“I FEEL POLITICALLY HOMELESS
AT THE MOMENT SO IT’S A WELCOME
THING FOR ME TO JUST ESCAPE
FROM IT AND ENJOY SOME MUSIC”
Ellington and Count Basie. Then you go
further on – I know that Elvis had brown eyes
but you get the point – there’s him, Mick
Jagger, Robert Plant, The Beatles. All these
people have all been enormously infl uenced
by African-American music and I’m looking
at myself and thinking, ‘What the hell’s the
difference? What’s the problem?‘”LET'S PUSH THINGS FORWARD
Blue Eyed Soul is the second album since
Simply Red were reactivated as a b(r)and
back in 2015 (more on that later). Mick
explains that he had two main aims for the
record: “I wanted to push my voice a bit
further this time. The other thing I wanted to
do was to make songs and arrangements
I thought the band would enjoy playing night
after night. And generally speaking I thought
up-tempo funky tunes would appeal to them.”
Interestingly, there are no covers this time- “I was lucky that the songs just kept coming
into my head and suddenly we had enough
to make an album. Besides, I’ve kind of done
the soul covers album thing now.”
The record’s jumping off point was the
infectiously funky fi rst single Thinking Of You.
“I wrote the song on my phone so I sent Andy
[Wright, producer] a version of it. He did a
kind of demo and we had a little bit of tennis
“Andy supervises the initial work, but then
we have always gone into what we call ‘the
second stage’ with some of the songs. If
Andy thinks that he could do something
different and improve on them, he then goes
away and reworks them. So that’s what he
does – we work together in stages until we’re
satisfi ed about a particular version.”
It sounds earthy and authentically 70s, the
sound of a group of musicians at ease with
themselves and each other. “There’s a
familiarity that we have together as a band
now,” Hucknall explains. “I’ve been working
with the same guys for a long time. We’re
very comfortable in our skins and we enjoy
working together, including Andy. It’s just a
family atmosphere, one that makes it very
enjoyable to work in.”
It’s certainly a fun-sounding album. You
can’t help but smile when the frontman
growls, ”Play the ding dong hard” on Ring
That Bell, a reminder of how life-affi rmingly
silly some of the best 70s funk often was.
Lines like, ”I love my life/ I love my wife”
from Don’t Do Down, are, yes, on one level
quite cheesy, but how rare is it to hear a
simple expression of personal happiness
from an established artist? At a time when
the country is engulfed in its greatest political
crisis for years, Blue Eyed Soul is a tonic.regarding that.” Once that and another four
songs were down, the producer suggested
going into Mark Knopfl er’s studio in Chiswick.
“By then I had all the arrangements in my
head – basslines, horn parts, guitar parts,
everything. I went in and showed the band
the arrangements and we started working on
takes – the old-fashioned way. Counting
them off: one, two three, four, off we go.
Wright has been part of the Simply Red set
up – as producer and before that keyboard
player for more than three decades.Producer Andy Wright – longtime Simply Red
and Mick Hucknall collaborator