‘It all goes to show that music is my first love’
Paul Young reigned during the 1980s. With his mop of glossy hair, tight jeans and roguish charm, he looked the part – and his songs weren’t bad either. After singing in new wave band the Q-Tips, he topped the charts and launched a solo career with a powerful cover of Marvin Gaye’s Wherever I Lay My Hat (That’s My Home). The hits kept coming and in 1984 he found himself singing the opening vocals on Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas?
Like his contemporaries such as Tony Hadley of Spandau Ballet and prog rock behemoths Genesis, Young, now aged 66, continues to play to fans.
“We’ve got this back catalogue of songs that people want to go and see – and they hear them and they get off on that,” he explains. “It’s like the Stones – still touring, still a massive ticket. And I think there’s a lot of people out there who want that.
“Because although they have got maybe a decade of teenagers, we have got three decades of people that remember songs from the 80s. Whether they were 15, 25 or 35 – they know those songs. You’ve got a bigger demographic.”
Born in Luton in 1956, on leaving school he worked, as did his father and brother, for Vauxhall Motors while trying to forge a career as a musician at night.
He fronted a series of soul and new wave bands – Kat Kool & the Kool Kats, Streetband and Q-Tips – before striking out solo. Only the latter secured any kind of meaningful success, supporting the likes of The Who.
When the Q-Tips disbanded in 1982, Young signed to Columbia Records and began writing and recording songs for his debut album, No Parlez. It was a smash hit and went to number one in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and more.
Overnight, Young became a pop heart-throb but it was a reputation that would sit uneasily with him as he tried to evolve as an artist.
“I felt that transition,” he recalls. “I was trying to move on from just doing pop. Those kids were getting older and probably getting married and having to go out and do a job and earn money.
“So it becomes less of a part of their lives. But then as the children get older, it starts to become a part of their lives again. I think that’s why you get a resurgence of interest. And so there was that natural dip there and I was trying different things.
“The good thing about that is maybe (the songs) didn’t do so well at the time they came out. But then they hear the ones they know and then they dip into the ones they don’t know and discover that I always tried to move on from one album to another.”
No Parlez was only the first of three UK number one albums for the burgeoning star. And those early hits such as Everytime You Go Away and Love of the Common People still serve him well.
“They grew up having those songs on in the background when they were children, so it’s still in there,” he says of his fans.