Simply Red – If You Don’t Know Me By Now
Patti LaBelle Turned This Song Down. Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes Made It A Hit. Then Simply Red Made It Bigger — And Handed Somebody Else A Grammy.
Patti LaBelle had first refusal on one of the biggest soul ballads of the 20th century, and she said no. Songwriters Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff had written “If You Don’t Know Me by Now” with her group Labelle in mind, but the trio never recorded it. So Gamble and Huff handed it instead to a Philadelphia vocal group fronted by a young drummer they’d just discovered could sing — and the song went on to become a hit twice over, seventeen years apart, for two completely different artists.
Keep watching: Simply Red – Holding Back the Years
That first version belonged to Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes, released in September 1972 as the lead single from their debut album, I Miss You, on Gamble and Huff’s own Philadelphia International Records. The lead vocal went to Teddy Pendergrass, the group’s drummer-turned-singer, whose raw, pleading delivery became the song’s defining voice before he’d even had his name on a record label. It reached No. 1 on the US R&B chart and climbed to No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 — a substantial hit, and the record that first put Pendergrass in front of a live audience instead of behind a drum kit.
Seventeen Years Later, Manchester Found the Song Again
By the time Simply Red got to it in 1988, Mick Hucknall had loved the Blue Notes’ version since he was thirteen, dancing to it long before he had a band of his own. Producer Stewart Levine, working on what would become the group’s third studio album, A New Flame, made a deliberate choice: strip back the original’s lush orchestration and rebuild the song around a two-part harmony instead of the Blue Notes’ three-part arrangement, putting Hucknall’s voice front and center with almost nowhere to hide. The track was recorded at AIR Studios on the island of Montserrat and released as a single in the UK on March 27, 1989, backed with a live recording of “Move On Out” taped at a Manchester show that February.
The gamble paid off far bigger than anyone at WEA or Elektra likely expected. Simply Red’s version became the band’s second US Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 — following “Holding Back the Years” three years earlier — and topped the charts in Australia and New Zealand, where it was the best-selling single of 1989. In the band’s home country it stalled at No. 2, kept off the top by Jason Donovan’s “Too Many Broken Hearts,” but the song’s global reach made it, alongside “Holding Back the Years,” one of the two singles that defined Simply Red’s commercial peak in America.
The Grammy Went to the Men Who Wrote It
Here’s the twist most casual fans miss: when “If You Don’t Know Me by Now” won the Grammy Award for Best R&B Song at the ceremony held in early 1990, the trophy didn’t go to Mick Hucknall. Best R&B Song is a songwriter’s award, and it went to Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff — the two men who’d been quietly authoring the soundtrack of American soul music since the early 1970s, from “Me and Mrs. Jones” to “Love Train,” without ever taking home a Grammy of their own. Simply Red’s cover, recorded almost two decades after Gamble and Huff wrote the song, is what finally got them one. It remains one of the more unusual Grammy footnotes in soul music: a British pop-soul band’s biggest US hit, and the prize belonged entirely to the songwriters standing off to the side.
Nearly three decades on, the song is still a fixture of Hucknall’s live shows — and one of its more striking modern stagings is the one on this page. In October 2017, Simply Red headlined “Symphonica in Rosso,” an annual Dutch concert series that pairs a major artist with a full orchestra for three nights at Amsterdam’s Ziggo Dome. Backed by a 40-piece orchestra, Hucknall’s reading of “If You Don’t Know Me by Now” traded the record’s stripped-down two-part harmony for a fuller, more sweeping arrangement — closer, in some ways, to the orchestration Levine deliberately avoided in 1989. The performance was released on the Symphonica in Rosso – Live at Ziggo Dome, Amsterdam live album and DVD that November, and later found its way to Simply Red’s own YouTube channel — proof that a song two songwriters wrote for a group that never recorded it is still finding new rooms to fill, forty years on.