Simply Red
Men and Women

This vintage import pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn't showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to "see" the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It's what vintage all analog recordings are known for -- this sound.

If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it -- not often, and certainly not always -- but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.

What The Best Sides Of Men and Women Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear

• The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
• The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes even as late as 1987
• Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
• Natural tonality in the midrange -- with all the instruments having the correct timbre
• Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space

No doubt there's more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.

Learning the Record

For our shootout, we had at our disposal a variety of pressings that had the potential for Hot Stamper sound. We cleaned them carefully, then unplugged everything in the house we could, warmed up the system, Talisman'd it, found the right VTA for our Triplanar arm (by ear of course) and proceeded to spend the next hour or so playing copy after copy on side one, after which we repeated the process for side two.

If you have five or more copies of a record and play them over and over against each other, the process itself teaches you what's right and what's wrong with the sound of the album. Once your ears are completely tuned to what the best pressings do well that the other pressings do not do as well, using a few carefully chosen passages of music, it quickly becomes obvious how well a given copy can reproduce those passages. You'll hear what's better and worse -- right and wrong would be another way of putting it -- about the sound.

This approach is simplicity itself. First, you go deep into the sound. There you find a critically important passage in the music, one which most copies struggle -- or fail -- to reproduce as well as the best. Now, with the hard-won knowledge of precisely what to listen for, you are perfectly positioned to critique any and all pressings that come your way.

It may be a lot of work but it sure ain't rocket science, and we've never pretended otherwise. Just the opposite: from day one we've explained step by step precisely how to go about finding the Hot Stampers in your own collection. Not the good sounding pressings you happen to own -- those may or may not have Hot Stampers -- but the records you actually cleaned, shot out, and declared victorious.

What We're Listening For On Men and Women

• Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
• Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren't "back there" somewhere, lost in the mix. They're front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them.
• The Big Sound comes next -- wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
• Then transient information -- fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
• Tight punchy bass -- which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
• Next: transparency -- the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
• Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing -- an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

Vinyl Condition

Mint Minus Minus and maybe a bit better is about as quiet as any vintage pressing will play, and since only the right vintage pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell. (The copies that are even a bit noisier get listed on the site are seriously reduced prices or traded back in to the local record stores we shop at.)

Those of you looking for quiet vinyl will have to settle for the sound of other pressings and Heavy Vinyl reissues, purchased elsewhere of course as we have no interest in selling records that don't have the vintage analog magic of these wonderful recordings.

If you want to make the trade-off between bad sound and quiet surfaces with whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing might be available, well, that's certainly your prerogative, but we can't imagine losing what's good about this music -- the size, the energy, the presence, the clarity, the weight -- just to hear it with less background noise.

Side One

• The Right Thing
• Infidelity
• Suffer
• I Won't Feel Bad
• Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye

Side Two

• Let Me Have It All
• Love Fire
• Move On Out
• Shine
• Maybe Someday...

ThisIsDig.com Rave Review

Having been elevated to superstardom off the back of 1986’s US No.1 hit single "Holding Back The Years," and its parent album, Picture Book, Simply Red hurried back into the studio, with frontman Mick Hucknall keen to further flex his songwriting muscles. Released on 9 March 1987, their second album, Men And Women, was immediately met with strong global sales and boasted a typically eclectic range of songs, such as a cover of Cole Porter’s jazz standard "Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye" and an experiment with reggae in the shape of "Love Fire," proving Simply Red were still a musical force to be dealt with.

At this early stage of their career, Simply Red were relatively fresh from supporting funk pioneer James Brown at Wembley Stadium. As a result, Hucknall’s confidence was arguably at its peak, but the singer was beginning to notice tensions running high in the studio. “Men And Women was probably the most difficult album I had to make,” he later recalled, “because I was having to deal with a lot of internal politics within the band.” By assuming responsibility as Simply Red’s primary songwriter, some feathers were starting to get ruffled, but none of this is evident in the songs.

Men And Women’s lead single, "The Right Thing," played up to Hucknall’s newfound role as 80s pop’s most surprising sex symbol, and attracted controversy due to the overtly sexual nature of its lyrics. A funk-inspired ode to enhancing one’s prowess in the bedroom, Mick was bemused that people were so shocked by it. “I just was astonished at the reaction,” he would say years later, noting how the album was actually banned in Singapore due to its perceived immorality. “I didn’t think that anybody would give two hoots about what the subject matter of the song was.” Recalling the same soulful grunts and groans as his hero Al Green, Hucknall’s bravura vocal performance no doubt helped the song reach No.11 in the UK and peak at No.27 in the US.

Most noticeable about Men And Women as a whole was that Mick Hucknall’s left-leaning lyricism had been put on hold, while the lush, synth-saturated production was ramped up courtesy of Thompson Twins’ producer Alex Sadkin. The band’s sense of style, too, was given a revamp – gone was Hucknall’s scruffy attire, to be replaced instead with a bowler hat and debonair waistcoat, possibly inspired by his newfound love of jazz owing to an affection for Ella Fitzgerald’s double-album of Cole Porter covers. This jazzy influence would also spill over into Simply Red’s live performances, with Hucknall displaying all the exuberance of a swing band leader in his pomp.

While the album failed to produce a hit comparable to "Holding Back The Years," the songwriting on display was commendable for its ambition and, in many respects, made Men And Women a more considered enterprise. Particular highlights include the horn-toting toe-tapper "I Won’t Feel Bad" and the funky slap bass groove of "Let Me Have It All," both of which wore their Stax/Volt influences on their sleeves. “I don’t like putting fillers on albums,” Hucknall admitted in a 1987 interview. “For me, it’s got to work as a whole entity. I don’t want to put one single bad track on it.”

Incredibly, the band’s earlier US success had afforded Mick Hucknall the dream opportunity of writing a song for The Supremes legend Diana Ross, "Shine," which Simply Red also recorded themselves for Men And Women. Perhaps more amazingly, Hucknall was also invited to jet off to LA to work with one of his songwriting heroes, Motown songwriter Lamont Dozier. Sitting down at the musical maestro’s piano together, Hucknall and Dozier wrote "Suffer," a beautifully restrained soulful ballad (“This time it’s gonna be hard for me/I don’t wanna suffer”), as well as the more upbeat Infidelity, which would later chart at No.31 in the UK. “Lamont was happy with them,” Hucknall recalls of their collaboration, “though he thought the words to Infidelity were a bit risky.”

Despite Men And Women confidently reasserting Simply Red as a globe-trotting touring band, culminating in the group playing to a crowd of 80,000 people at São Paulo’s Estádio Do Morumbi in 1988, Mick Hucknall continues to have mixed feelings about the group’s second album. “It’s a long story, but it was an unhappy album, that’s for sure,” he has said, indicating jealousy from his fellow bandmates as being the root cause. “I was quite disillusioned with dealing with this kind of enemy within, and it caused a lot of difficulty. I almost quit, actually.”

Aside from such behind-the-scenes troubles, the album holds up as a solid and assured work, and the musicianship is as stellar as you’d expect. By dabbling in a sleek and sophisticated range of musical styles – a grab-bag of soul, funk and jazz – it also saw Hucknall broaden his songwriting potential. Produced with an ear for the then-fashionable 80s trend of sophisti-pop, Men And Women is a clean and stylish-sounding record which more than lay the groundwork for Simply Red’s next album, A New Flame, which in turn kick-started the band’s ascendancy to even greater heights.

- Luke Edwards, March 9, 2021