MICK HUCKNALL and his band are becoming a familiar sight to audiences in the south.

The soulful outfit, currently busy promoting their latest best-selling album Home, make their third visit to the area in a year on Tuesday, following a previous performance at the BIC and an outdoor summer show at Beaulieu.

The first Simply Red recording in four years, Home saw the band returning to its basic strengths. Grounded in an easy soul tradition but with a neat contemporary twist, it garnered some of the best reviews of their career.

Flame-haired singer Mick Hucknall gets almost as many inches in the gossip columns as he does in the music press.

An incorrigible ladies' man, it seems the press is more interested in who he's with (and there's a constantly changing roster of actresses, singers, models and good-time girls to focus on) than his abilities as a stage performer.

The singer has never been one to shy away from publicity, though. In a recent edition of Q magazine, he talked openly about his sexual adventures and expressed his support for Tony Blair during the invasion of Iraq.

To trace Simply Red back to their roots you have to travel back more than 25 years to the days when a young but decidedly exhibitionist Hucknall was making his mark on the Manchester punk scene, fronting a short-lived outfit called The Frantic Elevators.

The Elevators' anarchic thrash was hardly the perfect vehicle for Hucknall's soulful voice but the band provided a necessary springboard - and even provided Simply Red with one of their earliest hits (Holding Back the Years was a reworked Elevators number).

Hucknall's unique treatment of old songs comes to the fore again on Home, which includes an intriguing version of Bob Dylan's 60s classic Positively 4th Street.

Tuesday. Performance: 7.30pm. Tickets: £35. Box office: 01202 456456.