Mick Hucknall: The repentant pop star

last updated 8 January 2015

Mick Hucknall is really sorry he slept with all those groupies, said Rob Fitzpatrick in the London Guardian. “Can I issue a public apology?’’ he says. “I feel like the antichrist. I regret the philandering.’’ With his shock of curly red hair, Hucknall was the face of the ’80s pop group Simply Red, and at the height of his fame, he says he slept with nearly 3,000 women. “A red-headed man is not generally considered to be a sexual icon,” he says. “But when I had the fame, oh my God, it went crazy. Between 1985 and 1987, I would sleep with about three women a day, every day. I never said no. This was what I wanted from being a pop star. I was living the dream.” Hucknall’s mother walked out on him and his dad when he was just 3, and he sees that abandonment as the root of his manic skirt-chasing. “I wanted the love from every single woman on the planet because I didn’t have my mother’s love,” he says. “It was an addiction. I never really got the emotional contact that I craved.” Today, he’s married and a father, but sometimes thinks back on what a jerk he was. “My only regret is I hurt some really good girls,’’ he says. “They know who they are, and I’m truly sorry.”