Simply Red
Braehead Arena
April 29
Where do Simply Red stand in the complex panoply of modern culture? “Go through the food court and turn left at Pizza Hut,” said the girl at the information desk. Here, just over the Renfrewshire border, in the middle of one of those anonymous shopping malls that have eaten great holes in the nation, is where Simply Red have ended up. And singularly appropriate it is too.

First though, it should be acknowledged that gleeful tales of Simply Red’s commercial demise might have been premature. The group is no longer on a major label, and the heady days of late 1980s excess are long distant, but the hefty turnout here, and the rapturous reception accorded Mick Hucknall’s bellowing delivery of the hits suggest he still has a healthy constituency here in the suburbs.

It’s a testimony to the broad market appeal of music that slides easily between genres, slipping in the black-girl choruses and yelps of old-school soul, the funk bass, and the whining guitar of menopausal rock. Hucknall didn’t get where he is today by ignoring any potential market niche.

So out here in the suburban fringes, in the harsh lighting of the shopping mall, Simply Red’s music is another familiar commodity on offer alongside Next, JB Sports and Sainsbury’s. Theirs is the sound of chiming tills and mall muzak that is an accompaniment to the glum escapism of shopping.

In Simply Red’s world it’s always drivetime, the mood is always regretful, but there’s always another dumb girl on the horizon.

These are songs with the perfect pitch to be the soundtrack to divorce. Its lyrical concerns usually hover around the narcissistic male view of romance as a series of tribulations punctuated by occasional moments of bliss. Even when poor Mick finds the girl who is “so beautiful” to the fat ginger lad, she turns out to be “oh so boring”.

The great joke is that, despite the sexual politics, the laydeez love him. The Braehead Arena was awash with oestrogen (and more than a little HRT; after all the Reds have been around a while), and the audience had no problem matching Mick’s falsetto on the choruses. The husbands and boyfriends nodded along tolerantly, and every so often there would be a screeching guitar solo in case they drifted off.

Hucknall bounded around the stage in a t-shirt and sweat pants, the image of a middle-management executive trying to work off the excess pounds. The slightly ponderous movements, the posturing and the massive back-up band suggest Mick wants to mature into Van Morrison, still smooching and sweating away in defiance of the years. A couple of the older numbers, notably the dynamic Stars, and Holding Back The Years offer glimpses of the time when Hucknall’s ability matched his self-estimation, but too much of the material is a richly bland sludge of ersatz emotion.

The new album, out there without the usual hype and backing that a major label could provide, sounds intentionally conservative, an attempt to consolidate the core market. The audience of course is growing older, and it probably isn’t entirely a coincidence that the moist-eyed title track, Home, summons up comparisons with Phil Collins and Celine Dion.

From the new album, Hucknall offered his brittle, varnished take on Bob Dylan’s Positively Fourth Street. The original is an adrenalin-filled rant of street-punk contempt for the — as he saw it — mediocrities and chancers surrounding him. Dylan wrote it when he was 24, and got away with its swaggering arrogance because he just happened to be the coolest man on the planet at the time.

Somehow the same sentiments are harder to take coming out of the mouth of an ingratiating, chubby, forty-something Lancastrian. “I wouldn’t like to be that person he wrote the song about,” he said with a grin at the end of it. Bad news Mick; you are.

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