Quotes from Mick Hucknall

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.

The reason I'm uncomfortable with celebrity and don't care about it is that none of that matters. I think that's why people attack me and think I'm arrogant. I've never felt the need to justify myself. If I make good music, that music will do the job for me, even when I'm dead and gone.

What helped a lot was becoming a dad at 47. I can't begin to imagine how I would have coped when I was just starting out with Simply Red. Gabriella and I would have been another one of those divorce statistics.

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 would say the worst period of my life was between 1997 and 2000. I was lost, I was all at odds. I needed a family, I guess.

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.

Music was my only outlet as a teenager. I always had the gift of music; I was singing at the age of four.

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.

All the best British groups were inspired by black American music. With The Beatles, it was Motown and the blues. With me, it was a mixture of British styles and the more sophisticated Seventies soul of Barry White and Marvin Gaye.

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 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.

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.

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