Hunters Palace

Despite the short life span of Maltese rock band Hunters Palace, the unusual music they recorded attracted the enthusiastic attraction of music critics. Their two recordings 'Idle Times' and 'It's cold outside', reminiscent of The Jesus and Mary Chain and The Velvet Underground (both among my childhood favourites!), made a substantial impact on the local music scene. The group's two members Alex Vella Gera and Peter Sant spoke to MaltaToday about their music:

Your style is very unusual for Maltese bands, what do you attribute that to?

Alex: I guess we just listen to different music then most other people. I don't know what other people listen too though.
Peter: Most local bands are heavily Americanised, and I shamefully include ourselves. We just listen to a different section of American music - country, free folk...

Can you tell us something about the high and low points of your career so far?

Alex: The high point for Hunters Palace with regards gigs is definitely, in my view the one we did at Remedy in Paceville in January. Things just flowed out of our fingers effortlessly. The low point gig is the last one we did at ‘Sinners in Heaven’ in March. Basically, we all had a chip on our shoulder of some sort or other and the last ten minutes was literally us making noise for no artistic purpose at all. We were so pissed off we decided to piss off everyone else present.Creatively our high point must be the EP released now and a couple of songs off our other EP, ‘Idle Times,’ and for a low point there are a few silly songs we recorded just because we were bored and thankfully one day Peter's computer crashed and we lost them all.

Listen to the music of Hunters Palace here.