Mick Hucknall
Biography
Michael James Hucknall (born June 8, 1960 in, Manchester, England), commonly known as Mick "Red" Hucknall, is the lead singer of the English band Simply Red.
The singer began his music career in the late seventies by forming the Frantic Elevators. He was among the fortunate 40 or so people present at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester, June of 1976, where the Sex Pistols were playing. Among those present at this legendary gathering were The Buzzcocks, eccentric music producer Martin Hannett, Vini Riley, and a nascent Joy Division. The band released four singles, including a version of "Holding Back The Years", which he would later record with Simply Red.
He is one of the founders and generally seen as the financial backer of the successful reggae label Blood and Fire and also runs the record label simplyred.com. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mick Hucknall [Sept 2006]
Punk
Hard as it may be to honour Mick Hucknall with bona-fide punk credentials, Simply Red's curly-mopped singer and sole permanent member was one of the few who really was at the Sex Pistols' first Manchester concert, at the Free Trade Hall in 1976 - a concert which would have had to have taken place at the substantially larger Manchester Evening News Arena to accommodate everyone who claims to have been there. A year later, at the age of 17 and by then in a punk band of his own, Hucknall wrote the distinctly unanarchic "Holding Back the Years", one of Simply Red's biggest hits, some years later.
"You're 16, you've got spots, and you can't get a girlfriend," Hucknall explains of punk's appeal. "Then you hear "Boredom" by the Buzzcocks and you think: 'That's me.' For my generation it was "Anarchy in the UK" by the Sex Pistols, the first EP by the Fall, and Spiral Scratch by the Buzzcocks. But I was listening to the Beatles as well, which you weren't allowed to if you were a punk. So I never quite fitted in." Reggae
Hucknall's other great musical love is reggae. He started the Blood and Fire record label to give obscure Jamaican artists a British outlet, and it is the cosmic sounds of dub, in particular King Tubby and Lee "Scratch" Perry, which have inspired him the most. "It goes well with the hashish, and it makes sense when you go to Jamaica, in the humidity and the heat of the night. In the case of Lee Perry, when you live on a diet of Red Stripe and pure marijuana you inevitably start to develop psychological problems, but there is no doubt that the man is a genius." --Will Hodgkinson, Friday March 21, 2003, The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/fridayreview/story/0,12102,918135,00.html
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