Quotes from Mick Hucknall

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.

People always tell me that redheads go silver. Long, silver-grey hair would be my ideal way of ageing.

Ageing is something to celebrate. If you can avoid long-term debilitating injury and illness, it's something you have to embrace because the other choice is being dead. So embrace it, grow with it. And that's what I try and do.

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.'

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.

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 felt trapped by my success.

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.

Corbyn Labour's budget numbers simply don't add up on the NHS and the economy.

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'm a troublemaker.

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.'

I am a 'champagne socialist,' and I'm proud of it.

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.

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.

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

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

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

There's no such thing as a typical day because I lead a very random life.

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

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.