a lady he’d recently met. He kept the picture ever since, and found some inspiration for this song 33 years later. Classic Miles.

We Can All Do Better, with its crunchy bass rolls back the years, sounding like a lost Wonder Stuff track from the early 90s. If you haven’t heard any of his newer stuff in donkeys, it’s patently obvious he’s still got it. Taut riffs, classic Miles Hunt vocal attack, not a whiff of self indulgence. This Descent provides a similar impression. Many hundreds of songs down the line, he still crafts them with such effortless immediacy, you can’t help but buy into them. And unlike some of his earlier solo efforts, the production sounds a lot more solid, more like he’d sound live, without overly embellishing it. The sign of a craftsman who knows what to do.

Shame it took me so long to track down a copy, or I’d have flagged it up sooner. It was sold out on pre-order before it even came out (maybe as few as 300 copies) and he never repressed it. Oh Miles. When he next decides to get on the road, and isn’t just doing the “hits” tour for the cash, go and see him. He has so many relatively unheard belters in his locker, it’s frankly unfair.