Simply Red “Picture Book” 1985. British blue-eyed soul/pop that went to no. 2 in the UK and made the Top 20 in the US (#16).

It’s been more than a minute since I’ve made time and space to sit down to listen to a record and write: life is insanely busy, the holidays came and went, Vault Boy is home for a month from college (I guess it would be more accurate to call him Vault Man since he’ll be 19 soon but that feels waaaayyyy to weird), and the records on my to-do stack are numbering close to 100 so it’s time to get back on the listening and writing wagon. I grabbed Simply Red’s debut record for a few reasons – it was sitting on top of one of the stacks and its big hit song, “Holding Back the Years,” is on my New Year’s playlist so it feels right this time of year.

“Holding Back the Years” went to #1 in the US (the week of July 12th, 1986) and to #2 in the UK (it was initially released there in ’84 when it went to #51). It earned Simply Red a Grammy nomination for best pop performance. It’s also the only song on Picture Book that I have any familiarity with or connection to and I am therefore going to ignore the rest of the LP (I’m listening to it now, it’s pretty boring overall though Simply Red’s cover of The Valentine Brothers’ “Money’s Too Tight” is OK). “Holding Back the Years” was omnipresent on the radio and MTV during the first half of ’86; one of my all-time favorite memories hearing “Holding Back the Years” is from around spring or early summer of ’86. I had stopped by Tom’s Drive-In (not an actual drive-in as this local fast food chain joint was downtown Appleton), possibly after school as I know I was on my brown 10-speed Schwinn bike, to see who was hanging out there. I can’t remember everyone present but I do know that (if they were even there) my girlfriends had all left, leaving me to hang with the group of punk boys who were a little bit scary and a lot of bit awesome. “Holding Back the Years” started playing on the restaurant’s speakers and one particularly scary punk, Kevin, got up and started doing a remarkably great slow stomping dance with his shaved head, army jacket and combat boots while singing along – even a hard-ass punk knew all the words.