Mick Hucknall knew he was famous the night he sat with Whitney Houston in a dressing room while the superstar put on her make-up. It was at the Grammys in Los Angeles in February 1987, and Hucknall had only just come off the dole. That evening he sang a duet with the “young beauty” Houston to a TV audience of 28 million. “Then Miles Davis comes up and says, ‘Simply Red, right? love your album!’ ” Hucknall says. “I’d been on the f***ing dole for four years and then he knows who I am?”
How did fame affect him? “Well, your ego goes out of control right away,” he says. “You must figure out how not to become an utter monster. Everybody says, ‘What does Mick want? What can we get?’ ” He mentions a scene in the spoof documentary This Is Spinal Tap when the band moan about the size of a sandwich backstage. “I’ve been there! I related. Fame is so f***ing weird.”
We are cocooned at a corner table in a west London hotel bar having coffee, surrounded by the chatter of various meetings. The only time Hucknall gives away that he is a globetrotting pop star worth roughly £60 million is when he pops his blue-tinted sunglasses on over his blue eyes — while very much indoors. Mostly, though, the 65-year-old is softly spoken, even humble, his Mancunian vowels still intact despite not having lived in his home city for years. And, yes, the man is a still a redhead, albeit with the dreadlocks long gone, the ponytail in the bin.
It is 40 years since Simply Red released their debut album, Picture Book — the one Miles Davis loved — and Hucknall is celebrating with an arena tour and a collection of 40 new versions of classics including Money’s Too Tight (To Mention), Stars, For Your Babies, Something Got Me Started, Fairground and, best of the lot, Holding Back the Years, written by a 17-year-old Hucknall as a way of dealing with a childhood in which he was raised by his father, Reg, after his mother, Maureen, abandoned her son when he was just three.
With the actress Catherine Zeta-Jones in 1998
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“I found fame incredibly culturally shocking,” Hucknall explains. “I just didn’t have any social skills, because boys really look up to their mothers to see how to talk to girls, or behave. I had none of that. Once my babysitter stopped looking after me when I was ten, I looked after myself. So when I became famous I didn’t know what I was doing.”
Maureen’s absence comes up a lot. She’d had issues with Reg and, wanting the best for her son, believed he would be better off with his dad. So Hucknall frequently came home from school to an empty house while Reg was out working as barber: “I had no mother, so music was my best friend.” He struggled with criticism: “I was hurt by it because I didn’t have a mother — being abandoned was very deep, so criticism was seen as a rejection that hit me really hard.”
Reg died in 2009, aged 74. When I ask if he knows whether Maureen is still alive, Hucknall shrugs. “You see, this is where people struggle to really relate,” he says, almost smiling. “Because it’s hard for anybody who had a mother and a father to comprehend that I don’t know her. Strangely, I was also fortunate it happened so young. I feel sorry for kids who go through separations in their teens, or around eight years old. Their whole life gets upturned — but I have no emotional affiliation to her.”
He met her once in the mid-1990s, at the peak of Simply Red’s fame. He does not want to dwell on this. “There’s nothing there,” he says quietly. “I don’t hate her, don’t wish her harm. But I don’t know who she is. Nothing in my character was instilled from any lessons I learnt from her — there is nothing she ever taught me.”
When Hucknall’s daughter, Romy, was born in 2007 he took time off from his career in music to raise her. I ask if that was because he had been abandoned. “Well, it’s a slight opposite,” he says. “My father was incredibly devoted to me and it was more that than anything. I stopped touring because I knew I wanted to be there for her in the way my dad was for me. It’s the best thing I ever did.”
Hucknall was born in Manchester in 1960 and raised in Denton, a suburb five miles east of the city. Reg’s time in the Royal Air Force had instilled in him “a sense of time and rhythm, punctuality” and he passed that discipline down to his son — “I thank him for that.” Hucknall started working when he was nine or ten, delivering milk and papers, and his father wanted him to end up as a marine biologist. “But I wasn’t even going to attend my biology O-level!” Hucknall laughs incredulously. “I got three O-levels.”
“School was the worst time of my life, without doubt,” he continues. But he made it to art school, then studied fine art at Manchester Polytechnic. “At art school they almost took pity on me. I had no qualifications to get into a foundation course, so just went in with these images of album covers that I’d drawn in my maths class. I had nothing. I was getting in trouble a lot. Some guys I hung with ended up in prison or in borstal. But my wonderful further education in fine arts injected hope in me. I thought I could have a future. It saved me.”
Meeting Princess Diana with George Michael in 1993
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What did his father think when musical success came? “He was slightly embarrassed,” Hucknall says. Reg had bought him his first record player, but had told him in no uncertain terms to pursue anything other than music.
