(#557: 19 October 1996, 2 weeks)
Track listing: Holding Back The Years/Money's Too Tight (To Mention)/The Right Thing/It's Only Love/A New Flame/You've Got It/If You Don't Know Me By Now/Stars/Something Got Me Started/Thrill Me/Your Mirror/For Your Babies/So Beautiful/Angel/Fairground
"You'll never see me walking down a guilty middle-class street/I'm frequently appalled by them pretending to be poor men." Those aren't the thoughts of Morrissey, but of a fellow audience member at that Free Trade Hall Sex Pistols gig. I wonder if Mick Hucknall has frequently pondered the paradox that guilty middle-class streets house the vast majority of people who have liked and bought his music for getting on forty years now.
That couplet comes from his song "I Won't Feel Bad," which appears on the second Simply Red album, 1987's Men And Women. It is a fiercely and admirably unapologetic lyric which challenges his critics to sneer at his imminent wealth and associated power; look, quit picking on me, look at the gangsters who are really raking in the money, away from all of us.
It is a pity that Men And Women is only represented on this end-of-imperial-phase best-of by its one big hit, the satyric and equally unapologetic "The Right Thing," since it contains some of Hucknall's most intriguing songs and performances - "Infidelity," which does Costello's "The Only Flame In Town" better and in which Hucknall refuses to be sorry for sleeping around, the inscrutable "Lady Godiva's Room" (originally a single B-side, then incorporated into deluxe editions of the album) and a rather moving "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye" which seems to owe its poignancy to the inadvertent memory of the great ghost that haunted British New Pop of the eighties, Ian Curtis.
Still, Hucknall has been haunted by the need to get his messages into those places which might otherwise sneer at and reject them, all the time doubtless worrying about whether his audience has ever "got it." The blue-eyed Soul, Passion and Honesty smokescreen conceals the likelihood that the nearest equivalent to his voice is, of all reluctant Englishmen, Leo Sayer; "Holding Back The Years" best demonstrates the two singers' identical just-accidentally-sat-on-a-cockatoo yarragh.
At the time Simply Red's Greatest Hits appeared like a blockbuster newly gone missing, although the compilation very quietly went on to go six times platinum. Its cover is unassuming, Hucknall's mind clearly elsewhere. The collection gives the public what it wanted; most of the "recognisable" hits, one or two curveballs - "So Beautiful" if anything sounds more convincing in this setting - and a token new recording, a somewhat perfunctory take on Aretha's "Angel."
The album confirms the story of a thoroughly sincere fellow who unequivocally means what he sings, whether it's about politics or sex or anything else. Picture Book worked - to a point - because Hucknall was only on the way to becoming famous and determined not to exhibit pre-emptive arrogance. He does the Valentine Brothers' masterpiece - a song which didn't get a proper British release precisely when it was needed - and uses it to escort Face/NME hipsterdom into the uncomprehending faces of the wider public, which is something a lot of New Pop artists didn't really achieve.
On Men And Women, Hucknall let all of his other tendencies - particularly the post-Tom Jones lurve man persona (in an unfortunate coincidence, not long before Jones himself essayed a full-scale comeback) - run freely, but where did that leave him save in a cul-de-sac? A New Flame buried its nuggets of angry wisdom beneath pastel shades of apologetic blandness. On Stars, he got the balance absolutely correct; he learned to slow down, reflect and, to a degree ("Thrill Me") zip up. With Life, however, Hucknall found himself back at the same paradoxical roundabout.
This is a very nice record of songs, if niceness is all you want and/or need. It may well be that Hucknall is singing and playing to...the suspicious people, the reasonably well-off types who don't view themselves as a central cause of society's problems, who do not consider themselves to be "fighting" or on a "mission" because, by escaping from the horror of the world so eagerly, they think themselves their own heroes, in control of their own historical fantasy. They see their passions and misdemeanours as part of a drama, view themselves as participants in an epic poem. Their lives exist as channels for light entertainment. They do not possess the capacity or imagination to consider just how passively receptive and actively complacent they might really be.
Yet these are the people for whom (they believe) Hucknall is speaking, and by some odd combination of chance and dogged perseverance his music is able to reach out to them. It's perhaps not his fault if their reception is faulty. In that sense, his nearest American equivalent is not Michael Bolton, but Garth Brooks. I said something above about "the suspicious people," suspicious because, much as the hardcore country addicts who resist any attempts at crossover being imposed because they are defensive of the music's perceived "commonness," the guilty middle-class streets are filled with Jerry Leadbetter types who really only want to crash out on their expensive sofa with a glass of wine and an Engelbert Humperdinck record but will rise up to the ramparts in order to defend what they view as an assault on the culture they like, again because it is thought common and lowbrow - "it" in this case being middle-of-the-road (a.k.a. centrist) pop (easy listening, if you must). The people, if you insist, with the real cash. I am not sure Mick Hucknall would disagree with that theory, if only because he reaches that audience with relative (musical, but not necessarily lyrical - nobody listens to the words in pop, not really) clarity and directness. And, like Brooks, he is proud and confident enough not even to consider changing his spots midstream.
The downside to that access is that only the surface of Simply Red's music prevails, and nothing genuinely changes. Thirty years ago, in the course of my day job, I befriended one of the clinic nurses - or, more properly, she befriended me. We began talking about music and ended up compiling C90 mixtapes for each other. Don't get the wrong idea - we were both spoken for and it was purely friends-only. One tape I made for her included a mix of then-contemporary music and things which were older but still reasonably hip. Side two, track two, was "Sweet Surrender," one of many priapic epics on Tim Buckley's Greetings From L.A. She commented to me that, although she really, really liked the tape, she couldn't understand why I'd put Simply Red near the beginning of side two.
I was quite tickled by her confusion. I had already heard the singer's Buckley aspirations towards the end of "Holding Back The Years" but really she was right; emotionally there was little substantive difference between the two voices and what their owners did with them. And it may be that it is the emotionalism which never vacates Hucknall's singing is what counts with his band's music and accounts for his immense popularity. At this (1996) point I was also busy picking up CD reissues of classic dub on Hucknall's Blood And Fire imprint. He did, and presumably still does, nothing but good. Not long thereafter my nursing colleague left for another job elsewhere and I never saw or heard from her again. That's the way life goes. I hope hers - if she's still out there - has gone and is going well.