Top 55 Mick Hucknall Quotes

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.

Composing is what drives me; it’s not the pursuit of fame. My songs are like pages in a diary.

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 grew up in Denton, east Manchester, and was raised by my late father, Reg, a barber.

I’ve got one of those heart-shaped faces and I take weight on my cheeks and jowls and gut, so in pictures I look much heavier than I actually am.

Family puts things in perspective.

My dad’s generation was stony-faced.

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

People strive for success, but it’s very lonely at the top. Now I realise the ultimate prize is a family.

Otis Redding was the ultimate 60s soul singer. We only get an indication of what he might have become, but he had the best soul pipes a lad could wish for.

I had a spate of being run over between the ages of 11 and 13. I was quite a rambunctious child, I had a little moped I used to ride illegally. I got hit by cars three times because I was a very day-dreamy kid.

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.

You’re damn right I’m comfortable, I’ve worked very hard to be comfortable. But something I’ve always tried to impress upon people is that these folks in the houses of parliament affect what’s in your wage packet, the welfare of your kids, your health. Why wouldn’t we be interested in it?

Those who say they’re not ambitious are being disingenuous.

Family is so important, I know that.

For a frontman of a band, good hair is a requisite.

Possessions aren’t my raison d’etre.

For my profession, you need hair.

I don’t want to be a slave to commercial success any more.

Fatherhood has changed me completely.

As a teenager you bounce off your mum, they give you guidance.

Musical recording history is full of multi-racial collaborations and it is this cross-pollination that has created the magic of Ellington, Sinatra and the Beatles. I am merely a part of that tradition.

I’m going to write music that’s appropriate to my age. And if younger people want to come along with me, they’re welcome to.

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

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.

It took me years to learn to deal with the realities of fame and success. It’s hard work sometimes but clearly the pluses outweigh the negatives.

I love quality drinks – a really good beer, or a great wine.

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.’

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

I’m a songwriter, my love of music has never left me and I literally don’t seem to be able to stop writing songs, they keep coming.

I wanted love from every single woman on the planet because I didn’t have my mother’s love.

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.

A Hard Day’s Night’ is the most perfect pop album you’ll ever get to hear in your life; it’s filled with definitive versions of the two-minute pop song.

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.

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’ve always thought my dad was fantastic and now I’m a dad myself I can see what an incredible sacrifice he made as a man in the 60s – he was there every day for me, cooked my meals and shaped me.

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.

I loved the African-American culture, but racism was still a big problem and white America was exactly what I didn’t love.

When we treat music as an industrial commodity, and young people as merely consumers, we overlook the joy of participating in music… of learning to play an instrument, of joining a band or an orchestra, and playing gigs.

Privatization of utilities costs would be astronomical, as would setting up a National Bank.

Strong copyright protection is not only compatible with future digital business models: it is an essential pre-condition of their success.

Copyright is fundamentally socialist – it is radical and redistributive, subversive even. How else would you describe a form of property that anyone can create out of nothing?

I thought of Britain as a moderate place. Britain isn’t a place of majority madness, we’re not like that.

I always used to listen to quite a bit of classical music because my dad liked it, and if you’ve got any ear for music at all you have to enjoy Mozart.

Whatever I do winds people up. I’ve been tattooed with every one of those criticisms.

I can’t vote for Corbyn.

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.

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

I get great creative pleasure from my work.

In January 1999, I proposed an initiative to the Music Industry Forum which I called Communities In Tune. Its aim was to bring community centres to the Internet generation.

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

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

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.

My mum left when I was three and my dad never remarried.

Copyright’s democratising effect is seen most clearly in the music business. Anyone who can speak, sing, rap or hum and operate a simple sound recorder can create a copyright song. Imagination is the only limit.