There's something about Mick Hucknall. The Simply Red frontman may not look like your stereotypical ladies' man, but he's had more than his share of dalliances over the past three decades or so. He even admitted as much in a new interview with the UK's Telegraph.
Asked whether it's true that he's had sex with over a thousand women, the now-54-year-old Hucknall said that was likely a fair estimate, though he never really kept count. "It probably is [true]," the "Holding Back the Years" singer conceded, noting that he "always got on well with girls" when he was younger.
"I've not denied that [number] but I never claimed it,” the ginger-haired singer told The Telegraph. "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."
The Brit — now in a long-term relationship with Gabriella Wesberry, the mother of his 7-year-old daughter Romy True — credits his sexual prowess to his band's success in the 1980s and '90s, when they topped the charts with songs like "If You Don't Know Me By Now" and "Fairground." (Simply Red broke up in 2010 but are reuniting in the fall of 2015 for a 30th anniversary tour.)
"It's like kids in a candy store. You can't believe it. There's girls chasing you all the time," he recalled. "It's incredible. When you're 24 you don't give a toss. You're invincible. You can do anything. Your mind is set in a way that the world is just ready and you're just going to take it all. You're just going to have a grand time."
Indeed, back in 2010, Hucknall told The Guardian he slept "with about three women a day, every day," from 1985 to 1987. "A redheaded man is not generally considered to be a sexual icon, but when I had the fame, oh my God, it went crazy," he said at the time. "I never said no. This was what I wanted from being a pop star. I was living the dream, and my only regret is I hurt some really good girls."
He added that his philandering probably had something to do with his mother's abandonment of him early in life. "I wanted the love from every single woman on the planet because I didn't have my mother's love," he told The Guardian. In the end though, he "got bored with it all" because he "never really got the emotional contact that [he] craved."
That emotional contact is something he still struggles with today. "I don't know how to communicate in a conciliatory way where you don't say what you think is true, but you say what you think that person would like to hear to make them like you," he told The Telegraph. "It's actually been something, incredibly, I've only discovered since having a child."
It's a learning experience, for sure, but one Hucknall is grateful to have. "I'd say I'm happy about 80 percent of the time," he mused, "and I'm satisfied with that."
