Biography

Scottish indie pop band Butcher Boy take notes from Tindersticks, Belle and Sebastian, the Left Banke, and Love for their crushed chamber pop, augmenting gentle, melodic tunes with orchestral strings and brass arrangements. Based around the poetic songs of guitarist/vocalist/founder John Blain Hunt, Butcher Boy released new music intermittently, beginning with 2007's full-length Profit in Your Poetry and continuing with sporadic new material over the next ten years. In 2022, the anthology compilation You Had a Kind Face collects highlights from the band's discography and includes three new, previously unreleased songs. Hunt formed Butcher Boy in Glasgow around 1998, but took several years to get the band into proper shape. In the beginning, Hunt could barely play guitar and was better known as a club night organizer. Before starting the band, he had used the pseudonym Butcher Boy when anonymously submitting poetry to local newspapers. The first iteration of the group played a few shows between 1998 and 2001, after which Hunt got more serious about solidifying the band's lineup and recording some of the songs he'd been working on. Now backed by a rhythm section, an additional guitarist, and a full string section, Hunt's songs reached their fullest form on 2007 debut Profit in Your Poetry. The band's literate chamber pop made fans of both casual music listeners and other musicians, and Butcher Boy released 2009's React or Die and signed on with Damaged Goods for 2011's Helping Hands before falling into a less-active period. In 2017 they resurfaced with a three-song EP, Bad Things Happen When It's Quiet, which expanded their style somewhat with synthesizers and ambient sounds from a junk shop weather radio. In 2022, new release You Had a Kind Face culled tracks from all of the band's earlier releases and filled out the anthology with three newly recorded unreleased tracks. ~ Fred Thomas, Rovi