'I regret the philandering," says Mick Hucknall, a man who, by his own estimation, had sex with more than 3,000 women in a three-year stretch in the mid-80s. "In fact, can I issue a public apology through the Guardian? They know who they are and I'm truly sorry." This isn't what one might expect to hear from Mick Hucknall. But then the Mick Hucknall I'm meeting in the quiet hotel suite reserved for our conversation is most unlike the man portrayed in hundreds of newspaper and magazine profiles: he's unfailingly honest, funny and polite (he requests alcohol hand wipes so I don't take his Asian flu germs home). Even the explosive red hair is absent, replaced with a soft mop of silvery-tangerine curls. He's 50 now, and happily married with his first child, so his days as the ruby-toothed, actress-squiring, restaurant-owning roué are behind him.

After a quarter of a century of being a pop star, Hucknall remains one of the most recognisable figures in British popular music. He has sold millions of records around the world and written four or five songs that will appear on radio playlists from now until the end of time. Leaving aside the smooth jazz-funk that made his name, though, he's had a fascinating and unusual career. His Blood and Fire record label has performed a public service in rediscovering and rereleasing some of the most brilliant reggae records ever made. He was an art school punk even before he saw the Sex Pistols at Manchester's Lesser Free Trade Hall, while the first lineup of Simply Red included musicians who'd been in early incarnations of the Durutti Column. Hucknall was one of the first big pop stars to ditch the major label, and one of the first to harness fan power through his website. He has taught himself Italian and makes his own wine in vineyards on the slopes of Mount Etna. Hucknall even has a crisply informative, wine-related Twitter account ("Romanee St Vivant '76 Leroy: delicate hickory smoke, black cherry, raspberry, cream. Still youthful. Served with roast haunch of Seka. Joy."). And yet rather like that unfortunate man in the joke whose good points are all ignored because he "fucked one sheep", it looks as if Hucknall will never be forgiven for wanting, in his words, to make "pop music with taste".

Sometimes, I ask him, don't you wish you'd kept it deliberately dumb? "Oh God, I love dumb!" he laughs. "I love Iggy Pop and the Stooges as much as anyone, but I took on the challenge of trying to introduce jazz into the pop mainstream. I was on a mission, really. Perhaps I should have just said, 'sophisticated'?"

That would have been even worse. "You're probably right. Whatever I do winds people up. I've been tattooed with every one of those criticisms. Even now, I'm the boy everyone loves to hate."

Do you still care? "Sometimes I do. Sometimes I give too much of a fuck. But I created the boxing match. I'm a troublemaker. I'm from the punk generation, but I make romantic, soft soul music. I like the bizarre disconnect of that but, clearly, some people don't."

Well, that problem's nearly over. Hucknall has spent 2010 touring the great cities of the world, bidding farewell to Simply Red's following. After 25 years' service he is retiring the Simply Red name and everything it stands for. "I don't want to be a slave to commercial success any more," he says. "I've been set free. I can do whatever I want now."

Hucknall says he has been "pretending" to be Simply Red for the last few years. He describes the pressure to write radio hits as being a form of "entrapment". The last Simply Red album, Stay, was, he says, "half 'Please play me on the radio!' and half 'Fuck you! This is what I want to do'."

When you've sold millions and millions of records, why worry? Why not tell everyone to get lost? "Because you want to relate to people," he says. "This is an issue that goes to the heart of Simply Red. We had hits and I liked it. People around me would listen to a new song and start going, 'Radio's not going to like that one …' because radio always wants another Something Got Me Started. All big bands encounter those problems – it's the seduction of mass relation. But I've walked away, I don't want to fight any more. None of it matters. I just want to write songs in my little corner. And I still love music, I've not been worn down by cynicism."

For Hucknall, everything begins with John Lennon. His earliest memory is of singing I Want to Hold Your Hand at an aunt's wedding when he was four. His mother had abandoned him and his father just a year earlier. "There was something about Lennon not having a mother," he says. "He had this bite, he was a bit gnarled."

Despite his lifelong love of the Beatles, Hucknall's music never contained even a trace element of Fabbery. "It's a very interesting point you make," he says. "I actually felt sorry for Liverpool bands like Bunnymen and Wah!, having this immense pressure of following the Beatles. I suppose I responded to that challenge by being nothing like them. I carved my own thing."

As a teenager, Hucknall – dressed in the 50s gear he bought from Oldham market – and his best friend Neil Moss formed the Frantic Elevators, inspired by the Manchester punk scene. "There was John the Postman," he says, remembering the characters of the time. "John Cooper Clarke, Paul Morley – I've never actually spoken to him – and there was this young guy who called himself Paki Paul – his words, not mine – who wore this fantastic military gear. Everything had happened in 1976. At those early gigs no one had bleached spiky hair or black leather jackets – there were only about 60 people who went to all the gigs, and they all had their own version of what punk meant. Then the rest of the world latched on to punk in the late summer of '77, but by 1978 it was just too mainstream."

