After a monster debut, Simply Red's follow-up album...featured an uneven batch of songs and lacked the kind of standout single Hucknall had enjoyed on the previous album...
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The magnificent "Holding Back The Years" couldn't compensate for several stiff stabs at trendy chart funk. Useful only for gauging how far Hucknall has...
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The band finds a steady R&B groove reminiscent of '60s Stax house band the MG's, and, as with the MG's, it's all in the service of a big-voiced soul singer, in this case a...
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Although it doesn't have a single as strong as "Holding Back the Years" or "If You Don't Know Me by Now," Stars is Simply Red's best album since their debut. It's smoother...
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The major leap forward. The moody, late-night originals show Hucknall had realized his career path lay more in the direction of "Holding Back The Years" than with half-baked...
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Although Hucknall tries to resurrect soul in his own original songs, he's most successful at evoking the past, notably on Simply Red's second number one, a remake of the...
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The attempt to copy the ethereal soul of Marvin Gaye's What's Going On is obvious, but very successful nonetheless. The house-driven rhythm track of "Fairground" is the only...
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For Life, Simply Red retain the basic influences that fueled their earlier albums, especially American R&B of the early '70s, specifically the Marvin Gaye of What's Going On...
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Rollo and Sister Bliss, Cziz Hall and Steve Christian, and John Graham remix the first single from Simply Red's 1995 album, Life. ~ John Bush, All Music...
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Mick Hucknall made himself known with the plaintive blue-eyed soul weeper "Holding Back The Years" back in the '80s. Despite his serious debt to R&B greats of the...
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Simply Red entered a holding pattern after 1991's Stars, turning out two records in a row that essentially replicated its charms, only with diminishing returns. Mick...
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