The Gross Double Standards of Mick Hucknall’s Sex Life

Some people staring at a massive digital image of Mick Hucknall's O-face at a Day On the Green in 2010 (Photo by ​Stephen Michael Barnett)

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

Can we stop talking about Mick Hucknall having sex, please? It's just every time Mick Hucknall's sex life gets brought up—which it does, like clockwork, every time Simply Red have a new album or tour coming up—someone asks Hucknall how many women he has had sex with, and he always says, "Ooh, about a thousand," and then I have to think of Mick Hucknall's freckled back wobbling slightly in the cool October night as he pumps frantically into his latest conquest. Of Mick Hucknall, bursting out of the exit behind the back of a satellite town theatre, assessing a row of mums in mini-dresses, pointing to them all in turn and saying, "I'll have that one and that one. Not the fat one." Mick Hucknall shouting "LOVE THE THOUGHT" as he judders to his latest smooth-reggae orgasm. These thoughts flash instantly through my mind every time you say "Mick Hucknall" and "thousand women." These images haunt me every time a new Simply Red tour looms on the horizon.

Guess what: Simply Red are reuniting again for a 30th anniversary tour and this time, it's The Telegraph who want to verify his sexual claims, asking in an interview this week whether, really—the subtext being, "Really, Mick? Because you look like a dinner lady who's been up all night with a four-pack of Special Brew, and not a sexual lothario who's been up getting his hands all covered in lube"—it was true that he'd had sex with 1,000 human women. "It probably is," he said. Come on, Mick: anyone could say they've "probably" slept with 1,000 women. "I've not denied that but I never claimed it. I never bragged about it. I don't keep count. I've no idea, but I would think over a 25-year period that's probably reasonable to say. But do I want to say it? No. It's not what makes me tick. I don't put chips on the bedpost." He then describes sexual life as a lead singer in pre-AIDS Britain as being "like a kid in a candy store," a line I regret reading while working my way through a tube of Fruit Pastilles.

But here's the thing: In 2010, he claimed that in three years in the early 80s alone, he had sex with 3,000 women—that's one good threesome and another solo conquest a day for three entire years. And that includes Christmas, and New Year. And Easter. And those days where you have to catch a series of trains to go see your cousin for his birthday, and you're so short of time your dinner ends up being a £1.60 packet of McCoy's and a £1 Crunchie from the station vending machine. How is Mick Hucknall having sex then? When does he find time to do his laundry—or renew his passport, or transfer that £20 he owes his bassist for that Nando's they went for, or install that new iOS software his phone keeps telling him to do—in between orchestrating all these threeways?There are just not enough hours in the day or women who would feasibly want to have sex with Mick Hucknall in existence for any of his claims about having sex with women to make sense.

But that's not the point about Mick Hucknall having huge, just gross amounts of sex, or, in actuality, just having a middling-to-moderate amount of sex and then banging on about it constantly for 25 years. It's the double standard of the thing.

Imagine for a moment that Mick Hucknall had voluptuous breasts and an ass that wouldn't quit and was a cherub-faced northern lady (Mick Hucknall running one red-taloned finger down the small of your back; Mick Hucknall licking his lipstick-stained lips and slipping his bra off under his shirt). Haunting. But now imagine this monstrous Hucknallia was the one banging on about having sex with between 1,000 and 3,000 pre-AIDS sex-lovin' dudes in the 80s. Would the Telegraph be conducting wink-and-a-nod interviews about his sexual proclivity then? Would they run with the headline: "Mick Hucknall: Have I slept with over 1,000 men? Probably," or would they run with a watered down version of: "Infamous Slag Mick Hucknall Still Hasn't Found Love Despite Rattling Through a Thousand Dicks"?

Nicki Minaj, Iggy Azalea, Miley Cyrus: they've all been variously blasted in the last year for getting either their boobs or their bums out or wearing something so tight that we can imagine what their boobs or bums would look like should they have opted to actually get them out. Taylor Swift gets heat for, as far as I can tell, being a 24-year-old with eight ex-boyfriends. None of them go, "I destroyed a thousand anacondas in one calendar year and so let's now talk about my new tour." None of them go, "I have wrecked two thousand sets of balls in my life, and now I've got a Greatest Hits out." Because they would catch hell for it.

A lot of Mick Hucknall's sexual reporting is done with an element of genuine surprise—more, "Really? A thousand women? How though?" rather than a LadBible-esque anointment of Mick Hucknall as King Shagger ("SimplyLAD"). A lot of it, also, is Mick Hucknall desperately selling the same old line of vague personality spice to counter his Dignitas waiting room-ass brand of music. But a lot of it is, quietly, the old slags vs. lads stuff, that makes a hero of Mick Hucknall and a villain of any girl who deigns to have sex with more than one dude in her entire life. So, please, for the love of my mental wellness and for people everywhere, stop talking about Mick Hucknall having sex.

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