INTERVIEW - Simply Red by
As one of Manchester's most famous sons, we thought it would be a great way to kick off our new website with an interview with Mick Hucknall, lead singer of Simply Red. With new album Simplified coming out later this month, featuring reinterpretations of some of their classic songs, Simply Red will soon be out on the road (stopping off in Manchester of course!), so we asked Mick about the album, the tour and his hopes for the future...
Q - Tell us more about your new album…. Hasn’t it taken an unplugged Latino turn?
A - With this new album, ‘Simplified’, we’ve covered so many bases. It’s almost like the album is in two parts: you’ve got this acoustic, orchestral side and then with the song ‘More’, it just suddenly shifts. It’s like we’re on a plane, we arrive in the Caribbean and then all of a sudden it kicks off into this kind of Latino album. When we were making the album, some of the music that I’d done for it had this kind of slightly sort of Latino feel to it but in a bit more of a Gilberto Gil, acoustic, sort of lazy style. And then Ian, my manager, mentioned to Andy Wright - who I’ve been working with since ‘Fairground’ - that we were doing this DVD in Cuba and did he have any ideas that would fit into that theme and we got Andy Wright on a roll, man, he just went – it was incredible! On the song ‘Perfect Love’, he came up with this brass riff and it was just so evocative; then he did the same thing with ‘Holding Back The Years’ and with ‘Something Got Me Started’. I’ve just done a little bit of additional production and mixing on the songs and they were complete. I haven’t even touched ‘Something Got Me Started’, that’s exactly how he finished it, it’s brilliant.
Q - What’s it like going back and re-visiting your greatest songs?
A - It’s been such a real great joy to open these songs up. When we did a DVD for the ‘Home’ album in Sicily and also doing the ‘Classic Albums’ project recently where I just sang a song on a piano - what struck me when I played it back was how much the song kind of leapt out at you as opposed to the production. You suddenly got a stronger sense of the melodies than you had before. A great example of it on the new album is ‘Your Mirror’: the version on ‘Stars’ has got this plonky, ‘80s-sounding keyboard with some standard drums and stuff. And yet when you hear it on this version – to me anyway – it sounds like an entirely different song and it’s so much more melodically open. I feel the same about ‘Fairground’ as well: anyone who knows the original will get quite a shock when they hear it because it’s so ethereal – it sounds almost like Weather Report. I find that even my voice is just so much deeper and enriched. On the album we’ve got a version of ‘Sad Old Red’ and when I listen to the original of that and ‘Holding Back The Years’, I sound like I’m about seven years old! But when I hear myself now, it’s just so much bigger. The vocal is so exposed and the instrumentations are so exposed because they’re so simple - people don’t realise how exact you have to be to be so exposed. You can’t hide behind any drums and loud, plonky keyboards anymore, you’ve got to get it right. Although I think those first recordings are within their time, they really do sound ‘80s and now, because we’ve lost a lot of contemporary production values, they just speak for themselves. So in 10 years’ time they won’t sound like they were made in 2005; they could have been made at any time within the last 30 years and I knew that if I was going to want the music and the songs to be represented, I’d want them to be represented like this, in a timeless way.
Q - Where do you see this new album taking you, from a career perspective?
A - With the last Simply Red album,‘Home’, I wanted to set up my own label to effectively make the music I most definitely wanted to make without feeling any restrictions of commerciality. But the irony is I’m naturally a commercial artist: it’s in my nature to want to make communicative music – to make friendly music that attracts people and as much as I tried to do my own thing, my own thing ended up being just that. And with this album and the next it will be the same sort of theory: trying to make music that communicates to people; that shares an emotion as opposed to sharing a slogan. Because we are in such an era of slogans, of easy one liners, ‘save the world’ kind of thing. I just always think to myself, wouldn’t it be great if it really was that easy, if life really was that simple and it’s not. So now, as I’ve grown into the autumn of my years - I do love that phrase, the autumn of my years, it reminds me of that Frank Sinatra song, ‘It Was A Very Good Year’ when he describes himself as being like vintage wine which really, really appeals to me - this is a time when I feel I really can actually show people who I am and what the band are capable of doing.
Q - Are you looking forward to touring for yet another time?
A - It’s just fantastic being on the road because everybody really gets along. It’s taken me a good number of years to get this line-up together to the extent where I feel I’ve almost reached perfection with the musicians. They’re so good together not only in the music but also in personalities too.
Q - What do you think Simply Red can bring to a modern audience?
A - We’re up there with some of the best long-term chart successes and I don’t think there’s any doubt that we’re still very much fixed within pop: I think I’d still call us a pop group without any shame but we’re out on our own because nobody else has really done it in the way we have. If I called it an orchestra, it would probably make a lot more sense to people. They’d say “ah, I see, I see what that means, yeah.” And yet we’re influenced by soul, jazz, reggae, rock music and in one song we’ve done recently by folk as well. We’re living in this wonderful world of such variations and with apparent globalisation so of course the boy from Manchester can be influenced by Latino music. Why on earth not? There’s so much flexibility and potential to be involved in so many different mediums.
Q - What are your plans following this tour? Can you foresee another new album in the pipeline?
A - I’m already thinking ahead with the next album which I know is very different to this one but is still very much a sister album to it. It’s going to be called ‘Amplified’ and it’s coming out next Spring. So we’ve got plenty of cards under the table.
Q - What are the favourite memories from your career so far?
A - One of my great musical moments – if I was ever going to go up to St. Peter’s gate and say ‘let me in’ – is the solo that Ian Kirkham plays on this new version of ‘Sad Old Red’. The first time he comes in on that song is one of the greatest moments in musical history, in jazz or any other medium, it just blows me away every time that moment happens.
Q - Have you any unfulfilled ambitions?
A - I’m still hungry for more songs. I still think I’ve got a lot more songs that I want to write. And just to keep trying to improve my melodic sense and improve melodies and keep trying to take melodies into places that I didn’t know I was going to go.
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