Daniel Hunt now lives in Brazil and works with music icons but he’s never
Daniel Hunt (second left) and Ladytron have performed with some major artists since they were first formed in the late 90s(Image: Wendy Redfern/Redferns)
Daniel Hunt is one of the best-connected musicians to emerge from Liverpool’s music scene, rubbing shoulders with stars including Bjork, Christina Aguilera and Nine Inch Nails over an influential career spanning decades.
And as he reflects on his career and what the future might hold, he points to early trips to Liverpool city centre as playing a key role in inspiring him to pursue his passion. Before rising to fame in the electro band Ladytron, Daniel, 51, said his love of music was sparked in the city in the 1980s and 90s.
He told the ECHO: “Liverpool has this really really high concentration of music, in this small manageable area. There were different things going on in different reaches of the city, but there is a very high concentration in the centre that is all walkable and interconnected. It was important for me, because you obviously grow up with your own perceptions of things and you learn from crate digging in record shops, the music press.”
He added: “The second hand record shops were always really great for this kind of form of organic discovery. In those days you had to really draw your own maps and join your dots about how everything worked.”
But it wasn’t just flicking through records or music magazines that helped peak his interest in music. After gradually spending more and more time in the city centre, he realised that Liverpool’s music scene was changing.
Daniel, who is originally from Crosby and grew up in Wirral, said: “What I found was that Liverpool had a very different scene [to what it used to have] at that point, in terms of indie music. It had a different set of reference points and it was a very psych city and it had been since the post-punk days.”
Daniel would spend hours flicking through records and music magazines during his earlier years(Image: Katherine Gaines/MCT/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
He added: “Liverpool had a massive effect on what I thought I could do and I think there’s a lot of things that happened in Liverpool over the years that I think could have only happened here. There’s unique characteristics and history involved in Liverpool that couldn’t have happened anywhere else.”
While his musical taste had originally led him to taking an interest in the post-punk and shoegaze scenes, his love of electro first emerged when he would spend his weekends going to car boot sales. He said: “I got into electronics, like antique electronics and old synthesisers that I used to buy from a car boot sale on the Dock Road every Sunday. I used to get instruments from there for like 10 quid, stuff that is worth thousands and thousands now. That gave me a different palette of sound to work with.”
The bandmates originally met in Liverpool(Image: Wendy Redfern/Redferns)
As his interest in music progressed from his early days of travelling into the city centre looking through the music magazines and records to gradually developing an interest in electro music, he formed Ladytron with his friend Reuben Wu [who left the band in 2023] in the late 1990s. After releasing their first record in 1999, later that year they expanded and added Helen Marnie and Mira Aroyo who joined as vocalists and keyboardists, while Daniel predominantly stayed on guitar and synthesiser and Reuben was on keyboards.
Since then, the band has gone on to have considerable success, with hits including Seventeen and Destroy Everything You Touch, tours around the world with bands including Nine Nine Inch Nails, Bjork and Goldfrapp as well as working on projects with some of the biggest artists in the world such as Blondie, Christina Aguilera and Bloc Party.
While they found global success after originally shooting to prominence in the late 1990s, more recently Ladytron have been able to find new audiences thanks to a number of their songs going viral on TikTok, including their 2002 hit Seventeen. Daniel said: “It’s hard to actually imagine or understand how things sound now to people who weren’t aware or even born when they [the songs] first came out.”
Ladytron are set to return to Liverpool next year(Image: Medios y Media/Getty Images)
He added: “What we found, especially with the last record, is because certain songs had become viral, we ended up with a much younger audience and new audience showing up at the shows on our last tour, which was interesting because obviously this was like a cross pollination with the kind of existing audience. So it gave the shows a bit more of a different energy and it was refreshing.”
While most of his time is now spent living in São Paulo in Brazil with his wife Adrianna and their young daughter, Daniel is looking forward to returning to Liverpool in the new year as Ladytron are set to begin a short tour of the UK with a gig at the Arts Club in March.
He said: “The last time we did Liverpool, it had a genuine sense of occasion to it, we really enjoyed it. It’s not just me from Liverpool, Helen went to university there and that’s how we met. I’m looking forward to that Liverpool [date], I’m going to see people that I haven’t seen for a long time.”