Holding Back The Years by Simply Red is about a renewed self. Ravages of time and lost love and feeling old, felt while one is taking stock of life, finally, after contemplation of the battles of life, deciding to redouble your efforts and try to re-energize—become, quite literally, Renewed.

The video features the vocalist on a European train in a state of sublime contemplation, wearing a tipped cap and singing. Are we to know that he is being filmed or not? That is up to us. The lyrical expression of the song shows Simply Red taking an account of his life, taking a pause in life is a stressed theme here. The singer is pleading: he has made mistakes, he has had wishes die; he has also, in his estimation squandered the chance to be “good.” At the same time, he reminds us, with the powerfully subtle chorus that he will “keep holding on.” We are reminded of this fantastic singer in with an amazing coif of Red beneath a cap “escaping from all he’s known,” and like other songs in the Renewal category, we hear a plea for a new lease on life.
When first I saw this video, like many or all of you do, “out of the blue,” I had never heard of the band “Simply Red.”

Holding Back The Years was recorded with the aid of a drum machine. As with most drum machine-based songs, from start to end, there is no acceleration or deceleration in slope of the song, except within the measure.

from WIKIPEDIA.ORG, THE WORLD’S FREE AND MOST INTERESTING CYBERENCYCLOPEDIA: “Holding Back the Years” is the 7th track of Simply Red’s debut studio album Picture Book. The song was a smash success for the group and quickly rose to the top of charts across the world. It remains their most successful single. The single is one of two Simply Red songs (the other being their cover of “If You Don’t Know Me by Now”) to reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100, for the week ending July 12, 1986. It also reached #2 in the UK and was a worldwide hit. Contents Frontman of the group, Mick Hucknall, wrote the song when he was seventeen, while living at his father’s house. The chorus did not come to him until many years later. His mother left him when he was three; the upheaval caused by this event inspired him to write the song. He recorded a version of the song with his first group “The Frantic Elevators” in 1982 but the real success came when the Simply Red version was released in 1985. In 2005, a brand-new stripped down acoustic version of the song was released on the album Simplified, and this version received heavy airplay on smooth jazz radio stations. The video for this song was filmed in the English coastal town of Whitby and the famous scene where Hucknall watches the coastal view from his window can be seen on the cover of the single, in its music video and, for a brief time, in the music video of “If You Don’t Know Me by Now”. The other band members play the role of the local cricket team who see Hucknall off on his journey. Eastenders & Shameless actress Maggie O’Neill made her acting debut as the schoolteacher in the video. The song was covered by Another Level in 1999.It was also covered by Umphrey’s McGee on their New Years Run on 29 December 2007. “Holding Back the Years” was used as the soundtrack to a party political broadcast for the Labour Party in the 2005 general election campaign.‘

Meanspeed-Carlton Summary
The mean-speed, or the speed of the song expressed as beats per minute on this live recording= 86.0 beats per minute.
The mean-space, or time between each beat= 698 milliseconds.
The mean-beat on the recording = 1.433 beats per second.
The mean-frequency, or the speed of the song expressed as cycles per second= 1.433 Hertz .
The mean-tone= 366.93 Hertz, located 16 cents below F#4/Gb4=369.994 Hertz , and 84 cents above F4=349.228 Hertz.