Mick Hucknall: ‘My audience want me to sing the song like it sounds on the record’

Mick Hucknall has settled into a comfortable level of fame. At 62, he still fills arenas and gets TV and radio airtime, but no longer has to put up with tabloid intrusion or strangers accosting him in the street. “I can hide away a little bit,” he says. “I’m not on the celebrity market. I’ve not got a manager saying, ‘You’ve got to go there, keep that profile up or they’ll forget about you.’”

No surprise, then, that the latest album by Simply Red — the group that Hucknall has fronted since 1985 and, in effect, defines — sounds as if it could have come from 1986, 1996 or 2006: sleek, danceable, understated.

The years of gilded, tasteful soul and funk hits tend to obscure the fact that Hucknall was one of the original punks — one of the select few who really did see the Sex Pistols play at Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester in the summer of 1976, the show that inspired punk’s explosion in the city. His first band — the Frantic Elevators — began as a punk band (they recorded the original of Hucknall’s best loved song, “Holding Back the Years”), before he realised it was a straitjacket.

“I look back now and think there’s no way that I would have carried on following the punk mantle because it just didn’t suit a melodic voice,” he says. “I’d been listening to the classics — Tamla Motown, and that sort of stuff — way before 1976. I look back on 1976/77 as being this glorious opportunity for a bunch of young, pimply kids to think that they could do that.”

Part of the attraction was a washing away of the past and a resetting of expectations. “By then, the people we idolised — The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin — were kind of unattainable. They were playing huge venues, whereas when you go into the smaller clubs where we first started playing — like Rafters and the Electric Circus — the guy you saw on stage could be you. That’s what got me going. I saved up to buy an acoustic guitar, sat in my bedroom. And we made plans.”

Hucknall doesn’t talk about music as an art form or a highfalutin spiritual quest. As a teenager, he wanted to be a singer, and he worked at it because he saw it as his job, one worth doing properly. “I think that comes from my father’s work ethic. [His mother left the family when he was three.] He didn’t give up his job to go on welfare to look after me. He used to say that he would have actually got more money if he’d signed on instead of keeping his job . . . he was just above the breadline, and he was just a very hard worker. He was in the same job for 35 years.”

As a result, Hucknall sees a nobility in hard work, which might help explain his longevity. “I think it’s a conditioning, something telling you, ‘I want to get out on to that stage and I want them to get the feeling that however much that ticket cost, they got their value for money.’ My audience want me to sing in tune. And they want me to sing the song like it sounds on the record.”

That sense of duty informs Hucknall’s politics, too. He insists he’s never been a political songwriter, and asserts: “I wouldn’t want to alienate anyone in my audience.” Yet Simply Red’s first single was a cover of the Valentine Brothers’ poverty lament “Money’s Too Tight (To Mention)”, and similar songs occur across the band’s career (the new record features an unlikely Bob Dylanesque protest folk-rocker, called “Too Long at the Fair”). 

“What I’m interested in, from a songwriting perspective, is social movement. Where are you at? Are you happy? How are you going to make yourself happier? Is this really what you wanted? It’s stuff like that.”

That leads to incongruities. Last summer, I saw Simply Red play a show at Hatfield House, north of London. The car parks were full of giant Range Rovers and BMWs and the crowd was dressed to the nines. It looked like a Conservative party fundraiser, but from the stage Hucknall railed about the cost of living crisis and sang about families on the breadline while the crowd waited politely for him to sing “Stars”. Does he ever ponder such jarring moments?

“I think if you go to a posh place like that, you’re going to dress up . . . that’s just the way it is. I don’t have any issues in that respect. I try not to be judgmental in that manner at all. I try to be tolerant even of people who don’t share the same politics.”

He smiles, gently, a man at ease with his place in the world.

‘Time’ is released on Warner on May 23