The band were soon spotted by Roger Eagle, the DJ and promoter at Eric's, the Liverpool club where Teardrop Explodes, Echo & the Bunnymen and Frankie Goes to Hollywood played some of their first shows. "Eric's was sort of disgusting," Hucknall says. "Spit and sawdust, dark, dingy, unclean. Absolutely glorious! The jukebox would have a Charlie Parker 45 On Dial, Anarchy in the UK and King Tubby's Meets Rockers Uptown. That's what music should be."

Between 1979 and 1982 the Elevators released four scratchy singles on four tiny labels, but they collapsed after Moss was sent to borstal for stealing cars. When he came out he'd changed. "He fizzled out," Hucknall says. "The dream was over."

Except, of course, Hucknall's dream was only just beginning. He had been quietly studying the songwriting of Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin for some time when his friend and manager Elliot Rashman decided to build a new band, which would become Simply Red, around Hucknall's considerable voice and presence ("He has always had this magnetic effect on women," Rashman noted some years later). In this new band, Hucknall wanted a foil, a McCartney to his Lennon, but it never really worked like that. Everyone would talk about the ideas they had for songs, but it was only Hucknall who delivered. And, thanks to his striking image, it was his face – and hair – on every record sleeve and magazine cover.

"I fought that every single time!" he yells. "I began to feel alienated from the band and they felt left out. Then I feel like I'm letting them down. And then there's the money …"

You're making all of it?

"Yes! But for years I was the only member of the band who didn't have a studio at home. I was still writing on a Walkman with an acoustic guitar up until, well, now really."

When Holding Back the Years (originally a rather awkward, guitar-based Elevators song, devoid of the killer chorus) went to No 1 in America in July 1986, 26-year-old Hucknall was living in a bedsit in Didsbury, Manchester. "It just didn't connect," he says. It was symptomatic of his distrust of the US.

"The Beatles and the Stones had Elvis and Hollywood," he says, "but when it came to my generation America meant Richard Nixon and Vietnam. The radio programmers were paid with hookers and coke, and I hated that. I loved the African-American culture, but racism was still a big problem and white America was exactly what I didn't love. I still feel that. It's tarnished."

It was around this time that Hucknall's mother called him out of the blue. He told her he'd had a great childhood and, frankly, he didn't want to know her. Goodbye.

Simply Red became massive in Europe, too, and more success in America followed – If You Don't Know Me By Now became US No 1 in 1989. Hucknall, like a starving man let loose in a cake shop, took full advantage of fame. Simply Red interviews from the peak years are almost exclusively concerned with gourmet dining and lashings of guilt-free sex – journalists' pre-imagined outline of one man's obsessions laid bare time and again. "I like good food and I've always had a very natural empathy with women," he says. "A red-headed man is not generally considered to be a sexual icon, but when I had the fame, oh my God, it went crazy. Between 1985 and 1987, I would sleep with about three women a day, every day. I never said no. This was what I wanted from being a pop star. I was living the dream and my only regret is I hurt some really good girls."

If I were an entry-level psychologist, I say, I would propose the idea that the rejection by your mother drove your relentless desire to find love elsewhere. "And you'd be right," he says. "Definitely. I wanted the love from every single woman on the planet because I didn't have my mother's love. It was an addiction that took me to my darker period from 1996 to 2001 when I really came close to the gutter – I was more into drinking than seducing. I had got bored with it all as I never really got the emotional contact that I craved."

Do you think your music has been maligned by the shadow of this "Mick Hucknall" character?

"Yes. Yes, I do and it breaks my heart," he says. "It really does. But I hope my music stands up in the long haul when that image had died away. The truth is there was a golden era in music from 1962 to 1978 – after that it all went a bit tits up. I blame the fucking drum machine and the fucking shoulder pads of the 1980s. I feel a bit like the antichrist as I had the bulk of my success in the 80s and I hate 80s music. I don't care if it's in fashion now, I hate it. I hate everything about it. The only thing I succumbed to was the ridiculous hairstyles."

And you had to have one of them.

"Yes! Well, that was part of the deal."

Hucknall's phone rings – his ringtone is the Laurel and Hardy theme – just as he's bemoaning the "grotesque karaoke culture" of modern Britain. "I feel like we're living in the late Roman era," he spits. "Pierced navels and lips. Head-to-toe tattoos. Tits out everywhere."

Are we witnessing the end of days, I ask?

"Maybe," he smiles. "I hope so. To tell you the truth, I really just want to start all over again."

Simply Red play the Arena, London, on 8 December, then tour.

This article was amended on 3 December 2010. Owing to an editing error, a text reference said that Mick Hucknall slept with more than 1,000 women in a three-year period during the mid-80s. This has been corrected.