It was at Manchester Polytechnic that Hucknall first started to vote Labour. He says his politics are simple and that he just believes children from working-class areas should “get a shot at life”, like he did. “It sounds naive, but what’s wrong with that? If you become wealthy, working-class people say, ‘What does he know? He’s in a bloody ivory tower!’ But it’s hard not to care. The system worked for me and it was Labour — what else am I meant to feel?”
A few years ago, though, Hucknall said he felt “politically homeless” and did not vote for Jeremy Corbyn or Ed Miliband. Did he vote for Keir Starmer? “Yes,” he says. “Because he was more middle-of-the-road.” How does he think he is doing? “I do have one dig,” he says. “I was expecting to pay more income tax. I thought, stick a couple of per cent on me — I’m ready.”
“But look,” he continues, “what I am more against than anything is political extremism — far left, far right. I want politicians to serve people, not impose dogma. Political dogmatism has these empty slogans without solutions. ‘Save the whales!’ ‘Free Palestine!’ OK, so how are you going to do that? Because it’s really easy to say but I’m more interested in how you get things done.”
Watching Oasis at Knebworth with the actress Martine McCutcheon in 1996
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How would Hucknall feel about a fan who had been to a Unite the Kingdom protest heading to one of his gigs? “I don’t like to pass that kind of judgment,” he says. “A lot of that has come about because people feel disenfranchised and powerless.”
He smiles mischievously. “But I am mildly amused at the irony, because the dreaded B-word” — he means Brexit — “sent mainland Europeans who’d trained here back home, because they felt unwelcome. Then we realised we had work shortages, so had to relax visas in Africa and India. So the very people these bigots resent now come to do this work untrained. And since a lot of them are racists, they complain because these people have different colour skin. Yet their actions by voting Brexit brought them in. And they are blaming Starmer!”
• Mick Hucknall: ‘What can I say? I’m genetically blessed’
Rock’n’roll lore has it that Hucknall was alongside Morrissey, members of New Order and the Buzzcocks at the Sex Pistols gig in Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall in 1976. “Well, I’ve seen them twice,” Hucknall says, “but I don’t fully remember where.” Punk, though, was exciting. At the time of his first band, Frantic Elevators, it proved to him that he could, musically, stick to the basics, which led to him writing Holding Back the Years despite only knowing three chords. These punk roots might seem a world away from Simply Red’s jazz, R&B, reggae and pop fusion, but he has always blended genres, offering a shrug when I tell him he is on a Reddit list titled: “Songs by white people you thought were black”. He says “the concept of cultural appropriation is ignorant” and tumbles into a history of how Duke Ellington liked Stravinsky, and Elvis was influenced by African-American music. In 1997 he walked away with the outstanding achievement award from the Mobo (Music of Black Origin) awards.
Simply Red performing on Top of the Pops in 1989
He has covered Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin and Barry White. Would he wrap his soulful tones around anyone new? “I’ll be frank,” he states. “I’m 65 and I’m not going to pretend for one minute I’m down with the kids.” What about 18-year-old Romy? Does she play new songs he likes? “She’s a massive Dylan fan! She’s worse than me! But, no, I’m out of touch. And I’m not losing any sleep over it.”
He cackles. “Jesus Christ!” Something has popped into his head. “I was on holiday in the mid-1990s in Jamaica and Marianne Faithfull, God rest her soul, was there too. But she and I had a moment of tension because at that time I had just discovered Snoop Dogg, Dr Dre, 2Pac, and I played the shit out of them. She was horrified by all this ‘Yo, motherf***ing ho!’, and I don’t know what was wrong with me but I perversely enjoyed her horror. Like digging the knife in.
“But I am very uncomfortable with all that now,” he adds, rather seriously, of rap lyrics. “I don’t like the terminology. To denigrate women? It’s just wrong.”
Rock’n’roll lore also suggests Hucknall has slept with more than 3,000 women. In 2010 he told The Guardian that “between 1985 and 1987, I would sleep with about three women a day” and, well, you do the maths. He has since denied he was being accurate or serious and when I ask about all the sex, he just cheekily says: “I was a kid in a sweet shop who couldn’t believe his luck” — meaning lots of shagging.
Hucknall, aged eight, with his father, Reg, a barber who had served in the RAF
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“My poor wife,” he says of the art dealer Gabriella Wesberry, 54, whom he married in 2010. “How she’s stuck with me, I don’t know.” This is not, I hasten to add, because Hucknall is off philandering, but because most people think that her husband spent three years in the mid-Eighties bedding 3,285 women. Over the next decade he was also linked to Catherine Zeta-Jones, Helena Christensen, Steffi Graf and the actress Martine McCutcheon, who accompanied him to see Oasis at Knebworth in 1996.
