I’ll keep holding on

Mick Hucknall was seventeen, living in his father’s house, when he wrote “Holding Back the Years” — a song about his mother, who had left when he was three. His punk band the Frantic Elevators released it as their final single in 1982 and nobody much noticed. Four years and one new band later, the same song went to number one on the Billboard Hot 100.

The Simply Red version, from the 1985 debut Picture Book, adds the one thing the teenage original didn’t have: the “I’ll keep holding on” refrain, written years after the rest. So the song carries two Hucknalls at once — the boy stuck in the fear, and the man who found the line that lets him out of it. The writing credit still reads Hucknall/Moss, though Hucknall has said his old Frantic Elevators bandmate Neil Moss didn’t actually co-write this one; the credit was a gift, for all the songs they had written together.

Listen to it knowing all that, and the chorus stops being a pop hook and becomes exactly what it says.