Mick Hucknall on women, rejection and cultural appropriation

What makes someone become a pop star? Sometimes, it’s true, pop stardom arrives by accident, and its recipient responds not with joy, but horror. More often, though, pop stardom is sought, sometimes to make up for things that are missing in life, and the newly minted star embraces all the benefits fame brings, until those benefits — unlimited sex, unlimited drugs, unlimited drink — become more of a burden than a pleasure. Mick Hucknall appears to fall very much into the latter camp.

What was missing was, first, a mother: she left his father when he was an infant, and records became some sort of surrogate as he grew older. ‘Music was probably a kind of sanctuary, once I got a record player and I was in my bedroom and I was on my own,’ he says, sipping coffee in the Langham hotel, next door to Broadcasting House. What was also missing from the young Hucknall’s life was amusement.