I always get puzzled when it becomes fashionable to hate an act for no apparent reason, Phil Collins and Celine Dion are just two of the many. You mention their name to a group of people and the response will generally be sneering and snide comments. Why? Who knows? Phil is an amazing musician who has sold over 100 million singles and albums both as a soloist and as a member of Genesis. He can’t be that bad. Celine is terrific singer as she proved at the opening of this year’s Olympic ceremony in Paris, a is the many who sings this week’s request. Mick Hucknall is the epitome of white soul and people don’t like it. Tough. Get on with it.
Simply Red were the darlings of MOR radio stations across the world and got as much airplay in the States as Phil Collins did. Prior to Simply Red, Hucknall was in the punk outfit The Frantic Elevators in 1984 until they evolved into Simply Red. They had released five singles on various independent labels between 1979 and 1982, the last being Holding Back The Years completed with a sleeve that showed Mick Hucknall with a gun. The following year they re-recorded it in a very different and slower way but it still wasn’t received that well by the record buying public because it stalled at number 51.
Taking the name from his flame-haired locks, Manchester-born singer Hucknall assembled Simply Red with musicians: Fritz McIntyre (guitar), Tony Powers (bass), Tim Kellett (keyboards and trumpet) and Chris Joyce (drums). Their chart account opened with a cover of the Valentine Brothers’ Money’s Too Tight (To Mention) which peaked at number 13 but the next hits had disappointing peaks; Come to My Aid (number 66), Holding Back the Years (number 51), Jericho (number 53), but it all changed in May 1986 when their record label re-issued Holding Back the Years and it flew up to number two nestling behind Dr & the Medics’ version of Spirit In the Sky.
They followed it with as mixed of decent covers of Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye (1987) and If You Don’t Know Me By Now (1989) as well as the self-penned songs The Right Thing and A New Flame. Mick made 1990 a sabbatical year. He wanted to travel at leisure and often woke up thinking, ‘which country shall I visit today?’ Whilst in Milan he joined Barry White on stage for a duet of Let The Music Play. He was also spotted with Miles Davis at the Montreux Jazz Festival. He was growing tired of the same routine with the same members of the band. “I want to keep Simply Red a rolling thing where different musicians come and go,” he said, as he fired Bowers and Joyce. The following year their career rocketed. They recorded the album Stars which became the UK’s best-selling album of 1991 and 1992 and earned Mick an Ivor Novello award for Songwriter Of The Year. Five singles released from it all made the top 40.
In 1993, Simply Red won Best Group at the Brit Awards and Mick was voted Best Male Singer. At that point Mick announced that he was taking some time off and would return when he had enough songs of ‘appropriate quality’. A point he proved in September 1995 when he returned, essentially as a soloist, with his new single, the Latin-flavoured Fairground, which debuted at number one. It had all Mick’s trademark soul qualities, but, throughout, heavy sampled Give It Up, a Top five hit for Dutch duo The Goodmen. Mick even acknowledged them in the lyric ‘Let’s make amends like all good men should’.
The Goodmen were DJ Zki (b: Rene Ter Horst) & Dobre (b: Gaston Steenkist). They also charted under the name Chocolate Puma and were rewarded with a number six hit called I Wanna Be U in 2001. Dobre also had minor UK hits as Jark Prongo, Trancsetters Tata Box Inhibitors, Tomba Vira and Rhythmkillaz. A number of their tracks have been sampled by various acts who were signed to Global Underground, Hooj Choons and Ministry of Sound labels. The pair were still making music up until 2017.
Like many acts they got fed up with their record label’s demands and Stars didn’t do anywhere near as well in the States as it did hear. “The reason Stars didn’t sell in the US was because they had a budget and they chose to promote En Vogue instead. We didn’t get much support after they’d made that decision and I never really forgave them for it,” Mick revealed in an interview with Ron Slomowicz. “From then on, our relationship just went from bad to worse and by the time 1998 came around, I said to my management ‘let’s get out there and find another deal because I don’t want to do it this way anymore. As far as I’m concerned, I own that work that you might have on your table right now, a greatest hits or whatever, I own that work, I paid for it. They are currently custodians of my work, they think they own it but they don’t. They don’t own it morally, they don’t own it financially and the only way that I can really get back at them if the law won’t enable me to have what I own, is to create my own record company and create my own catalogue that would be in direct competition with that. Until they see the day that that work belongs to the artist.'”
So, in 2003 Mick did just that. He set up his own simplyred.com label and the first single, Sunrise, which sampled Hall & Oates’ I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)’, went to number seven. “It was my friend Andy Wright who came up with the sample, the same guy I first worked with on the Goodmen sample on Fairground,” remembered Mick. The album Home, didn’t quite make it home to the number one slot. It stopped at number two behind Meteora by Linkin Park, but it proved that simplyred.com had the capability to compete with the major companies.
Fairground was produced by Andy Wright who, on his website recalled, “Fairground was the ninth of ten songs we’d done by then, so I’d had the chance to really find my feet from working on all of that material before we embarked on what was to become the record’s biggest hit.
Mick was quite into a sort of R&B vibe at the time, with a Soul II Soul kind of swing, so that was how the early versions of some of the songs developed. Mick said he had a song that he wanted to treat a bit like a Brazilian carnival tune – but it was totally at a formative stage, and he was basically still writing it the night before we were due to start. On the day, he came in, sang the song melody down, which, in terms of meter, was all over the place. It had 5/4 bars, 7/4 bars, and of course this was very different to a modern session with pro-tools; at the time, we’d record it all onto tape. I chalked up a meter and an outline and gave the piece some kind of shape and he told me what he wanted and then he left me to develop the program.
He’d wanted me to program something from scratch, something really full and Latin, but it so happened that I knew the tune Give It Up by The Goodmen, which contained samples by the Brazilian percussionist Sergio Mendes. I was also thinking a little of Rhythm Of The Saints by Paul Simon. So we asked Merv Pearson, his assistant, to head over to the record shop and buy these two records for us to reference.
When he came back, we listened down to them and decided to use a sample from The Goodmen track, recording it into an Akai sampler and then looping one of the main parts. I cut and re-ordered all of the fills to fit with the song structure I’d made out, and to fit with the vocal melody Mick had so that the various measures and meters would work. The fact it went on to be a number 1 hit record and stayed there for four weeks, propelling the album to six million sales worldwide will always be a very special thing to look back on.”
Simply Red only had one further top 10 with a cover of the Stylistics’ You Make Me Feel Brand New also in 2003. In 2007, he announced that Simply Red would split in 2009, so clearly a planned decision but he released a solo album called Tribute to Bobby a collection of soul cover version as a tribute to Bobby Bland. His second and, to-date, final solo album, American Soul arrived four years later.
He periodically releases tracks in between his other activities as he co-owns Ask Property Development who construct squares and public buildings and spends time in Sicily, where he produces wines under the name Il Cantante which translates as The Singer.
In 2004, a poll compiled by the Radio Academy was released listing the Top 10 artists with the most plays on British radio in the last 20 years, Mick Hucknall/Simply Red came in at number nine. Just for the record the list was topped by George Michael.