It may not have escaped your notice that a lot of famous musicians - particularly singers - are not without ego, so it’s perhaps not surprising that when Simply Red frontman Mick Hucknall learned that fellow pop-soul boy George Michael was recording a duet with one of his heroes he was insanely jealous.
This would have been in the mid-'80s, when Simply Red were just breaking through. The hero in question was none other than the Queen of Soul herself, Aretha Franklin: she linked up with Michael on I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me), the pop-soul anthem that hit number 1 in both the US and UK in 1987.
A triumph for both artists, then, but Hucknall admits that he struggled to feel happy for George in particular when the song was first released.
“I was so jealous of George Michael performing with Aretha Franklin,” Hucknall told Gary Davies on BBC Radio 2’s Sounds Of The ‘80s show. “Aretha Franklin was one of my biggest vocal influences in my early teens - I was always trying [to work out] ‘how do I hit those notes?’ And I’d be listening intently to Aretha, Otis Redding, Al Green…”
A real student of soul, then, which meant that hearing one of his contemporaries singing with Franklin must have hurt all the more.
“There George goes and records this fantastic song with my heroine,” Hucknall remembers. “And I just… arghh!”
Fortunately, though, Huckall has developed a strategy for putting the green-eyed monster back in its box. “One of the great things about jealousy, is that if you confess to jealousy, you’re not as jealous as you once were,” he believes. “I confessed to myself that I was jealous, and I’m no longer jealous. Now I can just sit back and enjoy the beauty of this track.”
Good for him, but what Hucknall may or may not know is that it could easily have been another artist duetting with George on the song: either Michael Jackson or Stevie Wonder.
It seems that Jackson was approached first, but George would later say that a “very odd meeting” with him convinced him that that wasn’t going to happen.
“Michael Jackson never once looked at me,” George would later recall. “He was talking to me, but he was addressing my manager and his manager. But I was sitting next to him… it was very odd indeed.”
Stevie Wonder was next to get the call but, after repeated attempts to meet up with him failed, Michael eventually gave up, which ultimately led to him getting Aretha onboard.
Hucknall, meanwhile, says that he met George Michael a couple of times but, unfortunately, never got to speak to Aretha. He says that he once invited her out to dinner when he was in Detroit, but she had to cancel at the last minute after her son was arrested and she had to go and deal with the situation.
“But I wasn’t jealous!” he says, almost convincingly.
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