In 1985, Simply Red released “Holding Back The Years”. The song, part of their debut Picture Book album, was written by Simply Red’s lead singer, Mike Hucknall.
Interestingly, when Simply Red first released “Holding Back The Years”, the song failed to chart at radio. But just one year later, the band released the song again in 1986. That time, “Holding Back The Years” became their first No. 1 single in the United States.
“Holding Back The Years” starts with, “Holding back the years / Thinking of the fear I’ve had so long / When somebody hears / Listen to the fear that’s gone.” The entire song is about a stream of consciousness, a very mature topic. So it’s surprising that Hucknall was just 17 years old when “Holding Back The Years” was written.
“I wrote the song in 1978, while I was a teenager,” Hucknall tells The Guardian. “At art school, a teacher said, ‘The best paintings are when you get lost in a piece of work and start painting in a stream of consciousness.’ I wanted to do music, not art, so I started writing lyrics that way. The first song I wrote was called ‘Ice Cream And Wafers’. The next was ‘Holding Back The Years’.
“I didn’t realize what it was about until I’d finished it,” he adds. “It’s about that moment where you know you have to leave home and make your mark, but the outside world is scary. So you’re holding back the years.”
What Mick Hucknall Says About Writing “Holding Back The Years” for Simply Red
Hucknall lists Neil Moss as a co-writer on “Holding Back The Years”. However, Hucknall later reveals that Moss actually had nothing to do with writing “Holding Back The Years”. But Hucknall and Moss were first part of a band, Frantic Elevators, which is where the earliest version of this song began.
“When The Elevators split and I started Simply Red, I returned to the song and wrote the ‘I’ll keep holding on’ chorus,” Hucknall explains. “The song is credited to me and Neil Moss, the guitarist in the Frantic Elevators and my oldest friend. Neil didn’t write it, but we wrote so many songs together that I gave him a credit to remember the great times we had. We shared a flat, we toured with The Fall. We were [broke], but it was magical.”
Although they had much more chart success in their native United Kingdom, in 1989, Simply Red had their second and final No. 1 single in the United States with “If You Don’t Know Me By Now“.
Photo by BSR Agency/Gentle Look via Getty Images
The post Simply Red’s Lead Singer Was Just 17 Years Old When He Wrote This Big Hit appeared first on American Songwriter.