Has he spoken to Romy about the gossip? “It’s so far in the past,” he says with a sigh. “And I have this peculiar old-fashioned morality. I’m not religious but I take marriage seriously. I’ve done it once and don’t intend to do it again. My wife knows that and my daughter does too. I’m completely devoted to the family and, again, that may be something to do with the amazing dedication that my father showed me.”
Did he talk to Reg about his lothario lifestyle? “To be fair, I didn’t talk to him about anything — he’s not that generation.”
And what of MeToo, which shifted what might constitute consent? Did any past encounters worry him? He shakes his head. “It was always mutual,” he says. “You want to be attractive and, in my psychology, imposing yourself on someone is the complete opposite of being desired. Somebody desiring you is what makes me tick. Imposing myself on somebody does not make me tick at all.” He smiles. “Let us put on our amateur psychologist’s hats…” Sure. “Maybe the need to be loved came from [my mother’s] rejection. And the want to be desired is just part of the fulfilment that I get from my job. Because people? They love my arse.”
With his wife, Gabriella, a German-Hungarian art dealer, in 2017
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It is hard to fathom the cash that artists such as Hucknall made in the 1980s and 1990s, the pre-streaming era of CD sales. Hucknall says he did well because he was a punk as a kid; it made him cynical of the industry and, as such, he wanted to make as much money as possible (which perhaps isn’t that punk). Every time Simply Red had a hit, Hucknall and his management would renegotiate their deal with the label — and they had lots of hits: 10 Top Ten singles and 15 Top Ten albums, of which five went to No 1, selling 60 million units in total.
“We would call up the record company and go, ‘He’s not happy — we need more,’ ” Hucknall says. “I was fighting not to get screwed because all of my heroes have been f***ed over. Those great injustices made me a rottweiler. It made me alienated by the industry.” How so? “I’m overlooked. I’m not listed in the top ten greatest singers by whoever, but I don’t give a shit. As long as I’m selling tickets, I don’t care about your accolades. That’s the punk in me.
“It’s just a conveyor belt of exploitation, you know?” he continues about the industry, mentioning his contemporaries from the 1980s — Whitney Houston, Prince, George Michael, Michael Jackson — who are all now dead. “It’s the system that killed them. And they don’t care, they just move on to the next…” Hucknall says. “If you allow the system to control you, it works you into the ground. You lose your sense of reality.”
Watching Manchester United in 2014 with the club’s former manager Alex Ferguson
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He says he dabbled with cocaine and heroin, but it was never a big problem. “A lot of drug use comes from overwork, unhappiness,” he says. “And there was a phase when I was unhappy in my personal life and it got a bit dark, but I never got deeply into all that stuff.”
Success rather than excess, then. That said, what is the most ridiculous thing he bought? “My manager used to complain that I wasn’t spending enough,” he says, laughing. “All I used to spend money on was music and travel, that was it.” But you travelled around in luxury hotels at least? “Oh yeah, of course.”
Now, everything is calm. He is in that autumn phase of rock stardom when all the money means you can relax. He, Gabriella and Romy live in Surrey, where his main vice is a “few glasses of wine”. He used to own a vineyard in Sicily — they did not simply do reds.
Hucknall photographed last month for The Sunday Times Magazine
PEROU FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE. GROOMING: EMMA LEON. STYLING: NATALIE READ. BLAZER BY GRESHAM’S BLAKE BURGUNDY FLORAL SHIRT BY HARVIE & HUDSON
I think that you can learn a lot about Hucknall from the fact that he only fell in love with Manchester United when his club got relegated in 1974. The boy had the glory of George Best, but only when they went down was he all in. “As a 14-year-old I thought, ‘My team needs me!’ ” he says, grinning. He was part of the Denton Reds gang, a group of supporters who would gather at the scoreboard end, and he beams as he recalls the fashions, the violence and, above all, the losing. “I went to every home game in the second division and some away too,” he says. “You need to accept defeats because then you can start rebuilding. And to rebuild, you need patience.”
On the team’s current malaise? At the time we went to press Hucknall wanted to stick with their beleaguered manager, Ruben Amorim, but also believes they should not have sacked Ole Gunnar Solskjaer. Would he want them to be relegated again? “That’s probably going too far.”
Forty years is a hell of a career in what is meant to be a young man’s game. When did Hucknall know that he did not need a plan B? “I knew that I would do this for a lifetime, but didn’t know to what level of success,” he says. “I probably would have been satisfied singing on a cruise ship. I just love my job.”
Recollections by Simply Red is out on November 21