Mick Hucknall on women, rejection and cultural appropriation

What makes someone become a pop star? Sometimes, it’s true, pop stardom arrives by accident, and its recipient responds not with joy, but horror. More often, though, pop stardom is sought, sometimes to make up for things that are missing in life, and the newly minted star embraces all the benefits fame brings, until those benefits — unlimited sex, unlimited drugs, unlimited drink — become more of a burden than a pleasure. Mick Hucknall appears to fall very much into the latter camp.

What was missing was, first, a mother: she left his father when he was an infant, and records became some sort of surrogate as he grew older. ‘Music was probably a kind of sanctuary, once I got a record player and I was in my bedroom and I was on my own,’ he says, sipping coffee in the Langham hotel, next door to Broadcasting House. What was also missing from the young Hucknall’s life was amusement. ‘Growing up in East Manchester, when I was in my early teens, there literally was nothing to do. Except standing in shop windows smoking fags. And probably, at some point, losing your virginity.’

Punk took care of having nothing to do. Hucknall was one of the select few who saw the Sex Pistols at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall in June 1976, along with most of the people who went on to form notable bands in the city over the next few years. But forming his own punk band, the Frantic Elevators, didn’t bring him the other thing that was missing: money. ‘By 1981 I was tired of being skint. I was living on £25 a week for four and a half years. There comes a time when you think, “There’s got to be something better than this.”’

What turned out to be better than that was forming Simply Red and being a pop star, singing soul in an unmistakable voice he had developed by singing along to Aretha Franklin records and trying to reach the high notes.