Paul Young (17 June 1947 – 15 July 2000) was a British percussionist, singer and songwriter. He achieved success in the bands Sad Café and Mike and the Mechanics.
Young was born in the Wythenshawe district of Manchester, England. He loved music from a young age and sang in the local church choir. Whilst still at school at the age of 14 he formed a skiffle group, Johnny Dark and the Midnights. He started in the music business by playing German clubs in the '60s. with the Manchester based band The Toggery Five The group secured a recording contract with EMI's Parlophone label, but their few singles such as the doom-laden I'm Gonna Jump made little impact.
After The Toggery Five disbanded, Young drummed for Wayne Fontana & The Opposition in the late 60’s and early 70’s and then was a founding member of Music Force and Gyro. Young and Gyro bandmate Ian Wilson, together with guitarists Ian Wilson and Mike Hehir, saxophonist Lenni, keyboardist Vic Emerson, bassist John Stimpson and drummer David Irving, who were members of Mandalaband, formed the band Sad Café in 1976. The new group caught the eye of Manchester music business entrepreneur Harvey Lisberg, who got them a recording contract with the RCA label. In 1977 their first album, Fanx Ta Ra, was a showcase for Young's dynamic singing and craftsmanlike songwriting.
They achieved success with the follow-up, Misplaced Ideals, and its Young co-written hit "Run Home Girl." Their next album, Facades, featured the UK "Every Day Hurts," which was a no. 3 hit on the British charts. The band also hit the UK Top 40 with "Strange Little Girl", "My Oh My" and "I'm in Love Again", and had two US Billboard Hot 100 hits with "Run Home Girl" and "La-Di-Da". Following some chart success in America, the group made a 54-concert US tour. This was the group's peak year, as Every Little Hurts, featuring Young's impassioned singing and the group's complex harmonies, became a massive hit in Britain.
Sad Café toured extensively and played three nights at Manchester's Apollo Theatre to capacity audiences, proof that classic rock music retained its appeal even in the heyday of punk, when Manchester was creating the Buzzcocks and the Factory record label. Thir album, La Di Da, was also a commercial success, but in the early 80s the group suffered from changing personnel and a split with their record company. By 1985, Young was almost penniless.
At this low point in his career he was asked to audition for a group being organised by the bass player of Genesis, Mike Rutherford. Mike and the Mechanics was to be a vehicle for Rutherford's songwriting, and Young was one of five singers hired to perform on the group's first album. Young enjoyed further chart success sharing lead vocal duties with Paul Carrack and scored three Top 40 hits, including two US Top 10s, "Silent Running (On Dangerous Ground)" and "All I Need Is a Miracle". The single "The Living Years" (US#1, UK#2) became the band's biggest hit, and featured on the band's second album Living Years.
During Young's career, he provided lead vocals on several chart hits, including Sad Café's "Every Day Hurts" and "My Oh My", and Mike and the Mechanics'"All I Need Is a Miracle", "Word of Mouth", "Taken In" and "Nobody's Perfect". Young possessed a wide vocal range, often utilising fifth octave head voice notes, and a voice characterised as "rich". His early style has been likened to that of Mick Jagger; in the early 1980s, he began to explore a more "emotive" style.
Although Young enjoyed fifteen years of chart hits and live success with Mike and the Mechanics, he also worked on many different session projects and played on other artists’ and bands’ records. He had also been working on a solo album of his own probably as long as he had been making music. Unfortunately fate did not give him the opportunity to complete and release it in his lifetime.
Young had recently returned from gigging in Switzerland with fellow rock stars Dave Gilmour from Pink Floyd and his namesake, 80s singer Paul Young. On 15 July 2000, having no symptoms, Young had a sudden heart attack at around 6:30pm at his home in Hale, Altrincham, and died shortly afterwards at 53 years old. Young was planning to tour Europe with Mike and the Mechanics later that month. An autopsy revealed that the cause of death was a heart attack and that "it was not the first".
(Edited from Wikipedia, FrankTortorici @ MTV & Dave Laing @ The Guardian)