Simply Red: how we made Holding Back the Years

‘When the song became a hit my mum tracked me down, but I thought: “My dad was there for me every day. You think you can just walk back into my life and it be OK?”’I wrote the song in 1978, while I was a teenager. 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 started writing lyrics that way. The first song I wrote was called Ice Cre