Simply Red’s cover of “If You Don’t Know My by Now” has been on my mp3 player for a long time. But I had forgotten this song, “Holding Back the Years.” Here is in, in an early MTV video, from 1985, and I just rediscovered it day before yesterday.

(I started teaching teens in the 1980s and loved their music, almost immediately.)

Simply Red’s singer, Mick Hucknall, lost his Mum. She deserted the family when he was three. He began, about the age of ten, to have huge fights with his Dad. “There was no woman around to referee,” he said many years later. But he found an outlet in art, in dreary industrial Manchester, and then in singing, and with the group that takes its name from his hair.

The Irish imagery comes from his mother’s side of the family, from Offaly, a county dead in the center of Ireland. The song comes from his pain. It’s been transmuted into something beautiful.