About

Now we’ve got to this point in the Hanterhir story it’s probably best to talk about where the name came from. Ben used to live in Northampton and the area of the town that was notorious for prostitution was called Semilong, when it came to naming the band, and having no band members to quarrel with about names, that was what the band was originally called, or more strictly speaking “Ben Harris’s Semilong”…when it actually came to playing the first gig on 11th July 2009 the name had morphed into a lazy Cornish language translation Hanter (meaning half) and Hir (meaning long).

The band secured their first gig on 11th July 2009 at Redruth’s infamous Gaslights (sung about so eloquently by Hedluv and Malibu Barny). Personnel rotated for a while with Barnaby Ray playing drums for the first few gigs before making way for Jason, Whitford played bass from the start with notable appearances from Martyn Trathen (currently playing in Twitch) playing guitar and djembe for a few gigs, Stephen Taylor playing a laptop, Dave Kent playing djembe, John Filbrook playing guitar, Brendan McGreal and Lukas Drinkwater playing bass and some random guy called Mike Hewitt playing sax.

By November the band had settled on core members Ben, Jase and Whitford, but on booking time in Black & White Studio to record, the band found a guitarist in producer Martin Pease who joined the band in later 2009.

The recordings eventually became the first untitled album and saw the four-piece Hanterhir release they first album in early 2010.

We made a video for Knots and the rest of the year saw the band playing gigs and festivals across Cornwall on the back of the first album. As Peasy had joined after the first album had been written it was only natural for the band to start writing as the gigs came and went and by the middle of the year the band had completed writing another full albums’ worth of material and this time, they’d decided it was going to be bigger and better.

The band headed back to Black and White Studio in Redruth and this time enlisted help from artist Chris Odger on guitar, Beckie Brown, Duncan Jewitt, Lucy Keast, Hayley Sanford and Jud Vandy on vocals, Frances Bennett on fiddle, Brendan McGreal helping write Plos Mis Du with Whitford and Stephen Taylor making random noises.

The result was Agapus, titled after Whitford’s inability to say “abacus” in a Cornish accent. The album featured our first two Cornish language songs “Omgonfort” and “Plos Mis Du”.

Promoting the album saw us play across Cornwall and England as well as our first radio appearances.

Whitford in Black & White Studio on a Whitford sized piano.

Soon afterwards, for some stupid reason we decided to “compete” in another Kan Rag Kernow song competition. This time, knowing that we were never going to win (let’s be honest about things, we’re not really Radio 2 enough), we wrote a song called Kana Pubonan (“Sing Everyone”) and decided that if we weren’t going to win, we sure as hell were going to enjoy ourselves, so we enlisted as many musicians as we could. The organisers found out about our little plan and then tried to stop us from playing by adding a “6 musicians only” clause to the entrance, so we pulled out. Somehow, we ended up playing, turning up at an arts venue on a cold rainy night as a 14 piece. As with the previous competition we were hammered (this time by a young Fisherman’s Friends tribute act) but thanks to Grant Kellow on bass, Mike Hewitt and Matt’s cousin on saxophones, Tim McVey on stylophone, Stephen Taylor on toy guitar, Andrew Cornish on bodran, Frances Bennett on fiddle, Becky Brown on vocals and Jo Tagney on harp, we had an awesome time.

With our tails not so firmly between our legs we quickly decamped to Cabin Fever Studios to record our self titled 5-track with Hoby Allen. Somewhere in the recording process, Matt left the band and Grant joined in May 2014 (and then went off to play in a festival in Brittany with his band Tredanek). Mike came back on saxophone on a few songs, Becky returned on vocals with a little bit extra from Jago Clift.

We released the EP, did a bag load of gigs and drank some tea. PJ stood in to cover a festival (you can check him out pulling some shapes in the video for Victim) and we were ready to record again (sometimes life really is that fast…).

Jason had been talking (well, going on and on) about us writing a rock opera for a long time, so we took that as the starting point. The next recording we were going to release was going to be a 10 song rock opera on a 10 inch record played by 10 people and limited to 10 copies…you’ve gotta think big, and 10 is pretty big.

By the time we’d finished writing the first song Hello Sunshine, we realised that we were never going to fit it all on a 10 inch record, so bugger it, we might as well release a double album. A year into recording the album saw a chance meeting with Carlton from Easy Action Records after a show in Falmouth. Carlton grabbed Ben whilst the shitty headline band were playing and asked “where’s your guitarist, he was mental”, “he fucked off because he couldn’t put up with anyone playing Mr Brightside” Ben replied. This led them to agree to release our next album.

The next thing that happened broke our hearts for a good five minutes. The laptop that we had stored all the files from the album crashed, we lost 99% of everything that we’d done.

The only thing we managed to salvage was the drums, so we set about recording everything all over again. The recording features Trev Kemp on guitar and harmonica and Francis Bennett on fiddle and vocals. Lou Macchi joined the band and added flute and vocals to the tracks.

Ben was driving and got a call from Carlton saying the album was too long for 4 sides of vinyl what could we do? Ben said he’d get back to him and think what could be cut. the call ended. Two minutes later Carlton called back and said “fuck it we’ll do it on 6 sides of vinyl, what do you want to do on the 6th side?”, “nothing” Ben replied. 

We met a crazy (in a nice way) woman called Laurie at a gig we did in St Ives where at the end of the gig she gave us drawings of all of us. We stayed in touch and when it came to artwork for the album she seemed like the perfect choice. We gave her the album, which by now was called ‘The Saving of Cadan’, as we were recording it and explained what was happening in each song. She came up with this amazing 3D perspex artwork which was perfect, the next time we saw her she had gotten rid of it and had started working using dried flowers. The next visit she had binned the dried flowers and had started painting the artwork, Grant and Jase mentioned something wasn’t quite right and the next time they went down to look at the artwork she’d thrown it all away and started again…anyway Laurie is amazing.

We played some gigs off the back of the album, got 5 stars in Record Collector, Shindig magazine said we “oozed occult magnificence” and even had the local constabulary close down a gig in some woods as apparently it’s not acceptable to play music at 2 o’clock in the morning.