Mick Hucknall performing at The Summer Pops _320
MICK HUCKNALL fans hoping to enjoy an evening of Simply Red’s Greatest Hits at the Echo Arena last night would have returned home disappointed.
And some of them did leave, albeit before the show got into its groove, which it did, and it did it well.
There wasn’t a note of 1995 hit Fairground, or even the earlier Something Got Me Started.
This was Tribute To Bobby, Hucknall’s cap-doff to the still-living and still-gigging Bobby “Blue” Bland, a soul and blues crooner from the 50s and 60s.
His voice has only just mellowed and deepened enough to do the tribute justice, but through Bland hits I Wouldn’t Treat A Dog and Cry Cry Cry, it was unmistakably the same unique, croaky bloke from Manchester.
This was toe-tapping jazz-blues. Superb amid the intimacy of a foggy, basement bar, but perhaps lost in the cavernous, Arena.
Hucknall asked the crowd how many had heard of Bland. Just a handful had. And that’s perhaps why it took maybe 10 songs, in a set of around 15, for the crowd to warm to the reworked material.
But after a short instrumental number, the pennies were dropping. It was only in the closing 15 minutes that the Hucknall faithful started enjoying it as much as he clearly was.
Hucknall’s penultimate number, Farther on up the Road, which took Bland to the top of the US R&B chart in 1957, turned up the tempo on the original.
Bland’s lyrics are, in Hucknall’s own words, “about loss and dealing with pain”. But the ginger frontman, backed up by a pounding six-piece band, knocked them into a jiving 21st century mould.
Hucknall, part of the Summer Pops line-up, missed the old Big Top. His 3,000 fans would have warmed the atmosphere nicely. But the Arena was too echoey and frigid.
And it was a shame few seemed to know they were getting Bland-covers, no matter how great they turned out to be.
