Mick Hucknall

Singer

1960-06-08

Quotes by Mick Hucknall

• 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.

  Read quote

• My long-term girlfriends have always had something special about them.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• Tom Jones told me only a few singers have got the pipes, and he's right. He has. Sinatra did. I have.

  Read quote

• I'm a troublemaker.

  Read quote

• I first heard Miles Davis as a student, when I was struck by his extraordinary musicianship, and his work did affect some of the sounds of Simply Red. He was one of the reasons I chose to have a muted trumpet on 'Holding Back the Years.'

  Read quote

• I must have been six or seven - standing in front of a full-length mirror with a yardstick, pretending to be John Lennon. In my head, I was always going to be a singer, and The Beatles were probably the first musicians that had a major impact.

  Read quote

• I didn't want to be one of those touring musicians who get to hear about their daughter taking her first steps while they're in New Zealand.

  Read quote