Quotes By Mick Hucknall

I actually felt sorry for Liverpool bands like Bunnymen and Wah!, having this immense pressure of following the Beatles. I suppose I responded to that challenge by being nothing like them. I carved my own thing.

I've read some amazingly derogatory things about me over the years and I've sat there and thought: if you replaced 'ginger' with 'black' or even 'Asian,' you'd be up in front of a judge.

Allowing valuable sound recordings to pass into the public domain does not create a public asset: it represents a massive destruction of U.K. wealth and a significant loss to the U.K. taxpayer.

For some, music is a limitless source of cheap content, just waiting to be exploited.

I keep reading that I'm diminutive - why do people call me that? I'm 5ft 11in with size 11 feet. I'd actually like smaller feet. It might be a fetish, but I do like graceful feet, and small ones lend themselves to grace.

Money's Too Tight to Mention' was about as big an anti-Thatcherite message as you can get in pop music. There was a vast swath of the British media at that time that were rabid Thatcherites; do you think they are going to take kindly to me? Then I got hit by the left, because we were too popular.

I'm quite happy being famous for what I do but I'm not happy about being famous for the sake of being famous.

I'm from the punk generation, but I make romantic, soft soul music. I like the bizarre disconnect of that but, clearly, some people don't.

The Beatles and the Stones had Elvis and Hollywood, but when it came to my generation America meant Richard Nixon and Vietnam.

At art school, a teacher said: 'The best paintings are when you get lost in a piece of work and start painting in a stream of consciousness.' I wanted to do music, not art, so started writing lyrics that way. The first song I wrote was called 'Ice Cream and Wafers.' The next was 'Holding Back the Years.'

Around 1988 I started to 'dread' my hair; because it's curly, it would go into dreads naturally if I stopped combing it. But the dreads went down only one side, so I had to have extensions put in.

I just want to write songs in my little corner. And I still love music, I've not been worn down by cynicism.

My dad knew I was mad about music. While he worked as a barber he would hear songs on the radio and we'd have endless discussions about them. So I got my first record player when I was 11 years old.

I feel enormously privileged to be part of the generation that witnessed the magic of the Beatles first hand, and I think 'A Hard Day's Night' connected with my four-year-old self because it was the whole package: an album and a movie.

I feel a bit like the antichrist as I had the bulk of my success in the 80s and I hate 80s music.

When I stopped Simply Red the reason was to bring up my daughter Romy. I wanted to be a dad that was around.

The last Simply Red album, 'Stay,' was good, but the first three tracks were designed for radio play. They were written to meet people's expectations of Simply Red.

The way I'm distorted and intentionally misquoted has been going on since 1985.

A red-headed man is not generally considered to be a sexual icon.

I first sang 'Holding Back the Years' in my earliest band, Frantic Elevators. When the Elevators split and I started Simply Red, I returned to the song and wrote the 'I'll keep holding on' chorus.